Please plan to join CIO members and guests at the October 19 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum. The topic for this meeting is "Workplace Collaboration: Tools, Techniques, and Practical Deployment".

There are numerous perspectives on assessing and implementing collaboration in the workplace. This meeting will explore the following:

• What is the maturity of workplace collaboration in today's marketplace and where is the industry headed?

• What are the common elements of the Microsoft and IBM strategies, and how can companies best leverage them?

• How is the increasing role of collaboration affecting business processes?

• Where is the competitive advantage in collaboration going to come from?

Tom Austin, Group Vice President and Gartner Fellow, will provide an overview and analysis of the current Collaboration movement and a glimpse into the future: how Gartner sees the collaboration movement evolving over the next 3 to 5 years. "Collaboration is essential to the modern workplace, both within the enterprise and between and among enterprises." Some of the issues Tom will explore include:

• What are the business imperatives behind investing in collaboration support technology?

• What other technology dimensions are important (e.g., search and business intelligence)?

• What is the minimum set of workplace technologies you should deploy universally?

• How do company culture, strategy, organization and metrics influence success or failure in collaboration support initiatives?

• What are the key pitfalls to avoid?

The meeting will also include presentations and discussions with two industry leaders in collaboration, Microsoft and IBM. Ken Bisconti, Vice President Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software, IBM Software Group will present the IBM roadmap for successful collaboration deployment including discussion of tools, techniques and lessons learned in the IBM experience. He will examine the evolution of disparate workplace experiences and environments into an integrated flexible dynamic workplace. Cliff Reeves, General Manager in the Strategic and Emerging Business Team, Microsoft, Inc. will then present the roadmap for the Microsoft approach to collaboration. He will discuss the strategy and pragmatics in the Microsoft approach. Both speakers will look at internal and external collaborations, discuss how their approaches provide competitive advantages, and highlight many challenges, changes and new opportunities collaboration brings to the modern workplace. Microsoft and IBM share similar goals in their collaboration strategies, but follow very different roadmaps. The Gartner perspective of the overall collaboration industry, along with the perspectives and experiences of the two industry leaders, IBM and Microsoft offers Forum participants an exciting and balanced view of this hot topic. Also a special time (1-3PM) for more demos and dialogue is planned for any meeting participants who can stay after the lunch.

Please join our members at the meeting! The meeting starts at 8:00 AM and ends by 1PM. Brunch and lunch are provided. Pre-registration is required. Please let us know if you will be staying for 1-3PM demo and discussion session. Meeting logistics including agenda, directions to the meeting place and parking information will be emailed to you after you register. For registration for this meeting, please contact: Catherine Swift at cswift@towson.edu or 410-704-4252.

To make inquiries about this meeting or about membership in the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum, please contact: