My Office 2.0 setup currently includes 15 different services, 10 require a login and password, and 8 separate logins and passwords are used. This is one of the bugs that plague the concept for Office 2.0 today. It could be solved with single sign-on, which is one of the interoperability services that are needed to make Office 2.0 a truly effective computing platform. This article provides a first list of such interoperability services.

Single Sign-On
This might be the most complex problem to solve, especially within the context of an Office 2.0 working environment, where you do not want your web browser to cache your logins and passwords, for the web browser might be used by someone else after you. And because nobody wants to trust any single company to become the custodian of all passwords used on the Internet, this problem might never be solved. My intuition tells me that instead of trying to solve the problem entirely, all we might have to do is reduce its scope by using multiple services offered by the same provider, like Gmail and Google Reader. That way, single sign-on is offered for groups of services and less passwords are needed. But even with such a solution, some work remains to be done, as illustrated by the fact that Google Analytics still requires a login and password that are different from the ones you need for your main Google account.

Centralized Subscription & Billiing
Like it or not, most of the cool services that we are using for free today won’t remain free for very long, either because they will come out of beta and require a paying subscription moving forward, or because advanced features you cannot live without will take you down a paying upgrade path. One way or the other, you should be prepared to have to pay for them. Problem is, managing subscriptions for 15 or 20 different services and their yearly renewal can quickly become a pain, therefore a centralized subscription and billing infrastructure is required. Multiple service providers could partner to build such an infrastructure, which in turn could provide services such as single sign-on. Ideally, payment could be done through credit card or PayPal, which might make eBay a good candidate for providing such an infrastructure, even though I would expect some healthy competition from Google. In any case, this is where we need to go, and the sooner the better. Author’s note: Many thanks to Assaf for pointing this need out.

Federated Group Management
Some of the best Office 2.0 tools offer great social features that foster group collaboration. Good examples of this are ma.gnolia for bookmarks, 30 Boxes for calendaring, and Collective X for whatever it actually does — I am still waiting for my preview account. This is all nice and fancy, but if your group wants to use several of these tools, you will have to create duplicated versions of your group multiple times, and send one invitation for each of these services to all members of your group. Not to mention the fact that managing user permissions in such a distributed manner can quickly become a nightmare. A federated group management infrastructure with support for authorization or entitlement is something that we should start thinking about. Then will come the issue of group branding, which starts with the need to use an organization’s domain name instead of the one of the service provider. For example, I would like Gmail to work with my itredux.com domain name, instead of just gmail.com, and I would like to use Basecamp through a URL that looks like projects.itredux.com, instead of the backward itredux.projectpath.com. This is an other Office 2.0 bug that I need to record, and I was glad to see that Google partially fixed the bug even before I could record it. Many thanks to Garett Rogers for pointing this one out.

All these questions would be best discussed through an appropriate forum, and I will create one using Collective X as soon as I can get access to an account. I am also thinking about organizing an informal get together sometime in May or June in the San Francisco Bay Area, where vendors and users could come up with creative solutions while getting to know each other better. If that sounds like fun to you, let me know and I will share with you the agenda that I am putting together with a couple of friends.