Worlds CollideWorlds Collide

Notable about next months Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco is that it is co-located with VoiceCon, a long-running show focused on telephony that for many years was the place to go to learn about digital phone systems.

You might think it strange that a single event will bring together focuses around real-time and non-real time collaboration, but the decision to co-locate E 2.0 and VoiceCon reflects the growing reality that a complete collaboration strategy must integrate all potential ways that individuals and groups work together.

This week's announcements around SharePoint 2010, coupled with the recently announced Lotus Connections 2.5 show that features such as presence, voice and video are spilling over into the content management and social collaboration spaces.

I'm heartened to see that in several recent consulting engagements our clients are asking for assistance in developing an enterprise wide collaboration strategy that integrates unified communications (including voice, video, conferencing and instant messaging) with document management and social computing. They are bringing together disparate teams, looking at security, compliance and governance issues, and orchestrating a strategy that merges the old way of communicating with new tools such as microblogging and facebook-style applications for the enterprise.

As part of this year's events I'm moderating two similar sessions on both sides - "Web 2.0 and Enterprise Communications" on the VoiceCon track on Thursday at 8:00 AM, and "The Future of Social Messaging" on the Enterprise 2.0 track on Tuesday at 4:15. I look forward to the cross-over of both topics and audience members.