The Extreme Productivity Seminar scheduled to take place on Friday, August 26 has been moved to Saturday, September 6 in order to allow participants to the Office 2.0 Conference to attend. If you want to learn how to implement an optimized version of David Allen's Getting Things Done process using Office 2.0 tools, please register now.

"Your seminar was fantastic!"

—Oliver Starr

"The Extreme Productivity Seminar really helped me improve my existing GTD setup. Much recommended to get more done in less time."

—Sebastien Stadil

"Having a good tracking system for opportunities, portfolio companies, and managing time in general is critical for running a venture firm well. I looked at and experimented with just about everything. Ismael's approach to Extreme Productivity is the only system I've seen that combines the ease of use and power that I was looking for. Highly recommended and very thought-provoking."

—Mike Maples

"Ismael is an inspiration. The fact that he is able to accomplish an enormous number of activities without stress is a testament to his discipline and organization. If you are already familiar with the principles of GTD, and want to learn how you can take your practice of it to the next level, I urge you to take a serious look at his Extreme Productivity Seminar."

—Thomas Jones

"Ismael takes a daunting number of tasks and projects, and processes each with impressive efficiency. His seminar presents his productivity management techniques in a way that is accessible to everyone, and easy to implement using common tools. I believe in the core techniques so much that I have given Ismael's presentation twice with our organization. Highly recommended seminar."

—Seth Taylor

We're currently in the process of migrating the Office 2.0 Database to Clearspace (front-end) and Zoho Creator (back-end). While most of the content can be automatically migrated, we might have to do some manual data entry to make it right. If you have some free time available in the coming days and are not afraid of doing some really boring work, please send an email at ismael at monolab dot com.

Thanks!

Running fast and furious, we signed 8 new sponsors in the past 24 hours: Atlassian, Clarizen, Email Center Pro, Mindjet, MindTouch, NewsGator, Storm Ventures, and Viewpath. We still have a few pods available, as well as slots for the Launchpad. We also have sponsorship opportunities for several functions (breakfasts and lunches), and a custom deal for VC firms interested in sending multiple partners with a discounted pass that does not include the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC (most VCs have an iPhone already anyway). Please contact us at ismael at monolab dot com for more information. But hurry up, for time is running out quickly.

Our goal this year is to provide a fantastic online experience to all our attendees, for both the ones who can make it to San Francisco, and the ones who can't. One part of the challenge is to provide a community website that can be used before, during, and after the conference, for attendees to network and get the most out of their participation. In that respect, Jive Software's Clearspace is doing wonders, with already a dozen active blogs hosted on the site. Another part is to provide the right collaboration tools for attendees to schedule meetings and interact in real time. This is especially important now that we decided to organize the Office 2.0 Launchpad, and must provide the appropriate demo scheduling system for it. On that front, I've got some good news (for a change).

Today, Google gave us 1,000 accounts for Google Apps, hosted on the office20.com domain name. What this means is that all our physical attendees — plus several hundred online attendees — will get a full Google Apps account, with email, chat, calendar, docs, and sites. At $50/user, that's quite a gift, so please let me extend a warm "thank you" to the Google Apps team. You guys and girls rock!

So, how will we use Google Apps during the conference? Well, the first application will be for scheduling meetings. Since there is no way to integrate with everyone's existing calendar seamlessly, we might as well take advantage of the fact that we have a captive audience and know what our attendees are up to on September 3-5 (attending the conference, what else?), and give them an empty calendar to fill up with plenty of demos and meetings. We're also working with Presdo to make the scheduling process even easier. Another application will be to gather feedback from attendees on all our sessions, and provide some real-time heat maps for them. Yet another will be to provide an easy way for attendees to exchange virtual business cards, even though we're not exactly sure how we'll put it together — ideas welcome!

Now, let's take a step back, and look at what's really going on here. With Clearspace, EchoSign, Google Apps, Intacct, Presdo, Salesforce.com, and Veodia (Cf. Office 2.0 Setup), we're putting the foundations for an enterprise IT system that will be used by up to 1,000 end-users scattered around the world, including Groupware, ERP, CRM, Portal, and all the bells and whistles to make it überly sexy, all in one month, with no full-time staff... That's right: a dream enterprise IT system built in one month by part-time amateurs, for the cost of one-year salary of your typical IT guy (if we had to pay for it all)... And make no mistake, we're not talking about an ugly patchwork of standalone applications that do not talk to each, we're building a fully integrated system with single sign-on across the board, and processes that can span four or five applications seamlessly (using Intalio when things get a bit hardcore). If anyone needed proof that Software as a Service works, here is a perfect use case for it.

This Office 2.0 Setup will become our platform for years to come. We will continue documenting it's build-up, and keep improving it year after year, reporting on new integrations developed by our partners, and building some ourselves where they are missing. Let the fun begin!

Losing our Diamond Sponsor 10 days before the conference was definitely a huge blow ($75,000), but it forced us to be creative, and focus our efforts on what makes this conference unique, as Susan and Gadi so eloquently pointed out — its community-driven nature. The Office 2.0 Conference would not exist without the help it receives from its sponsors, but many early-stage startups cannot afford even our entry-level package ($2,500). In fact, they can barely afford the cost of flying to California today. Yet many innovations come from the smallest companies with the tightest budgets, and we've always been looking for ways to engage with them. The Office 2.0 Launchpad might be the answer.

Less than 24 hours after announcing it, we confirmed the participation of 8 companies, and are reviewing another 5. With a little bit more help from the bloggers community, we should easily reach 20 to 30, creating a nice balance with our more established paying sponsors. This is a perfect example of how powerful a community of online contributors can be, and a real-time illustration of how this event is put together, in less than 2 months.

Back in early July, we did not have a single sponsor, nor a single speaker, and were about to open our attendee registration system. Our website came a full month later, prompting even our most ardent supporters to question whether or not the conference would even take place this year. Today, we have 35 sponsors, 71 speakers, and more registrations than we had last year at the same time. It's fast, a bit scary, quite stressful, but it works, and it's a perfect illustration of how online communities work, and how effective Office 2.0 tools can be.

Now, let's be fair, and give back credit to who truly deserves it. A community is made of people, and some contribute more than others, which is the way it should be. But a few give everything they can, for reasons I cannot always explain, and they deserve special credit. Among them, I would like to thank Susan Scrupski and Oliver Marks who essentially recruited most of our speakers, Gadi Shamia, who made our partnership with Intacct possible and recruited many other speakers, Susan D'Elia and her team at TECHMarket, who are handling all our Public Relations, and my wife May Ghalimi, who is doing pretty much everything else, including shipping these cool mobile devices to our paying attendees. To all of you (and many others), I would like to say "thank you," for this event would not exist without your contributions.

With so much goodwill being put into this event, it is our responsibility to make it the best it can be, and you can help. We need more paying registrations to make up for the loss of our top sponsor, more VC attendees to provide feedback to the companies participating in the Office 2.0 Launchpad, and more bloggers to cover the event. And speaking about bloggers, I've heard that many of them will write about the event tomorrow, Monday, August 25, so if you feel like joining the party, please blog about the conference as well, and link to this post.

I thank you for your help, and look forward to meeting you all next week.

-Ismael

Here is our full list of Confirmed Speakers.

This year, the Zoho Party will take place in the Vitrine, on the hotel's 4th floor, on Thursday, September 4, from 6PM to 9PM. All attendees are invited. Many more Zoho-related news coming soon...

Our goal is to turn the office20.com community website into a premiere destination for everything Office 2.0. For this reasons, we're currently looking at migrating the Office 2.0 Database to Clearspace. At present time, it's powered by a WordPress server on the front-end, and a Dabble DB database on the back-end. We'll definitely migrate the front-end component, creating a custom Clearspace document for each application and using it as a place holder. But for the back-end, we're not exactly sure. We need an online database that supports JSON for data syndication, and offers the ability to share rows with individual users — typically the person in charge of marketing at the application's vendor. I don't think Google Docs supports row-level sharing in spreadsheets, and I've not followed the development of Zoho Creator or Zoho DB closely enough to know whether they do or not. Any idea?

The entire Office 2.0 Conference is managed using online tools exclusively. This eat-your-own-dog-food approach allows us to see what works, and what does not. We learn quite a bit from these experiments, and share our fidings with vendors. Most of the time, they listen, and improve their products based on our feedback.

First, let's talk about what works: we've been using Jive Software's Clearspace 2.5 for about a week now, and I must say that we love it! Using this great piece of software, we managed to build an entire community website over a week-end, and are already starting to get some nice contributions from attendees and speakers alike.

Second, let's see what does not work, or could work better. Clearspace lets us create Word-like documents, but does not have native support for spreadsheets (beyond simple HTML tables). For some documents, such as a media list with the names, emails, companies, and websites of media attendees, a spreadsheet is what we need.

We could build one using Google Docs, save it as a .csv file, and attach the file to a Clearspace document, but it would require many extra steps every time we would add a new entry to the spreadsheet. Another option would consist in sharing the spreadsheet with all our sponsors, but this would essentially require that we update two databases whenever we sign a new sponsor: the Clearspace user database where we add new sponsors to a Public Relations group, and the Google Docs database where we would specify who the document is shared with. Neither solutions are satisfactory.

In a perfect world, Clearspace would be integrated with Google Docs, and would allow the creation of Google documents directly from a Clearspace community. Whenever such a document would be created, it would be automatically shared with all Clearspace users having access to it. I do not know whether Google Docs' API is complete enough to support such an integration scenario, but I'll make sure to ask at the conference.

In the meantime, our best option might be to store all media attendees in our Salesforce.com instance, and publish this content on our Clearspace community website. This would require the development of a custom piece of Java code to deal with the authentication process, but it would allow us to keep everything is sync, with no unnecessary manual steps. Good news: Clearspace makes it very easy to build such custom components. Bad (or good) news: Java developers won't be out of a job for quite some time...

For the past two years, we've been looking for an accounting application that would be available as a service, would work with any web browser, would support multiple currencies, and could be integrated with Salesforce.com. After much research, we came to the conclusion that only one option was available: Intacct. Today, I am pleased to announce that Monolab, Inc. will deploy Intacct Small Business to manage our conference business, while Monolab|Workspace, Inc. will deploy Intacct Enterprise for managing its upcoming network of workspaces. Intalio is looking at it as well in order to manage its fast growing business (125% year-over-year growth for the past two years). Last but not least, Intacct is joining the Office 2.0 Conference as a Silver Sponsor, and will bring some customers along to present some very cool use cases. Many thanks to Gadi Shamia for his help in getting this partnership off the ground.

Back in 2001, my good friend Doug Neal introduced me to Dynamism, a US based company importing cool devices from Japan. While nothing can replace regular trips to Akihabara if you're a true gadget lover, frequent visits to the dynamism.com website are the closest match you can get, especially if you're on a budget. This year, I am extremely pleased to announce that the good folks from Dynamism will join us for the Office 2.0 Conference. We will give them the largest table we can fit in the Gear Gallery, and they will demo their coolest gadgets. Many of them cannot be found in any domestic retail stores, hence this will be a great opportunity to discover some new form factors up close. Many thanks to Doug (Neal) for the introduction, and to Doug (Krone) for his participation. We look forward to seeing you both at the conference.

The Office 2.0 Unconference will take place at the St. Regis Hotel on September 3rd, 2008, from 9AM to 5PM. Attendees of the Office 2.0 Conference can participate for free, without any additional registration. Anyone else can join the Unconference for $50 by registering on the www.regonline.com/unoffice20 website. The Unconference will also host David Coleman's Collaboratory Experiment.

The Office 2.0 Blog is now using the feeds.feedburner.com/office20 feed that was generously donated by Dan Itkis, author of the Office 2.0 Reviews blog. If you were one of Dan's subscribers, please use this new feed instead. Many thanks to Dan for his help! Now, I'd love to use the twitter.com/office20 Twitter feed as well. If you know the person owning it, please make an introduction.