John Eckman also moderated a panel on Open Source Platforms at the recent Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference. He talked to Bob Bickel , John Newton (of Alfresco) and Jeff Whatcott from Acquia. I like this take – if we want to achieve more adoption in the world of SMBs (that are lacking adoption drive) it’s necessary to have inexpensive, adaptive tools as an alternative to the established systems. There’s a record of the panel’s audio (mp3). And John links to various places where the panel was covered, I found some interesting things there:
- At Jeff Whatcott: “Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Drupal Perspective“.
He has some good points why Drupal should be considered, forget about the stabs at proprietary software and take it with good humour even if you’re non-organic …
- Dennis Byron: “Open source, including open source Sharepoint tool, in/at Enterprise 2.0“
- At Kathleen Reidy on the 451 Group blog: “Open source at Enterprise 2.0“.
She’s noting Socialtext’s (here) and Jive Software’s (here) efforts in open source but yes, it’s not their primary model. By the way, Kathleen has a nice summary too (“Enterprise 2.0: the good and the bad“). She’s complaining about too much talk on cultural change. Well yes, I agree but out of other reasons – I think there’s too much talk on these issues by people who basically don’t get it. It’s like the revenge of technology people for INATT (“it’s not about the technology”). Then it were people who want to cover up that they don’t understand these technologies, now too often it’s lighthearted chit-chat about organizational culture, motivational structures, change management etc. (“We’ve all read our Dilbert so we can all talk at lenghts about this fluffy stuff, can’t we?”). But hey, this is no “fluffy stuff” and that’s the real reason why these discussions are so unnerving – deep inside we all know that cultural and people issues are central and that they need to be thought through thoroughly (sic!) and not chatted about lightly