I've made it to the Collaborative Technologies Conference being held this week in Boston. The event appears to be well attended, I've heard estimates of around 800 total attendees, which is about twice the attendance of last year.
The exhibitors are an interesting mix of companies covering various facets of collaboration, including content management, web conferencing, blog/wiki/rss management, and security. These vendors are intertwined with IP telephony vendors including Cisco, & Nortel, and mobility offerings from Orative. The mix of vendors underscores the increasing merger of real-time communications and collaboration with more traditional collaboration offerings.
I've had the chance to speak to a couple of attendees as well. What I've found interesting is the concern over collaboration from a policy/organizational perspective more so than from a technical one. One attendee I spoke with was most interested in understanding how organizational dynamics, including office atmospheres, could be optimized to support collaboration.
I'm now in a session on security, as usual it's the typical battle between risk and reward, with risk concerns being a limiting factor on the ability of enterprise organizations to take advantage of emerging collaboration & communication tools.
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