Integrating Google Wave into the Enterprise

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session.

• Andy Fox, Vice President, Engineering, Novell
• Alexander Dreiling, Program Manager, SAP
• Gregory D’Alesandre, Product Manager, Google Wave
• Chad Wathington, VP, Product Development, ThoughtWorks

Greg started off, giving a brief demo of Google Wave and the concept. (I started using Google Wave a few weeks ago, but it has left me a bit confused. You can find me at doug.cornelius@googlewave.com.) Most other existing communications tools are a poor substitute for face-to-face communication. But at times, electronic communication can be better if you can get real time communication and enable multiple people contributing and editing at the same time.

They started off with no lock-down because the first thing most deployments do is lock down features and editing rights. He did state that the tool is currently very buggy and still being tested.

Alex came up next to show what SAP built on top of Google Wave for business process management. They built a gadget called Gravity. He has a flow chart, with each action box contributed by different people. He also showed an analysis gadget showing  graphs and charts related to the process.

Chad showed how he integrated his company’s project management tool called Mingle with Google Wave. He showed how you can bring data from Mingle into a Wave. They can also create a new task in Mingle through a Google Wave. Each task in Mingle can show the Google Waves that mention that task.

Andy showed Novell’s Pulse. Novell latched onto the Wave Federation Protocol that allows the serves to interact and allow real-time collaboration across platforms. Andy emphasized the benefits of real-time collaboration.

Greg came back and said that most of Google Wave code will be open-sourced. It’s not clear what the business model will be for Google.