Recently, OpenText has announced very loudly an “integrated approach to Enterprise 2.0″ (see this page). As Craig Hepburn, Director of the Social Media Strategy at OpenText Web Solutions Group, is part of our upcoming conference I was quite eager what this buzz is all about.

We talked about 30 mins about the solution approach, the market and its development. Here are my notes to the interview:

• The OpenText 2.0 strategy consists of several product components - the more traditional compenents come from the LiveLink (for internal collaboration approaches) and Vignette (for external approaches) product. On top OpenText offers an updated version of the FirstClass groupware and messaging solutions. Besides traditional groupware and messaging functionality it provides a social network feature that brings a web-based social application towards the OpenText document and content world underneath.
• Like the other big players with ECM background this approach (1) provides a holistic and integrative view to the enterprise (if integrated the right way!) and (2) enhances the 1.0 document-/content-related business process by social information - but (3) is therefore also limited to the boundaries of these content/document object and the structuring of the information by business processes (in contract towards to the more flexible wiki information structure).
• Craig Hepburn points out the importance of the cultural background of companies - in this he sees also the main difference between E20 projects (and the E20 adoption in general) in the US and in Europe

For the full interview watch this:

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This is a short notice that there’s now a video of an interview I did several weeks ago with T-System MMS’ Frank Schoenefeld on the topic of Enterprise 2.0, adoption challenges and outlook for Enterprise 2.0. Then his book was still in the making, but he’s finished now and I will try to get my hands on it ASAP.

Björn published the video on the German-based ECM WORLD weblog - I embedded it here directly (but be aware it’s in German!)

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Frank Schoenefeld is a deep thinker on Enterprise 2.0 and his contained views and perspective is doing the field a good service. Moreover he’s got first-hand experience as T-System’s MMS experimented a lot with internal social software, and has evolved quite a bit since then. See for example Franz Patzig’s account of the changes he’s seen while coaching them with their internal BarCamp-alike, Open Space unconference initiatives. So, even when he’s a CTO by title, there’s much to learn from him on questions of implementation and utilization of internal collaboration platforms, and we’re glad to have him amongst the speakers at the upcoming E20SUMMIT.

Update: There’s also a long interview with him at besser 2.0 too, but it’s in german language again.