Xythos hosted a Webinar earlier today on Web 2.0 and SaaS – Implications for Content Management. After a couple of cartoons to kick off the session, they put up the quote from Gartner that By 2015, 80% of work outcomes will need explicit input from, and the cooperation of, two or more people, and the work will seldom be done face to face.

Maria from Xythos was the panel moderator, and there were three people on the panel.
– Dick, from Volm Corporation (an end-user organization)
– Mike Straus, from Xythos
– Jim, from Xythos

This is a best efforts live blogging attempt. It was hard to capture the richness of the interaction.

There are a couple of changes taking place in the organizational landscape that have an impact on collaboration technology:
– we are working more in virtual teams
– we are working more with people outside of our organizations

Tools being used by attendees to collaborate:

Question: “Users and IT have had a highway crash. How do we address some of the challenges?”

(Dick) Agrees that users are struggling with email. Dick says he often needs to share 6MB file attachments; with email you get copies all over the place, but with Xythos-on-Demand you get a single place to store.
(Jim) One of the highlights of SaaS, is that users can get access to collaboration tools, without having to wait for IT. SaaS also allows you to start out simple.

Quote: “The average salaried worker will actively participate in at least five different ad hoc teams simultaneously, and 30% of these people will participate with external participants” (Gartner, 2008)

Question: “How do end users embrace wikis and blogs for content collaboration?”
(Mike) Multiple users can share links to resources.

Question: “The young people joining the organization now are familiar with Web 2.0 tools, and are joining organizations that don’t offer this. What’s going to happen?”
(Mike) New employees will do it themselves. They expect it. So IT in organizations need to get with it, and start getting these things put into the enterprise, and with enterprise controls in the organization.
(Jim) Email is highly discoverable, and can be requested for legal situations. Web 2.0 tools on the Internet are “hidden” from IT and thus from discoverable processes. IT needs to put enterprise-class tools into the organization so they are covered from a compliance and discovery perspective.
(Dick) Xythos-on-Demand offers great security for our organization.

Quote: “By 2011, social networking and social interaction will be more popular than team collaboration among enterprise users” (Gartner 2007)

Question: (to Dick) “You are using iPhone to show videos to customers, that are served up by Xythos on Demand. How can you do this?”
(Dick) Allows us to show customers what is happening with our products using the above, and we can keep track of everything.
(Mike – ?) It’s impressive that you can do this with an iPhone, rather than having people to carry a laptop around.

Question from the Floor: “How do you see the growth of storage as the Xythos data center expands? How do you see the trend to open source storage?”
(Jim) If this is related to Amazon S3 … there are a wide variety of storage resources on the Web. At Xythos, we feel that certain models make more sense for certain contexts rather than others, eg, S3 would be great for consumer applications. For Xythos, we went for another provider, who had better uptime guarantees, better authorization and authentication, certification, etc.
(Mike) These services over time will help to reduce delivery costs to end users.

Quote: “Having a wiki or blog embedded in your ECM application, rather than a separate tool, will enable your organization to minimize the risk posed by emerging point solutions” (Gartner, February 2008)

Question: “How can Xythos be used in compliance and discovery?”
(Mike – ?) It is incumbent on organizations that they choose an IT partner that has the right qualifications depending on their domain. Eg, to meet DoD 5015.2, HIPAA, SOX. This becomes a checklist item.

Question from the Floor: (Arthur) “We are a talent acquisition firm. Looking at deploying a social networking platform for branding. We are thinking about content discovery, and better ECM. How do we combine the two to get benefits?”
(Mike) There is a lot around that supports the integration of different platforms, eg, RSS and WebDAV.
(Jim) Access control lists are a great way of giving differential access to secured resources.
(Dick) We do something like this now … can post documents, can have discussions, can use the wiki.

Question: “How do you support offline access?”
(Mike) Xythos Drive supports this, with full offline access via a synchronized capability.

Question: “Gas prices have gone up a lot recently. How do we support teleworkers and give them access to data?”
(Dick) Xythos on Demand is working fabulously for us; it gives access to all of our information from any of our offices.

Final note from Michael Sampson: I felt that there was some mis-characterization of competitive tools during this Webinar. Eg (paraphrase), “If you use Lotus Notes in your organization, you can’t access Notes databases from home.” Hello? Haven’t you heard of replication?