I am back, fresh off a trip to San Francisco for the Office 2.0 conference.

I was at Office 2.0 last year, so I have been reflecting a little bit on the changes I saw, and didn’t see, from last year and now.

The Conversation
The conversation has come along a little bit in the last year. It is no longer impossible to get people to talk about the impact of social software in the Enterprise, how CxOs need to respond, or not respond, to it.

Memes this year were:

• Facebook parallels with Enterprise Software
• The coming surge of social software-savvy workers who are entering the workplace

The conversation did get a lot more practical this year. There was a lot more “this is what we are doing”, and even more “this is what we tried, and this is how we failed”. The back-hall conversations were even more pragmatic.

The infrastructure conversation has also moved along somewhat. Projects like OpenSAM are gaining traction, but are still not being implemented or backed in any significant way by vendors.

Vendors
It is safe to say that there has been almost no change in the last year as far as available tools and platforms are concerned.

Sure Zoho is a little less buggy, and Google Docs is looking a lot nicer these days. Wikis were practically off the map. Socialtext and Atlassian, who were the darlings at last years show, could hardly be found (although Ross Mayfield, uber connected founder of SocialText, did help organize the fantastic unconference in the day preceeding the conference), and the big-bang have-to-have-it new product just didn’t exist this year (which is probably a good thing).

Where does this leave us?
The Office 2.0 Conference is a benchmark in the Enterprise 2.0 community. Enterprise 2.0 really came in to it’s own at Office 2.0 last year, and I am afraid that things have moved painfully slowly in the last year.

Fresh Blood
It’s amazing to see that a lot of the biggest names in Enterprise 2.0 are already starting to move off the radar. People like Scott Gavin and his partner Simon Revell as well as Adam Carson from Morgan Stanley and Lee White from GsK are the new rising stars of Enterprise 2.0. They are the Jesuit Priests of Enterprise Social Software. (more on that later).

We need these new, eager and practical voices to keep driving the conversation.

Ignore the Vendors
Vendors have been pretending like they are going to provide The Solution to all of your Enterprise 2.0 needs.

I am afraid that this is one of the little tricks we are learning about Enterprise 2.0. No vendor is going to be able to do a proper one-size-fits-all solution, and vendors are confirming that by doing very little.