The Office 2.0 Conference 2008 is over now, and we've received a lot of feedback. Overall, the conference was a great success, and its content has significantly improved from last year. Yet many attendees pointed out that putting the show together in less than two months is making it very difficult for a lot of people to participate, either as attendees or sponsors. As a result, we've decided to give ourselves a full year to organize the 2009 edition.
The location remains the same, dates are set to September 21-23, 2009 (Monday through Wednesday), registration is open ($1,495 until December 31st, 2008), and we will keep our tradition of giving away a mobile device to every paying attendee. Also, we have made some changes to our sponsorship packages in order to simplify things, and make sure that early-stage companies get proper representation. Next year's theme is "The Global Office" and our goal is to gather one representative from as many Global 500 firms, national governments, and top 100 universities as possible.
This year, we got 500 registrations, 450 of which happened once the conference's website was released, less than a month before the event took place. For next year, the website is already online, more than a year before the opening keynote, so we expect to sell out quite early. As a result, we will reduce the number of press passes down to 50, and the number of free guest passes down to zero, so make sure to register early if you want to guarantee your spot at the event (the hotel cannot accomodate more than 750 people). The same is true for sponsors. We look forward to meeting you again in San Francisco next year.
For reference purposes, the video recordings for all 2008 sessions are now available from the agenda.
Update: GE (#12 on Fortune's Global 500 list) just confirmed that they will come back next year.
Thanks for all the work necessary in putting on this conference. I am the CTO for WELS and I manage the technology initiatives for this medium size non-profit. As part of my job, I also get to advise about 2,000 churches and schools across our organization about their use of technology. I was intrigued by many of the panel discussions related to doing most, if not all, things "in the cloud." Over the coming year I'll be exploring some of those concepts and perhaps recommending use where appropriate.
For future conferences, it would be nice to have some focus on SMBs rather than Fortune 500 companies (or perhaps a few "tracks"). I know I would personally benefit from frank discussions about working in a non-profit environment, and best practices around Office 2.0 there. It's not all about ROI for us, but providing solid tools that volunteers can use as well. Just a thought.