I’m not at the Office 2.0 conference, sadly, but fortunately for non-attendees the organizers have done a great job of making the content available online in a timely manner. Aside: I love the way this site includes social networking features, like the ability for users to comment on sessions beforehand, so that they can influence the content; and the way videos have appeared on the same day as they were presented.

One of the first things that caught my eye was Adobe’s Genesis. I watched the presentation by Matthias Zeller. As I understand it, Genesis is an AIR application plus online services, that enables enterprise mashups, organized into workspaces. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a way of using the Flash runtime on the desktop.

What’s in a Genesis Workspace? A collection of “tiles”, actually Flex applets, which can hook into other enterprise or web applications. It is a good fit with SAAS (software as a service) providers such as Salesforce.com. There is also a web browser tile (presumably based on WebKit), enabling the inclusion of any browser application; and a file repository tile that contains documents, using some of the functionality we have already seen in Acrobat.com. The idea is that these workspaces are easily created using drag-and-drop. The real value comes when they are shared online, through Adobe’s hosted services, enabling communication and collaboration.

Zeller says the Genesis client will be free, with monetization coming from subscriptions to hosted services and tiles; third-parties will also be able to market tiles for the system. There is an online slideshow here.

This is only my brief first impression; please follow the links for more detail. I found it interesting on several levels: a new approach to the cloud; a business use for AIR; and also this comment in the presentation, “Adobe-quality aesthetics for the enterprise”.