A group of businessmen, venture capitalists, innovators, entrepreneurs, analysts and journalists all got together recently, to meet each other in the flesh, at the inaugural Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

A diverse group, we had all been corresponding online in a Google group for several months, discussing what is best summed up as ‘anything 2.0 in the enterprise’. Although the group represented many views, we all had a common interest – understanding the new world of Web 2.0.

At the conference, we were used as a sounding board. Arguments raged, and there was as much agreement as disagreement. The conference organiser ended up as the arbiter, and a consensus eventually emerged. We had all managed to air our views, and none of us suggested halting what was becoming a runaway train.

From a modest expectation of 200 participants, the numbers billowed to an astonishing 450. Of course, we all blogged about it afterwards because we all believe in the fundamental idea that even within enterprises there are opportunities for users to deploy valuable office and collaborative software solutions.

The panel sessions were interesting and revealed many points of view, ranging from ‘embracing chaos’ to ‘IT is the enemy’ to ‘the Fortune 500 are not democracies’. Every point in the continuum, from idealist to pragmatist, was represented and it became clear that the protectionists believe their value lies in what information they can hoard.

This situation isn’t likely to change soon either – if ever. Complete openness across an organisation is utterly impossible, despite claims to the contrary. But, at the edges, in communities of practice, teams or workgroups, it is possible to use new technologies to improve collaboration and co-operation.

I’ve talked about blogs and wikis before and suspect that more of each fail than succeed, probably for motivational reasons above all else.

Office 2.0 brought some new teamwork offerings into play: some were actually wikis, but you wouldn’t know it. Itensil added a neat Ajax workflow element so that work could be passed around, actions could be integrated with existing systems and tip-offs could be issued if things weren’t going to plan. SystemOne is a document creation/editing system whose embedded search engine keeps an eye on the corporate system and external sources of information, bringing them to the writer’s attention in real-time. And then there’s Koral, a great document management system with embedded search, which looks after everyday documents and retrieves them by content, author or tags.

Yesterday’s social software, while it hasn’t gone away, is having layers of functionality added, and everything seems to be permanently in beta.

This is not computing as we know it: it’s a much more lively and fast-moving environment. You need to protect the downside, the main one being: ‘What if the service provider goes out of business?’

But there are some excellent opportunities to improve the working methods of those parts of the organisation that are willing to accept such change.