Last week seven startups spent the week developing applications on the SharePoint 2010 platform at the first ever SharePoint 2010 SocialFest hosted by the Emerging Business Team at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus. While most of the developers had little to no SharePoint programming experience, they were selected based on their potential to extend the SharePoint platform with their unique and innovative applications in the emerging social business space.

During the week, they heard from developer experts, SharePoint engineering, SharePoint product management and a panel of tier one venture investors. On Friday, they presented in front of a panel of judges including Charles Schwab & Co. and McKesson where Huddle took first prize.

Here’s a look at what the contestants built on the SharePoint 2010 platform:

Calinda Software – Creating conversations in SharePoint

Calinda MindUP automatically captures, organizes and structures email interactions. It creates visual maps of all messages and attachments sent and received in an email conversation. At SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, Calinda developed a SharePoint 2010 “mail space” which parses and groups related conversations, helping teams get a view of their projects, enhancing collaboration.

Confer – Bringing ‘twitter-like’ conversations to SharePoint

Confer for SharePoint 2010 integration extends the simplicity of Confer’s microblogging web application into an organization’s SharePoint installation. Confer bridges the gap between internal and external employees, and simplifies the communication process.

Cortex Intelligence – Social media analysis for SharePoint

Cortex Intelligence brings external qualified social media, quantitative market data, text mining-enriched news articles and data from external sources into SharePoint 2010 using SharePoint web parts. Cortex also integrates with SharePoint enabling users to share, discuss and act on the insights triggered by the market intelligence.

Huddle – Synching SharePoint team sites externally

With Huddle for Microsoft SharePoint 2010, enterprise teams can invite external users into their daily workflow and synchronize their SharePoint document libraries with content stored on the Huddle network, or even on other SharePoint sites. SharePoint users can also gain access to their files through Huddle’s online, mobile and desktop applications.

Leverage Software – Social sharing for SharePoint

Leverage Software DesignSpace transforms a set of email threads into an on-demand social workspace – automatically, with no data entry or administration required – and then lets you share that information with others in your company through Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Liaise – Keeps SharePoint as up to date as your last email

Liaise for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 turns text in email messages into structured KeyPoints (actions/issues, due dates, people and priorities) and ensures SharePoint is always up-to-date by automatically feeding messages, KeyPoints and attachments into SharePoint, providing real-time updates to: Task/Issue Lists, Discussion Boards, Site Calendars and Documents.

Loqu8 – Creating immersive experiences in SharePoint

Loqu8 Prelude integrates SharePoint 2010 lists and search results into a pop-up window that is contextual to the work they are doing. From applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc., users can instantly access their SharePoint data by hovering their mouse over a word in their document. The Loqu8 Prelude pop-up window will display contextually relevant information from SharePoint.

Interested in seeing a little more on each solution? Check out this slideshow on Network World.

Lynda Ting is a Director for Emerging Business at Microsoft.

People in the technology world love creating new words. In fact, they are responsible for the most of the recent English language growth. Be it telephone, internet or crowdsourcing there’s always a new technology behind the new term. The techies have even managed to introduce their trade traditions into the mass conscience. When was the last time you used a sequence of dot-separated numbers to describe a large official organization? Yet all the talk about Government 2.0 doesn’t seem to surprise anyone. The lack of surprise however doesn’t imply shared understanding. Just try asking ten people who use the term Web 2.0 what exactly it means – and most likely you will get ten different answers.

Enterprise 2.0: A Great Concept Often Taken Backwards

Although 2.0 memes are everywhere, hardly any of them have generated as much controversy as Enterprise 2.0 (a.k.a. E2.0). Introduced by Andrew McAfee in 2006 and later expanded by others, the term seemed to be a slam dunk for a while. Forward-looking and fresh, it was (and still is) about application of social software and corresponding approaches in business. However, somewhere along the way something didn’t go quite right. Today, almost three years after the term’s introduction, there is more confusion about it than there was two years ago. Heated terminology discussions keep going on. Key players are on the quest to find and articulate ROI. And most curiously of all, many business decision makers who decide to dive into the E2.0 sea, often come back more confused than they were before taking that dive.

AIIM’s year-old survey, which found that 74% of surveyed organizations had no idea what E2.0 meant or how it could be meaningfully applied, likely would’ve come back with a similar numbers today. This time around, it also would’ve included people who looked at E2.0 tools only to get puzzled. If you work in or sell to enterprise IT you know what I’m talking about. More likely than not, you have your own example of “now what?” story. As in “So we’ve deployed internal blogs and wikis. Now what?” All of a sudden, software that seems to work so well for millions of people on the internet, fails to make any noticeable difference when used internally. All these stories have the same root cause: as of today, E2.0 is still primarily a vendor space, dominated by ISVs selling software to businesses who haven’t really asked for it. It is simply not a demand-driven market. By contrast, just think of CRM or payroll software. You don’t need to convince businesses they need that.

This is why E2.0 ROI discussion keeps going on like a never-ending story. A thirsty person doesn’t care about the ROI of buying a bottle of water – and even paying a premium for it. But try selling to him a cute new gadget – and you better have some very good supporting arguments on why it’s a smart way to invest a single cent. As enterprise customers look for cutting costs and streamlining processes, ISVs along with internal E2.0 champions often offer them what seems to be a miracle pill. It promises to make their workforces way more productive, their executives much more informed, and their customers happier. And, given the loud buzz around social, many companies do give it a try. Some like it. But some end up with a loud huh? Worse, some end up with an outraged response from the people who think it’s a wrong way to spend money (like an Oregon county’s chair who recently posted a 70K per year social media coordinator position). Why? Because, in a Benjamin Button fashion, many customers – often encouraged by enthusiastic sellers – think about E2.0 backwards, starting with tools instead of concentrating on specific business problems.

It Takes More than Social Software to Become an E2.0 Company

No one (okay, almost no one) expects that buying a word processor can turn him into a great writer. Yet somehow it’s almost widely assumed that deploying tools labeled E2.0 would turn an organization into an E2.0 business. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite all the buzz, E2.0 is first of all a set of principles, not software bits. It is more about business practices and human behaviors than about features. Software with strong social computing capabilities makes it much easier to establish and maintain these practices, but it doesn’t create them on its own, nor does it sustain them.

Social technologies have enormous potential, but to make E2.0 more than a hotly debated buzzword, many players in the space have to shift focus from cool capabilities to critical business functions. This applies to how E2.0 software is developed, how it is positioned, and how it is used. Despite catchphrases like “Facebook for the enterprise”, the much discussed consumerization of IT does not mean emulation of consumer experiences within the firewall. It means taking the concepts behind the amazing transformation of consumer space, and leveraging them to address real business needs. All businesses have to deal with things like customer support, supply chain management, R&D and product distribution. Who makes all these things happen? People. Now, what E2.0 is all about? In essence, it’s about people connections, just like any of its 2.0 siblings. And with the right focus, any business function can benefit from better connections.

There are enough success stories to support this claim. Marketing has already added social media to the must-have part of its portfolio. Customer support organizations have been experimenting with social tools – some quite successfully. Many R&D departments have already discovered that capturing knowledge in wikis can be more powerful than using traditional strict-workflow content management systems. Enterprises around the globe have been finding that Facebook-like employee profiles speed up internal communications. But we’ve just scratched the surface. Real gold is not in the technologies of today. It’s not even in applying the best of breed E2.0 tools correctly. It’s in solutions of tomorrow, designed to solve hard business problems through people-connecting technologies.

Now, there’s one little caveat with everything I’ve just described. Implemented right, social business software and practices have a potential to transform many business functions almost beyond recognition. In other words, they can be quite threatening to organizations that are built around existing processes and tools, and are not willing to evolve. But that’s the topic of another post…

Yuri is a new contributor to the FASTforward Blog – more about him here. This is the first post in the “Connected Enterprise” series. Topics to come: adoption, corporate walled gardens, and more.

Yesterday I had the opportunity of participating in a great webcast (recording of which I’m told will be posted to the FASTforward blog later today) with Richard Binhammer of Dell.com and Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt of Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation about “Putting the Social in Customer Experience”. Both Dell and Best Buy have been pushed the envelope in how they are engaging with their audiences – both internal and external – across their own online properties and out in other social networking experiences they don’t control. (As Richard said it best, “What’s the ROI on *not* engaging more closely with your audiences?” J) David Rogers of Columbia Business School did a very nice job in moderating helping these really innovative and smart guys explain how their companies are embracing social media experiences to collect market information, from customers and co-workers, and use that insight to build better products and serve customers better.

From Microsoft’s perspective, we in the Enterprise Search Group are excited to see more and more companies understanding how search is moving beyond just a search box to an enabler of compelling user experiences which bring the voice of the customer into the discovery, purchase and post-sale service process. The right search experience allows you to gather social intelligence and leverage where the social expertise flows, lives, and grows. Searching user-generated content and incorporating user behavior to drive social recommendations, can help your business build participatory communities to grow sales revenues for e-commerce sites, increase subscription and advertising revenues for media companies, and dramatically improve customer satisfaction.

Take ISP Telstra BigPond, Australia’s largest internet service provider, for example. BigPond uses search and recommendations technologies to track customer preferences, point online customers to music, games and video on demand, and to help customers recommend favorites to their friends from their huge range of entertainment services – ultimately building customer loyalty and revenue for their online properties.

As this site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference series, I want to take a moment to share our excitement with you about the upcoming FASTforward’09 global conference and how it could benefit you and your organization.

As the User Revolution rages on, its impact is being felt not only by newly empowered users but by businesses struggling to respond. We see Enterprise Search as a key technology in harnessing the power of the User Revolution through rich, new user experiences that drive online business and enterprise productivity.

FASTforward’09 will explore how leading-edge companies use search and related technologies to engage people in interactive experiences and connect them to information. The event provides a much-needed forum to discuss best practices for developing and implementing search solutions that allow people to create content, consume information, and collaborate with each other in innovative new ways. We’ll kick off the conference with a discussion of the latest Web 2.0 trends and then spend two days talking about what it all means for you and your business. A strong line-up of guest speakers, Microsoft executives, and customer presentations will make this a event you won’t want to miss.

Commenting on her experience at the conference last year, Krista Thomas—VP of Marketing and Communications at Thomson Reuters—had this to say: “FASTforward is the best ‘user-conference’ I have ever experienced. Given the quality of the speakers and content and the thought-leadership of your executives and clients, the event amounts to a meeting of the best minds in search and content technologies.”

Speakers for FASTforward’09 include:

• Charlene Li – Independent Analyst on Emerging Technologies, co-author of Groundswell. “Groundswell provides practical advice on how to stay nimble and flexible in an ever-morphing digital world. Enabling your company to respond to change quickly especially when talking to and supporting your consumers is essential for business success.” – Cathie Black, President, Hearst Magazines
• Clay Shirky – Author, Consultant, Professor. His new book, Here Comes Everybody, explores the effects of open networks, collaboration, and user-created and disseminated content on organizations and industries. “In story after story, Clay masterfully makes the connections as to why business, society and our lives continue to be transformed by a world of net-enabled social tools. His pattern-matching skills are second to none.” – Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect
• Don Tapscott – Internationally renowned authority on the strategic value and impact of information technol­ogy and chairman of nGenera Innovation Network. “Don Tapscott provides an exciting roadmap to surviving and thriving in the Connected Era.” – Michael S. Dell, Chairman And CEO, Dell

Discover for yourself why FASTforward has become the largest global business and technology conference dedicated to search-driven innovation! Visit the FASTforward’09 event site for more details and to register – and register by January 9th and save $400.

Search has not been at the forefront for many social media sites. They’ve focused on drawing traffic, building a brand, and looking for a business model. But, there is a great opportunity for social media sites to leverage search in new ways. I decided to take a look at a few top social media sites to examine how they’re using search and what’s missing.

The sites I selected were drawn from top site lists on Web2Center and Technorati. (Interestingly, I had difficulty finding the top 100 blog list on Technorati through its site search. I had to resort to a web search.)

What Can We Learn

The common denominator across these sites is to have a standard search box with a results list showing basic information about an item, and in most cases, some teaser text. Beyond that there is variation, with some sites not doing much more than the basics.

1. Old News is Old News

Freshness is an important factor in search. Social media often becomes a sequential feed. Allowing users to sort and view by date gives them a reference point from their last visit.

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Squidoo provides sort by recently updated	Digg lets you narrow by timeline and anchors on how long something has been popular

2. Show Me What’s Popular and What’s Authoritative

Social media volume is growing. Providing insight into popularity and authority helps users make a decision to explore or not.

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lifehacker shows # of views and comments	Digg shows # of diggs and comments and top across all topics
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Technorati gives an authority ranking based on “the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months”

3. Categorize To Help Me Navigate

The cloud navigation feature started with “most popular” lists. But what about most interesting to me? Enter tag clouds.

Categorization, both predefined and user-defined, is an important way to help users digest content, find related information, and navigate directly to what they like.

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Technorati provides a tag cloud that is dynamic and changes constantly while you’re sitting on a page (while it’s interesting to see this, I don’t know if the value outweighs the distraction it creates)	Engadget provides static categories, but they’re buried below the fold
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TechCrunch allows you to navigation by company or product

4. Connect Me to the Community

Social media sites expand connections to link users to users. Not only does this allow users to build a community and find experts, it also helps them uncover new content by exploring what others are viewing.

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Digg lets you see a contributor’s favorites, recent activity, history, friends and their activities, and digg stats – great insight into a contributor’s behavior and likes	StumbleUpon shows recent “stumblers” and provides “people who like” front and center at the top of search results
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Technorati links you to a contributor’s blogs and exposes how popular each blog is

What’s the Opportunity

Through social media, search teams have a new source of input. With this they can build new practices around “social search” taking all the clues provided to uncover user behavior, intent and preferences. Social search is not limited to externally-facing sites. It also can be applied to sites behind the firewall that employ social media techniques.

Some additional ways search teams might use this input include:

• Making use of comments. Core content is searched against and exposed, but comments provide an additional source of content.
• Interpreting and exposing sentiment. Sentiment gives us great insight into opinions and preferences (see A Certain Sentiment in the Air).
• Using behavior as a feedback loop. Social media is a rich source of user interaction with content and it is captured in a real day-to-day situation. This behavior can be used as input to user experience design supplementing what is gathered through simulated tests or surveys.

We are just starting to tap the value of this source and the ways in which we use the input will expand.

Can machines understand the feelings expressed in text? Social media (including blogs, discussion groups, private emails, etc) and mainstream press (web pages, newswires, announcements, etc) are full of quirky, subtle cues about people’s attitudes and opinions. Harvesting this information has proven to be valuable for tracking companies’ reputations, playing financial markets, analyzing customer loyalty, tracking brand effectiveness – and lots of other applications. But doing this by hand is so expensive and inconsistent that only a few market research shops do it.

Machine “understanding” of sentiment – which promises to unlock the information in social media in particular – is a technology that has been part of search as well as a field called text analytics for years. We may have reached a “tipping point” for this technology – at least that’s my impression from my recent visit to the 4th annual Text Analytics Summit last week.

Text Analytics is one of the “adjacent” areas that overlaps search, and the boundaries are getting fuzzier by the year. It remains a small specialty market but it has grown well beyond its roots with government and pharma customers, and this year’s summit had a nice buzz to it (in contrast to last year, which was noticeably flat). Given the blurry adjacencies to Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence, and the rash of acquisitions over the last year, one can’t help wonder how long it will be until text analytics is no longer its own market. At the vendor and analyst panels, many of the panelists thought text analytics would become subsumed into applications (like Voice-of-the-Customer or market-influence-analysis), acquired into search and BI, or both.

One of the interesting things to me was that sentiment analysis was everywhere. The vendors exhibiting all highlighted sentiment analysis, the Microsoft Research talk demo’d sentiment analysis, half of the talks mentioned sentiment analysis. Nick Patience of the 451 group listed 20 vendors supplying sentiment analysis, and he missed a few I know of. Andrew Bernstein of Cymphony (a longstanding provider of “market influence analytics”) went so far as to say that an analysis of social media was practically useless without it.

But as far as I can tell the technology hasn’t changed dramatically over the last couple of years. FAST customers have been using sentiment analysis for about 4 years now, and many of the offline text-blob analysis applications (which FAST doesn’t do but which a number of vendors do quite well) have been around for equally as long. So what’s changed? Why the extra buzz this year?
Some people seemed to think this was the ebb and flow of the market; other folks felt the tipping point had been reached, or that acquisitions of ClearForest, Teragram, Inxight, etc had raised the level of interest and broadened the sales channel.

I think there’s another factor, too – business analysts are getting used to fuzziness, and the packaging of this technology has become simple enough to reach the point that you don’t need to be a linguist to use it. This technology will never be perfect, but it is good enough to add real value, and I think it gets even more traction when you stop focusing on how it works and start just using it. I heard none of the usual disclaimers about how machines can’t understand sarcasm, which was refreshing – this group at least knows that there are always limitations in the machine understanding of human language, and seems to have moved on.

Whatever the reason, it was fun to see some real success stories – real companies getting real benefits out of analyzing their unstructured text. Of course, it’s always fun to party with other people who care about the surface forms of sentiment, and like finding new ways to combine statistics and linguistics. But the feeling at this summit was different than I expected – more real, more pragmatic, more mainstream. And there was a certain sentiment in the air…

There was a lot of discussion in the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference posts by Bill Ives, Jevon MacDonald, and Jon Husband around issues in the deployment and management of the technology platforms for emergent 2.0 practices. As you know, we have always held that Search (the S in Andy McAfee’s SLATES model for E20) is the core “glue” in these platforms, pulling together concepts and people across the silos of project wikis, individual blogs, TownSquare-type enterprise Facebook projects, etc. Search becomes a core facility for knowing what you know as a firm and as an individual, and for keeping found things found and learned lessons learned.

As part of Microsoft, FAST is now working with the SharePoint team to help enable the growing base of 85 million Microsoft Office SharePoint Server licensees to integrate advanced search and discovery capabilities into their collaborative environments, including, of course, the SharePoint E20 applications.

It’s been around 45 days since Microsoft completed the acquisition of FAST, and now we are publishing tools to deliver interoperability between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server in an open process. Today we posted a set of open downloadable FAST search Web Parts on CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site for the developer community. See more about the details at the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog or check out the SharePoint Team Blog.

These Web Parts are available as a free download and provide discrete pluggable services for such functions as including an advanced FAST ESP search box in any SharePoint project and for creating conversational results displays that allow SharePoint users to refine searches through navigating dynamic clusters of content. SharePoint administrators will be able to build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint Server 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.

The Web Parts and Site Template are available as a free download from CodePlex at www.codeplex.com/espwebparts and are part of the Search Community Toolkit.

Look for the features, functionality and range of FAST ESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group.

At just-concluded Gartner Symposium in Las Vegas, Whit Andrews, raconteur and Gartner’s increasingly influential lead analyst on search (aka Information Access) offered a forward look on the market that stated: “Information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises by 2012.” (See Chris Kanaracus’ write-up of Whit’s talk in PC World’s PCW Business Center.)

What’s striking about this projection is how far we have come in a few short years. (NB: notice that Gartner has dropped its famous “probability qualifier” that formerly announced that they were only, say, .7 committed to their announced projection.) So at 1.0 assurance, Chris quotes Whit as stating: “End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy.”

A few short years ago, end-users had no choice but to treat those divisions as dictated on tablets from IT on high. There was no practical way for information access strategy to span those silos. The 2.0 experience has played a pivotal role in flipping our perspective. The new Web has been raising expectations and driving an unflattering comparative experience with enterprise software. As a direct response, 2.0 technologies are flowering all over the enterprise spectrum, as we have documented thoroughly here on the FASTforward Blog. (And Gartner themselves have added an interesting research practice around the apt label Consumerization of IT.)

But expectations don’t rise so far and so fast without some practical underpinnings. What brings together the unprecedented breadth of capability in what Whit Andrews is talking about with, for example, the kind of Enterprise 2.0 technology profile that Andrew McAfee outlined in the SLATES model (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions, Signals) is the fact that (except for “authorship”) search now can provide core technology in all the 2.0 areas and across all the divisions of enterprise data.

A major reason that Whit can confidently assert that 90% of data will soon be analyzed and made discoverable by search technology is simply that advanced search has become much more capable of understanding and mingling structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data at scale. The innovations in flexible data models and high performance processing architectures that are coming onto the market have provided for the first time a reasonable platform for the kind of boundaryless information access strategy that Whit sees rolling across the enterprise landscape over the next four years.

At the same time, again in the 2.0 mode, we are putting much more innovation today into suggestive algorithmic techniques that focus on the user. The next horizons in search lie in recognizing that user intent, whether inside the enterprise or out on the commercial or entertainment web, ultimately drives the quality of the search and the success of the user experience. The key perception is that people don’t search for no reason. And they don’t necessarily want to see what they wanted to see yesterday. As the little diagram suggests, they want to connect with answers and other people and data and services that are important to their current intentions.

So by 2012, look for a picture in search that’s not only accessing orders of magnitude more data, but doing so in a way that allows users to organize that world of information and to help it make sense for them.

FAST recently released a white paper on the business and technology of recommendations that, yes, we are recommending to FASTforward Blog readers.

Focusing on the business challenges facing managers of media and entertainment websites, the paper, Enhancing Content Discovery Through Recommendations Solutions, includes insights on how innovators can:

• Grow content and advertising revenues by exposing new or unknown content. Current search structures guide users to content within a particular topic area or category. By building associations across categories, recommendations expose users to what they may have otherwise bypassed
• Encourage browsing by teasing users with additional content choices, and spotlight popular content to drive wider distribution
• Obtain customer intelligence on which content items are most valued. Feedback loops analyze what content is preferred and not preferred in near real time by blending active feedback and customer behavior statistics
• Connect users with communities and experts who share their interests. The social context provides a rich source of insight on connecting people both with content and other people who share their interests or questions.

Register here to download this free paper from FAST today — and let us know who you would like to recommend it to!

Most readers will know J.P. Rangaswami, Managing Director in BT Group and ex-Dresdner Kleinwort Global CIO from his popular Confused of Calcutta blog and his appearances at technology management conferences. He has achieved industry luminary status through his thoughtful and often outspoken views of the role of IT in driving change and the challenges of executing that role inside the large enterprise.

Recently he commented:

“…when I see emergent tools with the following characteristics, I get very interested:

• Low barriers to entry, in investment costs, running costs and prerequisite skills
• Low TCO, open architecture, no proprietary lock-ins, either overt or covert
• Evidence of take-up by Generation M
• Emergence of a community of participation in an open multisided marketplace around the product or service
• The *possibility* that knowledge work can become more effective and more efficient, not just in the enterprise, but in health, education and welfare. Globally.”

These are the dynamics JP is seeing in the Facebook phenomenon, in Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and other web watering holes where user-generated content is the wellspring of value. He has noted that the enterprise is starting to benefit as well, citing examples like fire departments (Los Angeles FD) using Twitter and “old line” manufacturers like Slater Tools and aerospace manufacturing specialist Winslow Automatics taking advantage of YouTube.

Many IT departments are plagued by “polarizing” debates – with social media tools bleeding into the enterprise from the bottom up, with the “consumerization” of technology, and with the emergence of customer-centricity, personalization, and new interaction paradigms between the business and its audiences. In his FASTforward 08 keynote, JP will review the inevitability as well as the benefits of IT departments embracing the User Revolution and accepting the fact that the user has gained control.

Don’t miss the chance to meet J.P. Rangaswami and hear his latest take on where the user revolution is taking us. Make time Wednesday morning 2/20, and don’t miss registering for FASTforward 08. There is still time to catch this unique event.