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!

What about paper in all that? Is paper totally out of the equation in Office / Document 2.0? Will Office 2.0 finally deliver the “Paperless Office” promise?

Well, not quite yet… The paperless office became a buzzword after being introduced in an article, “The Office of the Future,” in Business Week in 1975. It coincided with the advent of the personal computer, and the hope was that all documents could be processed electronically and that paper would become irrelevant.

But has paper disappeared? Not quite yet. Actually, paper consumption is still increasing globally, soaring to extremely high levels. Some estimates go as high as 10-50 trillion pages! If we could stack up all printed pages, one year’s worldwide “production” could take us between 5 and 15 times to the moon depending on the estimate…

The good news is, paper consumption is now (somewhat) under control – moderate growth (around 2-3%), even declining in some countries. Still, we can get much greener. Did you know that between 20 and 40% of pages printed are discarded in the next 24 hours? That calls for new technologies such as electronic paper or transient paper, but also (and even more so) good practices… That’s what I call the “Less Paper Office”.