Today, I attended the Under The Radar event on Office 2.0 as a judge on a couple of panels (Collaborative Planning and Web Sharing). With over 350 participants, this was one of UTR’s most attended events, proof that the Office 2.0 movement is gaining some serious traction. Here are some notes from the field.

ConceptShare is right on target
ConceptShare is an application targeted at creative professionals that allows for the creation and management of interactive workspaces to present visual designs to others, in order to communicate design intentions and gather feedback from team members. Its user interface is highly intuitive, ultra sleek, and reminiscent of something that could have been designed by teams from Apple or Adobe. Here is a perfect example of an Office 2.0 application developed for a particular vertical, and doing a perfect job at understanding its target audience.

Smartsheet looks really smart
Smartsheet.com is a workflow-infused database dressed as an online spreadsheet and marketed as a project management application. A little bit like Coghead meeting Dabble DB, with a very sexy user interface. The feature that really grabbed my attention was the ability to define user permissions at the row level. This is something I could use for the Office 2.0 Database in order to let vendors edit their own records, along the lines of the idea for a Wikibase that was suggested in this past article. As of today, Smartsheet.com does not support JSON feeds (to be available in Q2), therefore I cannot use it for this purpose just quite yet, and the good folks at Dabble DB promised me that they will work on something that should address my needs. Therefore, I will stick to Dabble DB for the Office 2.0 Database, but might very well use Smartsheet.com for managing the speakers and sponsors for the upcoming Office 2.0 Conference.

Vyew is getting better and better
I got a first demo of Vyew at the first Office 2.0 Conference, and loved it at first sight. The online web conferencing category has six players today, with the recent addition of Zoho Meeting, but Vyew is the only one (to my knowledge) that does not require any browser extension on neither the presenter’s machine nor the guests’, making a very smart use of both Flash and Java for pulling this trick. I just hired a first contractor for helping me organize the upcoming Office 2.0 Conference, and I intend to use Vyew to remotely show her how to use the collection of online services we will use to manage the whole thing.

David Allen is a great speaker
The event organized by Debbie Landa and her team was concluded by a fireside chat with David Allen, author of the Getting Things Done (GTD). I am one of David’s biggest fans, and explained how to implement his highly successful GTD methodology by using a collection of Office 2.0 tools in this past article. David is a great speaker, and I was glad to hear that he is finally working on a third book that will help GTD practitioners get more perspective on their goals, projects, and tasks. Securing David for this event was a major win for UTR, and this sets a pretty high bar for the next Office 2.0 Conference. If you have any suggestion for a star keynote speaker, drop me a line.