We had a great week in Boston attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. We learned a lot from industry thought leaders and had a chance to speak with a lot of different folks about social and collaboration technologies and trends.  Of all the conferences we attend, this one definitely has a different “feel”. It seems like the attendees are younger, they dress hipper, and there is much more livelihood all around. A few of the sessions addressed this, as the "millenials" or Generation Y, have been using Web 2.0 tools, such as Facebook and Twitter for many years now, and as they are entering the workforce they are expecting similar tools to be a part of how they accomplish their job tasks. It's important to note that it's not just Millenials that are expecting these technologies, as workers young and old alike benefit from social and collaboration tools. I’ve highlighted some of the takeaways I had, as well as a reaction from John Brunswick, who helped us in staffing the booth.

• Giving your employees choices is empowering, but if there is no course of action or plan, it’s useless.
• There is no such thing as collaboration without a goal.
• In a few years, social will become a feature in the “platform”, a component of collaboration. Social will become part of the norm – just like email is expected when you start a job at a company, Social will be too.
• 1 in 3 of your employees are using tools your company doesn't sanction (how scary is this?!)
• 25,000 pieces of content are created every second.
• Context is king.
• Social tools help us navigate and manage the complexities we face with information overload.
• We need to design products for the way people work.
• Consumerization of the enterprise - bringing social tools like Facebook to the organization.

From John Brunswick: "The conference had solid attendance, standing as a testament to organizations making a concerted effort to understand what social tools exist to support their businesses.  Many vendors were narrowly focused and people we pleasantly surprised at the breadth of capability provided by Oracle WebCenter.  People seemed to feel that it just made sense that social technology provides the most benefit when presented in the context of key business data."

Did you attend the conference? What were some of your key takeaways?