Off to Office 2.0 in San Francisco

david_terrar — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:51:31 GMT

By the time I post this I will be in San Francisco for a collection of WordFrame partner meetings, and then the Office 2.0 show. I attended Ismael Ghalimi's first event based around the trend towards web based office and enterprise productivity back in 2006, but missed out last year. This year I'll be one of the presenters and contributors, and our partner SocialMediaToday is one of the media sponsors, at what I hope will be a very worthwhile show. The unconference is on September 3rd, with the main conference activities on September 4th and 5th, all based at the St. Regis hotel.

To give you a flavour of what this conference is all about, Ismael started talking about the Office 2.0 concept way back at the beginning of 2006. The current conference website details the rules for a browser only Office 2.0 set-up, explains the way they "eat their own dog food" to organize and manage the event, and sessions include topics like "Going 100% SaaS".

Unlike the normal conference 1.0 style giveaway of a branded bag of some sort full of sales literature, in the first year attendees got an Apple iPod Nano with the conference programme and presenter profiles handily pre loaded. Apart from being a cracking idea, my wife is still happily using it every day on the drive to work. Last year, when I didn't make it, everyone got the iPhone (or a PS3 if they already had one or want to stubbornly stick to a BlackBerry like me!). Continuing the trend, this year conference delegates will be getting an HP 2133 subnotebook PC — a nicely crafted and very portable device for Wi-Fi and the web on the move.

The opening keynote will be David Allen, author of the excellent Getting Things Done — a great way to set the tone as I'm sure a large proportion of the audience will be GTD fans. Contributors range from the likes of Robert Scoble or Loic Le Meur, to fellow Enterprise Irregulars Zoli Erdos, Vinnie Mirchandani, Ross Mayfield and Anshu Sharma. Susan Scrupski is helping Ismael organize the event, and David Tebbutt will be crossing the Atlantic to attend. Take a look at Dennis Howlett's explanation of the show and the Irregular messaging. Actually, the Irregulars have a special affection for the Office 2.0 event. Back in 2006 it facilitated the first real physical meetup of the group — many of us had been in daily contact with each other, but this this was the first time most of us actually met face to face. Record of the occasion below courtesy of Dan Farber.

This week at the unconference, I'll be presenting one of our projects, the award winning IT Counts community for the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, as a case study to discuss guidelines to help you start and manage a successful and sustainable web community. During the main conference I'll be contributing to the Document Management 2.0 panel. As usual with these kind of events, although the content should be good, the networking will be invaluable. I'm looking forward to meeting old friends, and a lot of interesting new people. If you want to follow the event, content and blog posts will be tagged O208.

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Off to Office 2.0 in San Francisco