Collaborative technologies are changing the way people interact, and key elements of successful implementations will have both presence - to allow communities of people to interact with "one click"- and persistence - which will enable a memory or continuity of that interaction.

Already, collaborative technology has enabled productivity increases, but the true transformational changes will be evolutionary from today's contextual collaborative through the year 2020, when a variety of social factors combine with technology.

Among these social factors are today's youth - raised on SMS, text messaging, IM and chat - joining the workforce.

For businesses to make sense of this progression, they need to think in three- to five-year cycles of advancing technologies and develop collaborative as "a continuous, purposeful series of tasks tied to a process."

This year, Gartner analyst Lou Latham has taken a good stab at predicting some of the key trends shaping the up-and-coming future of Collaboration Technologies.

Kevin Rudden, Director of Public Relations at InterWise, has taken the time to prepare a timely report from his first day at the Collaborative Technologies Conference taking place at New York Chelsea Piers for Kolabora.com.

Find out in this short report what Lou Latham, a principal analyst with research firm Gartner, predicted at the Conference on the topic of collaborative projects involving IT departments working on ERP and supply chain automation.

N.B.: Though, I have been part of the Collaboration Technologies Advisory Board, I have resigned from it over a month ago due to organizational and logistic issue.

My request for providing a live audio/video presentation report on Collaborative Technologies to be made available on the home page of CTC2005 was not well received by the organizers, and so also for several of my multiple promotion and marketing suggestions.

As a matter of fact I haven't been even given an account to post on the CTC2005 blog, though my former Advisory Board colleagues are clearly doing an excellent job of it.

I guess not being American, I owe my dues to this still too US- focused young industry. But that's OK.

My apologies then if you can't meet me there, as in fact, I wish badly I could have been given this opportunity at least in a virtual mode.

If you are at CTC2005 and have some good stuff to report from the show (even pictures), please feel very welcome to contribute your part of the story righ here, (mailto: Robin.Good[at]Kolabora.com) just as Kevin did.