ShareOffice and OpenSAM at Office 2.0

Another great Office 2.0 conference in 2007. The event itself was bigger and better this year with more Office 2.0 apps, more customers, more case studies, etc. Likewise there was more great progress for ShareOffice and OpenSAM.

A number of key announcements were made at Office 2.0 2007 including (1) new OpenSAM partners (Persony, Jotlet, Huddle, Data Infosys) (2) an expansion of ShareOffice functionality to include online calendars and online meetings, and (3) initial features for ShareMethods on the Apple iPhone including on-demand document search, browse, and viewing of content including text, images, documents, spreadsheets, and more - a great way for mobile salespeople to access thousands of documents easily and quickly when they are in the field with a need to get key documents.

The Office 2.0 Announcements were covered in media and blogs including ReadWriteWeb, ZDNet, and WebWare (CNET).

The progress on OpenSAM is accelerating - the standard itself is moving forward rapidly with lots of new additions including open source code for Single Sign-On (SSO); document file browsing (file open, edit, save, etc.); an RDF/xHTML/XML approach for Application Description Files (ADF); a “Build Application Launch Link” test platform; and new graphics/logos for web sites, banners, buttons, badges, etc. The OpenSAM community web site is evolving nicely with enhanced docs, more partners (up to 15 now…), richer specs, etc. Most significantly, the time it now takes an OpenSAM partner to get up and running to connect via Single Sign-On (SSO) is just a few hours so ease of integration has made dramatic progress. This is all moving us towards the ubiquitous Office 2.0 / web application “dial tone”…

Please be sure to check out the latest and greatest at www.opensam.org. Lots of potential partners have expressed interest to join forces, stay tuned for announcements in this area. We rolled out the key principles for OpenSAM -”Connects to All” intended to focus on enabling widespread web application “dial tone” across Office 2.0 applications and the component level messages (1) Connect Apps to Apps; (2) Connect Apps to Content; and (3) Connect People to Apps. At the end of the day, its all driving towards the Connection of People to People, in a socially networked business and digital media environment…

At the conference itself, OpenSAM was featured prominently including a special panel session with partners including EditGrid, iNetWord, Persony, Jotlet, and Huddle; inclusion in a panel called “New Platforms” with salesforce.com, WebEx/Cisco, Zoho, and Rearden Commerce, and a dedicated pavilion of 10 companies showing OpenSAM solutions (or working on it). Check out the Preezo presentation from the OpenSAM Panel - it reviews the Why, Who, What, and Differentiation principles of OpenSAM. (by the way, Preezo is working great now - I used it for all of my presentations at the conference and it worked like a charm every time [great work Preezo team...]). The most significant way to consider OpenSAM is its goal to connect any app to any other app. Its the P2P (peer-to-peer) Web Platform API based on a mesh model rather than the more traditional hub and spoke model (i.e., all apps connect into one vendor API). These models can and should co-exist to really broaden the appeal of any Office 2.0 services.

There was lots of interest in ShareOffice and OpenSAM at the show from small and large companies alike including many of the biggest ecosystem platform providers. It will be interesting to see how OpenSAM evolves over the rest of the year given its recent acceleration and momentum. We have customer, product, and team announcements queued up for Dreamforce 2007 where we are a sponsor too - please be sure to visit us there and more soon on that topic too.