Best of Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Each year when I go to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, as I have for the last several years. I look for some products or services that seem to stick out above the rest. This year it proved more difficult because the interfaces of many vendors had a very similar look and feel (even if there were differences in how they functioned). Yet even with this homogenization, there were some products that caught my eye because of the way the developers had innovated the core product.

Spaces by nGenera

Spaces is an interesting story because the interface was designed by IDEO, a design firm, while nGenera, which markets Spaces designed the guts under the hood that makes it run. Regardless of how it came together, the interface is gorgeous and intuitive. Your eye never gets lost on the page, even though there may be a lot of different types of content. Each function is clear and easy to use, requiring little or no training. Even though all of the products I saw did basically the same thing, this one caught my attention because of its amazing look and feel.

Jive What Matters

The idea of Jive What Matters is to find a way to slice through all the noise that inevitably results with an Enterprise 2.0 social network, and get to, well, what matters to you. Jive has created a natural filter that automatically populates your page with those items that matter to you such as any time you were mentioned, but more importantly, it also links to other enterprise systems and displays tasks for you need to complete automatically. This ability to filter and link to other systems was a real differentiator in my view.

Microsoft SharePoint video blogging tool

When it comes to innovation, you probably don't think of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). They tend to watch the market and respond, but Christian Finn, director of SharePoint, talked about how they developed an internal video blogging system during his keynote address on Wednesday. It stood out for me because Microsoft went out of its way to create what he called, a "YouTube" for the enterprise and built the system creatively internally before including it in SharePoint. It's not clear how quickly video will take off in the enterprise, but this was clearly a cutting edge development.

If you attended the conference, and you saw some innovative companies, let me know about them in the Comments section. No self-promotion, please.

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