What a great panel we've had! Noone really knew what to expect, but I think it ended up coming out great — it was almost too short. After a "warm" up period, the room participation was great, and we just could not stop the discussion.
If needed, this confirmed that documents still has a very strong role to play in Office 2.0. However, the essence of the Document 2.0 will be different — it will move away from this atomic container of information to this aggregation of evergreen content, capable of self-updating themselves, available online and offline. Although standards and openness will play a big role, the panel agreed that what is most important are onramps and offramps into traditional, legacy formats.
Where it got even more interesting was when we started to discuss long-term preservation, and making sure the document will still be there and readable decades from now. It became clear that parts of the audience wanted to see cloud computing mature before they could trust their company's lifeblood — such as contracts — to the cloud.
Ironically, the discussion came back multiple times to paper as being a universal medium, yet to be replaced — interesting twist in a paperless conference!
