Close to 400 Google Apps accounts on the office20.com domain name have now been created and shared with their owners. To do so, we synchronized our RegOnline attendee database with our Salesforce.com instance, exported an attendee list from Salesforce.com into a .csv file, imported the file in Google Spreadsheet, randomly generated temporary passwords using the RANDBETWEEN() function, exported the updated attendee list into another .csv file, and created the accounts in Google Apps using the bulk upload function (very handy). Once all the accounts had been created, we created security tokens for each and every one of them to be used by the Presdo scheduling application.

The final step was to send an email to every attendee with their login and password. To do so, we enlisted the help of Raju Vegesna and his team at Zoho, and built a little application with Zoho Creator. It worked, and tonight Google Apps can claim a few more happy users. Many thanks to all involved — this part of our Office 2.0 Setup is working like a charm!

If you're attending the Office 2.0 Conference, please use this office20.com Google Apps account to do as much as possible during the event, from sending emails to scheduling meetings (instructions coming soon). This is an integral part of our experiment, and the more active participants we get, the better. Also, if you cannot make it to San Francisco but would like to participate in the experiment nonetheless, please send an email to registration@office20.com for a free Google Apps account on the office20.com domain name.