The Office 2.0 Conference's organization is a paperless enterprise. Here are the tools we are using, to be presented in details during the Office 2.0 Setup session.

The Conference's website is powered by Jive Software's Clearspace, the most powerful enterprise collaboration software built from the ground up for teams, companies, and communities looking for an easy and productive way to work with each other -- without time or location limitations. This website will be used before, during, and after the Conference to support interactions among attendees and online participants. Once the Conference is over, this website will be turned into the premiere destination for anything Office 2.0, leveraging the office20.com domain name generously donated by our friend Mark Bean.

When including sponsorship agreements signed with sponsors and statements of work signed with service providers, about 100 contracts have to be signed by the multiple parties involved in the Conference's organization. In order to make it paper free and reduce time-to-close, we are using the unrivaled EchoSign electronic document signing solution. The workflow we used last year has been described in this article, and will be improved this year in order to support the automated generation of documents from templates and the merging of data pulled from Salesforce.com. Earlier this year, the Conference's organizer (Monolab) was inducted into EchoSign's Hall of Fame when signing up as 1,000th paying customer.

For email, we are using Gmail from a Google Apps account, which allows us to use our own domain name. Each account gets 10GB of storage, enough for storing five years worth of emails at the rate we are currently using it. Since last year, support for Apple's iPhone has been significantly impoved, and we are accessing our Gmail account directly from Safari, instead of using Apple's Mail application, removing the need for synchronization, while offering Google's legendary search capabilities.

Intacct will be used as master accounting system for managing the Office 2.0 Conference business, as well as the Monolab|Workspace business.

Presdo will be used to support the scheduling of demos and meetings among attendees.

From a business prospective, a conference organizer has to deal with two very different kinds of customers: attendees and sponsors. While the promotion of the event to potential attendees is a relatively simple process that can be easily managed with a blog and a newsletter, the signing of sponsors requires a more sophisticated sales process involving multiple people. Implementing such a process with a CRM solution is not a bad idea, and Salesforce.com is one of the best options currently available. We are using Salesforce.com to manage all our accounts and contacts, sales opportunities, contracts, and calendars. We customized it to support the management of referral fees for registrations and sponsorships brought by affiliates.

In order to open up the event to as large an audience as possible, we are using the amazing Veodia service for instant video recording and the immediate availability of all sessions. Based on the MPEG-4 / h.264 technology, Veodia supports the creation of TV-quality video from a simple web browser with distribution to virtually any device -- including Apple's iPhone and iPod -- without having to purchase any expensive hardware or software. Additionally, attendees can contribute to the sessions by using Veodia to record and submit their own videos.