Office 2.0 apps and usage in Romania

Last week, I was invited to talk about Office 2.0 applications on the IT&C show at the Money Channel. Their archive seems to lag 1-2 months behind their live show, so don’t hold your breath waiting to see the show :D

I took advantage of this opportunity to add to my understanding of apps in the Office 2.0 area that are being developed and used in Romania. Here’s a round-up of the people I talked to and our discussions:

• Mircea Goia put together a vey well-researched round-up of Web 2.0 presence in Romania on Read/Write Web. The article was written mid-June, so it is still fairly up-to-date. This was my starting point. His focus was mostly on social networks, while I was more interested in enterprise collaboration. Two of his apps fit my profile: Metromind’s BluoCMS and Soft32’s ZuluWriter. I contacted both of them. I also wrote to Mircea, who was very responsive… but, unfortunately, in a different timezone on the other side of the globe! I couldn’t get his input before the show, but look forward to discussing in the future.
• Vladimir Oane of Metromind was a joy to talk to – a wealth of ideas. We wondered why Romanian customers prefer paying a large amount up-front in order to own the product rather than going with a subscription-based model (even when the software they pay for will be outdated long before their investment pays off!). He insisted that the limiting factor in usage of Office 2.0 in Romania is culture, not technology – a point with which I fully agree. East European education methods and work ethics have been strongly individualistic and competitive for a long time. Collaboration has always been present, but more in the form or familism or cronyism (for ex. “suflatul la ore”) than in the form of open cooperation. However, “we build our tools, then they shape us“, (to quote a favorite Stowe Boyd theme). Our culture has been determined by the tools we have been encouraged and allowed to use, as much as by the assignments we have been given and the results we have been measured against. How quickly can culture cange when you introduce new tools? It is very likely to depend on how assignments and evaluation change, as well.
• Lucian Todea of ITNT/Soft32 has one of the more interesting projects around: ZuluWriter, an online word processor and document manager. Gotta love their homepage! Unfortunately, the project seems to be dormant at the moment. The functionality as hinted (not yet implemented) seems to be quite promising in the tagging and content sharing area.
• Zoltan Lorincz of Mindomo has the only fully-developed Office 2.0 application that I am aware of at the moment (in Romania, of course). He is based in Timisoara, and he openly told me he doesn’t expect Romanian client anytime soon. Mindomo is a (feature-rich) mindmapping application, and mindmapping itself is somewhat of a novelty to most Romanian corporate settings. A pity.

Office 2.0 – Enterprise collaboration

Dan Farber just started a very lively panel discussion asking Gafni from SAP if they use Zimbra. Sam Lawrence has the approach that the most important is to make it very simple to work with people you work with and new people. Focus on making it very easy. Oliver Marks of Sony hosts a worldwide collaboration platform online for Sony PS developers – offering a lot of support. Paul Pedrazzi of Oracle says that the siloed apps was that way for a reason, but is shifting the approach towards an app lab. They launched a social network, putting the person at the center of everything – by giving others the ability to see the entire picture of a person. Simons of BEA touches a sensitive point: web 2.0 needs to plug more into what already exists, whereas fun is what we usually think about re 2.0.

Openness in enterprises? Sony is prepared to pay handsomely for the source code but won’t consider anything hosted. Companies are starting to look at the possibility of sharing, looking at what other companies are doing.

What are people doing to implement? SAP trying to understand what can be transparent in an organization and what cannot? Zimbra has a real estate agency client who has no way to share content quickly among each other, share presence data – but know they can have competitive advantage by making this underlying data available.

The notion of “people-centric”; the social web is however very challenging for companies. Farber asks what are the experiences of the participants. Pedrazzi decided to not ask for permission, but just build using the same login and using the HR data. Just sent an email to launch, propelling from 3 to 8000 people within one day. What triggers implementation – improving communication so that the friction goes down. Social networks allow people to focus.

The sales cycle of social computing adoption into the enterprise – you need to get an approver at the enterprise management level.

If customers are being exposed to the technologies – what are the vendors doing to satisfy that need?

Probably the greatest question: suites OR interoperability? People will do what they want anyway; the power is swinging to end users. If you design the applications right, users can integrate very easily. The consensus seems to be on mashable modules rather than suites.

What’s still missing? More and more content types. Time zones are still a problem. It is also much easier to consume than to create – in Oracle, wikis are already adopted, but blogs are only now being explored.

Of all of the people on the panel – Oracle, SAP, Sony – nobody is at all excited about videoconferencing. Confirms what I have thought for a long time – videoconferencing gets much more media attention (on account of being so sexy) than it pragmatically deserves.