The real conference has not started yet but am really excited by what I'm seeing. So many tools presented here focus on the collaborative editing, annotation, sharing and tracking of documents, whether spreadsheets, presentations, or word documents. That's Document 2.0!

These tools are wonderful, extremely powerful, and very easy to use. They get the work done better than anything else out there and get good adoption from individuals or small groups. But what about Enterprise Adoption? How can we reconcile this trend with long-term preservation, legal compliance, or just security and privacy issues?

These are some of the topics we'll discuss on the Document 2.0 panel. Join us there!

Why should you care about the document?

First, I'd like to point out that the document is not only the traditional, old-fashioned sheet of paper. It is much more than that. It is a "representation of information designed with the capacity to communicate." It is not even limited by boundaries any more, or self-contained — it becomes a "mash-up" of information, put together to convey specific information to other humans. This blog is a document.

Why are documents important in the Office 2.0? They are the lifeblood of the entreprise. Without documents, barely any business process can run. Documents flow through our organizations, are validated, reviewed, circulated, modified, transformed, printed, scanned. They are like the air we are breathing — we don't notice them anymore, but without them, our business would stop.

Just like the Web, the Office, or the Enterprise, the document has to evolve to support more effective business processes. Welcome to Document 2.0! Open, secure, personalized, traceable, structured — we'll explore a few of these traits in further posts.