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!