Products and winners from the Office 2.0 conference

The Office 2.0 conference ran a product demo blitz in which 15 products were put through their paces in 5 minutes each. It was fast and furious, and the audience cast votes for the top three through their mobile phones. Vyew won the demo blitz, Wufoo was second and Koral third. Joyent walked off with the Office 2.0 suite prize. And, somewhat controversially, EchoSign, a document signature management service grabbed the best product award. (They got an unlikely 4666 votes against their nearest competitor's 6 votes. So well done to second-placed Coghead, a drag and drop web-based and hosted application builder/server.)

To give a flavour of the event, here's a quick (okay - less than quick) run-down on the demo's with those likely to interest you most at the beginning:

Vyew is web-conferencing with collaborative markup which runs through the browser. A little slow, but no client installation needed. It's free and it maintains a trail of activity. Nice.

SystemOne provides enterprise collaboration and search. SystemOne watches as you create or edit documents, showing related links from info sources such as the web, the intranet, corporate databases, blogs, emails, rss feeds, cms and so on. $95/seat but this may change.

Eighty percent of content is in docs (documents, emails, web pages and folders) and most of it isn't managed. Drag and drop documents into Koral for stunning management capabilities. Filter document views by person or tags. Full text indexing. Be notified of changes. Changes in one place can be mirrored elsewhere - eg if a PowerPoint slide has been reused. From free.

Preezo unveiled its web-based PowerPoint competitor at the event. Access presentations from anywhere. Slimmer files than PPT but it lacks animations at the moment. The product is still in development but it shows promise.

BEA's Builder is also work in progress. It's a wiki/blog based collaboration support system. Good for supporting unstructured teamwork processes.

Ninety percent of team/task management in done in Excel. Smartsheet is web-based and enables people to share a project view. Field update requests can be submitted by email. Changes trigger email alerts and a full audit trail is maintained. $20/month personal, $75/month for 5 users.

Wufoo is an HTML form builder - error checking, validation, confirm details etc. It's simple, easy to use and good for building surveys, application forms etc. It's free for low usage volumes.

Caspio Bridge is a web database/application creation program. Add forms and searches, recognise permissions. It can be run inhouse or hosted. Used by small and large organisations. From free to $600/month.

Approver tracks regular or web-based document development with email alerts, RSS or a desktop widget. Simple workflow with monitoring to show when things arrive and are looked at.

Etelos provides a powerful application builder, the results of which can be self- or externally-hosted. Sales and marketing systems, for example, with bookings, forms, drip marketing, contact management, activity monitoring and reporting can be created usine the English Application Scripting Engine (EASE) or php, jsp, AJAX etc.

Now for something completely different: The Techdirt Insight Community acts as a broker between Fortune 500 companies and expert bloggers. The bloggers are paid for their opinions. And the company bills one of the benefits as "create relationships with bloggers". Hmmm.

Design and build business-ready websites with SiteKreator. Hosting, forms, blogs, discussion forums etc. Aimed at SMB and individuals, not enterprise.

Trovix provides intelligent search for companies seeking job applicants. It cuts through misspellings and different terminology to get at meaning. The search engine itself is from MIT and sounds interesting.

Freshbooks offers speedy, painless billing, tracking and collection by email or US post. An API lets developers hook in.

Synthasite is a storefront builder. It's in closed beta.

That's it. No more Office 2.0. On to other things now. Unless you want more...