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Office 2.0 Conference offers collaboration lessons


By Alex Handy
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September 5, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Sept. 3 marked the kick-off of the third annual Office 2.0 conference at San Francisco's St. Regis hotel. The event focused heavily on using collaborative Web technologies to increase productivity gains and business agility. While many talks were broad overviews, some highlights included a spirited discussion of UI design and the business lessons learned by GE as it built an internal social network.

The first day of Office 2.0 was an un-conference with dynamically designed sessions focused on audience participation. Steve Bristol, co-founder of lesseverything.com, lead a talk on UI design that discussed everything from Apple to speech-based operating interfaces. Lesseverything.com is a Ruby on Rails consulting firm, but Bristol is likely better known for his accounting program, Less Accounting. He said that developing that application showed him just how much more complex the back end of software can become when the user interface is simplified heavily.

Bristol and others in the session compared vehicular dashboards to user interfaces, and much of the talk was focused on solidifying this metaphor. Bristol did point out, however, that the fundamental key to good user interface is communication. “If you don't have good communication skills, you're not going to write good UI,” said Bristol.


Dr. Sukh Grewal, manager of SupportCentral at General Electric, gave what was perhaps the most interesting talk of the conference. Back in 1999, Grewal was working as an engineer, primarily dealing with turbines and engines. The company then tapped him to head up the creation of an internal Web-based knowledge base. The project began in earnest a few years later, and eventually morphed into a social network. That social network is now nine years old and sees almost 25 million hits a day from GE employees.

Using the wiki model
Grewal said that the team at GE learned a lot about the business applications of Web 2.0 technologies. The fundamentals weren't always the same as those in popular Web sites, such as the Wikipedia, he said. That means ease of editing was certainly a priority, as was oversight and the ability to delete useless or dead content. But for enterprises, said Grewal, sometimes the most important aspect was simply being able to figure out who wrote what. There can be no anonymity, he said.


Related Search Term(s): networking, professional development, testing & troubleshooting

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