One of the many processes we would like to improve for next year's Office 2.0 Conference is the exchange of contact information among participants. We're trying to make it paper-less, without requiring any custom software to be installed on the mobile devices used by attendees. After looking at many different options, we believe that 2D code scanning is the best one. Here is the scenario:

A 2D barcode (DataMatrix Code, EZcode, QR Code, or similar) is printed on all attendee badges. Attendee A and Attendee B are both registered on the office20.com community website. Their respective profiles contains all the information usually found in a vcard. Attendee A wants to get Attendee B's contact information. Attendee A takes a picture of Attendee B's badge with her camera phone, and sends it as an email attachment to id@office20.com. A reply email is automatically sent back to Attendee A with Attendee B's vcard. Attendee A can also log on to the office20.com community site and download all her vcards at a later date.

In order to implement such as scenarion, we're currently looking at services like ScanLife and scanR. If you know others that we should take a look at, let us know.

If you want to ask questions during keynotes and panels, please add them on this Google spreadsheet (office20.com account required).

Now that all the pieces of the puzzle are starting to connect with each other, some pretty cool mashups can be built. Here is one courtesy of Eric Ly from Presdo, based on an idea originally suggested by one of our friends at Google: an Agenda Heat Map, showing the popularity of sessions based on actual user scheduling. As attendees to the Office 2.0 Conference are adding sessions to their Google Calendar, Presdo is fetching the data (anonymously), and feeding it to a Google Spreadsheet, which cells' colors are based on the number of attendees scheduled to attend any particular session. It's interesting to see that out of 400 attendees who received an account on Google Apps on Monday, more than 50 were already using it by Tuesday. We wil publish a revised heat map later tonight. In the meantime, sessions having less than 10 scheduled attendees should really start pimping themselves through blog posts on the conference's website...

I met Eric Ly, founder of Presdo, two and a half years ago. At the time, he was co-founder and founding CTO at LinkedIn. Over lunch, I told him where I'd like the LinkedIn platform to go. He listened, agreed with the direction, but remained noncommittal. Six months later, I met him again, this time for breakfast. He had left LinkedIn, and was working on a new idea, losely related to meeting scheduling. I asked him to be on the short list of people he would show his first prototype to. Five months ago, we met for breakfast again, and he gave me a first demo. I was the first to blog about it, which almost cost him an article on TechCrunch (I'm really glad he still got one). The application was great, and was only missing a direct link to Google Calendar. Today, this has been fixed.

Over the past week or so, Eric and his team worked around the clock to develop the scheduling system we are using to schedule demos and meetings during the Office 2.0 Conference. This thing is amazing. As a registered attendee, you select the company you want to schedule a meeting with (say OBM), click on the schedule meeting link, and Presdo automatically suggests three candidate times, based on your availability and the other party's availability, both fetched from Google Calendar in real time. If you don't like any of the suggestions, you simply click on the "See more times" link, and you'll get another three, until you find a suitable one. Once you're happy with it, you click on the "Schedule It!" button, and Presdo will automatically add an event on your calendar and the one of your party. That's it. Pure magic!

The reason why I like Presdo is that it does not assume that you will use it as default calendar. Instead, it works with the calendar you are already using, be it Outlook, Google Calendar, or anything else it's been integrated with. All it does is scheduling, but it does it really, really well, in less clicks than any other application we've looked at. It's also pretty smart at suggesting suitable times for meetings, based on a lot of constraints that can be added when using the standard application (not the custom one we're using for the conference). Now, make no mistake: the system only works as well as the parties' calendars are up to date. So here is my request to you faithful Office 2.0 convert: please logon to your office20.com Google Apps account, add all the sessions you're planning to attend, and mark as "Busy" all the time slots during which you will not be available. Then, schedule as many meetings as you can in order to get the most out of your participation to what promises to be the best Office 2.0 Conference ever.

Eric & Team: thank you so much! What you built is truly amazing.

We just got permission to announce that the surprise keynote will be delivered by someone from Google.

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.