Shimano are a major manufacturer of cycling and fishing equipment: As Shimano's Global EBusiness Director Julian Lambert is responsible for internal business unit as well as external partner and sales, plus associated enterprise content management and other tools.Julian has a great global business outlook combined with our common experience together of working for two large Japanese enterprises (Shimano & PlayStation) which tends to educate you in both eastern and western culture.Thinking through ways of effectively collaborating across these cultural boundaries is very illuminating. julian discusses his criteria for tool evaluation which essentially comes down to meeting business need. Sarbanes Oxley in the US and its Japanese equivelant JSox (Shimano are publically listed in Japan) are significant security constraints.We discuss open source: Alfresco is a big part of Shimano's internal environment. The openness and flexibility of open source allows Julian to meet new business needs internally as they evolve.Julian discusses how the Alfresco platform, which is rolled out internationally within a passwork protected extranet, has evolved from content management to gradually become a collaboration and communication hub.Exposing users to where everything is and their knowing who has interacted with assets is an often under rated but incredibly valuable attribute that streamlines workflow, while easy to understand new tools in this environment are getting picked up and used more quickly as user adoption blossoms.Open source tool options and associated support underpinnings are increasingly attractive, but first priority is business utility regardless of whether a technology is proprietary or not...