So what exactly is Office 2.0, again?

Participants at the Office 2.0 Conference this week made an effort to flush out the look and feel of what they hope will shape the Office 2.0 landscape, all the while conceding that it is still far from fully formed.

"Winston Churchill once said 'This is not the end. This is the end of the beginning.' Well, we're not even at the end of the beginning. This is the beginning of the beginning," said Andrew McAfee, an associate professor with Harvard Business School, in his keynote address on Wednesday. "Our track record is short and we'll need to keep watching for awhile."

Typically, Office 2.0 has referred to Web applications used within an enterprise as opposed to desktop applications. They are aimed to help users collaborate and communicate more efficiently and more publicly. Examples of "Office 2.0" applications have included wikis, blogs, online word processing, and others, some of which open up the application to outsiders. It is the public part, however, that might make chief information officers (CIOs) a little apprehensive to adopt Office 2.0 apps.

"That is the opposite of a fiefdom inside a company, and a lot of people have made very good careers hoarding information and hoarding the technology at their companies," McAfee said. "These technologies will be alien and foreign and scary for those people."

Traditionally, CIOs don't want proprietary information to run on public Web sites, and for good reason. Wikis can be restricted to a finite number of approved users, but security remains a problem.

"If you think about things like security and privacy, we realize that for us, security and privacy is our business. If that's violated, our business is in serious jeopardy," said Rajen Sheth, product manager for Google. "I think it is this mindset issue. In reality, most organizations are collaborating like its 1999. That means they're collaborating via email."

While the attitude at the conference was that attaching a document to an email for collaboration purposes is antiquated, attendees admitted that most people still do it. Most PC users don't yearn for Office 2.0 applications. They hardly know what they are, they said.

"If you leave this room and this industry, you don't hear anybody sitting around and saying, 'You know, I really need Office 2.0 or Web 2.0,'" said Shel Israel, author of Naked Conversations a book that discusses the ways in which blogs affect the corporate culture. "Office 2.0 is a nice name, and so is Web 2.0, and soon we'll have Lunch 2.0. I think most people think that's irrelevant. They just want their stuff to work."

It could be that Office 2.0 will just influence the way desktop applications are designed in the near future. Maybe Office 1.0 apps will give users the choice of online collaboration.

"Does Office 2.0 have to be about applications?" said Mark Suster, chief executive officer for Koral. "For me its about the way the software is designed. I hope that gets embedded in the way SAP works and the way Microsoft works. It's about democratizing the software we already use."

It was particularly noteworthy that speakers at the conference conceptualized Office 2.0 as a more political than technological revolution. They used words like "empowerment," "control," "fiefdom," and "bourgeoisie" as if Office 2.0 were analogous to the post-Renaissance Enlightenment.

"It's important to create those revolutionary sparks," said Karen Leavitt, vice president for WebEx. "Once the revolutionary actions trickle down to the bourgeoisie it is up to them to decide how this happens in their lives."

Okay, maybe. But it's just software, guys. It's not civil war.

The Office 2.0 Conference runs through Thursday in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.office20con.com.