Office 2.0 Conference

Announcement: Office 2.0 Conference 2009 Registration Open

Office 2.0 Conference 2009

September 21-23, 2009

St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco ( Book)

125 Third Street, San Francisco, California 94103 ( Map)

 

The Office 2.0 Conference is a collective experiment organized every year in San Francisco, CA and aimed at discovering the future of online productivity & collaboration. It is a unique gathering of visionaries, thought leaders, and customers using innovative online services for getting things done at the office, at home, and on the go.

 

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. Here are quotes from past attendees.

 

Attendee Registration | Sponsorship |  Contact

Timeline

  • September 8, 2008: Registration System and Sponsorship Packages
  • November 3, 2008: Call for Speakers
  • December 31, 2008: Last Early Bird Registrations and Sponsorships
  • May 4, 2009: Final Speaker Selection
  • September 21, 2009: Unconference
  • September 22-23, 2009: Conference

Attendee Quotes

 
 
 

More attendee quotes

 

Online Attendees

Anyone can participate in the Office 2.0 Conference 2008 online using the following resources:

 

Recent Blog Posts

Jason M. Lemkin

This year's theme of taking Office 2.0 into the enterprise was a good and timely once with terrific speakers and case studies.  However, I wonder if the theme will be as on point in 2009.  With HP laying off 25,000+, Dell and others forecasting large IT cutbacks, and the implosion of the largest buyers of IT software, financial services ... I would posit the hope for Office 2.0 2009 is the SMB.  With the VSB the target of 2006; the early adopters for 2007; and the enterprise for 2008, hopefully 2009 will be the time for the traditional laggards, the overworked and underresourced SMBs, to adopt Office 2.0 more rapidly.  I believe we are seeing a very rapid and fundamental shift in Enterprise 2.0 buying habits from "bring it inhouse now, it's dirt cheap and great and works now not later" to more traditional ROI analyses with much longer sales cycle and cost justifications.  Combined with IT spend freezes spreading across companies as I type, the enterprise boost for Office 2.0 may prove to be just that -- a boost but not the long term driver of adoption and change.

1 Comments 0 References Permalink
Francois Ragnet

During the panel, a number of very interesting questions were raised. where does my document end up in the cloud? Can I trust the infrastructure to hold it?

 

Among the topics for discussion that I believe we only scratched the surface, were:

  • Document 2.0 and legal / preservation constraints

 

  • Document 2.0 and Information Overload

 

  • Enterprise adoption of Document 2.0 and barriers

 

  • Technology enablers and infrastructure for Document 2.0

 

 

If there is interest, we could continue the discussion here, possibly on the Office 2.0 panel page. Please reply on this message (unless we can use some kind of voting capability?) to let me know.

 

- Francois

1 Comments 0 References Permalink
Ismael Chang Ghalimi

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.

6 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: conference, contact, vcard
Ismael Chang Ghalimi

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.

3 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: o209
Izumi Barker

Office 2.0 has been a whirlwind of great sessions, conversations, and viewpoints. Even though the conference is over, the conversations are going strong — you can continue to share your experiences and insights of Office 2.0 by showcasing the video recordings of the sessions on your blogs, wikis, and web pages. Veodia has added the code to embed the videos and player to each session document of the conference's agenda. Feel free to use the code — and please credit Veodia — to keep the conversation going!

2 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: video, embed, blog, sessions, veodia
Daniel Druker

I enjoyed the 100% SaaS session yesterday, but have to say that I felt a bit unfulfilled in the end. We all had lots of fun with the preparation for the panel. Doug Harr's view that 100% SaaS means that your whole IT infrastructure simplifies down to a wireless router in your communications closet is certainly a provocative one.

 

We had lots of spirited discussion on what we saw as the boundaries (none of us think 100% SaaS is truly realistic today, particularly when you think about desktop software, personal productivity, telephony, file sharing, data warehousing, etc.), but all of us are seeing more and more companies, including our own firms, at 80% or 90% SaaS, and we all are getting tremendous benefits from this.

 

The questions from the audience took us more into the current state of SaaS than into what we think the future looks like, and what we know the industry needs to do to move the needle more and more toward 100%.

 

Here is some additional coverage:

 

0 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: intacct, saas
Gadi Shamia

Yesterday, I moderated a panel titled “Going 100% SaaS” during the Office 2.0 Conference. There is a full video, so if you have 40 minutes to spare, you can see it all. It was also covered in Ben Kepes' blog. The panelists were 3 SaaS vendors (Dan Druker from Intacct, Rob Holl from Adaptive Planning, and Jeff Schultz from Bill.com), and one near 100% SaaS customer, Doug Harr from Ingres. Although we didn’t get to talk much about the future of SaaS, several interesting takeaways came out of the event:

 

  • 100% SaaS is real — Companies like Ingres made strategic decisions to become 100% SaaS, and they move programmatically toward that. If it was not for Exchange and Office, Ingres would be 100% in the cloud.
  • Going more SaaS has many cost advantages — First, it costs less than buying licenses. Doug compared his $140K/year investment in SFDC to $1.5M he spent on Siebel licenses only at his previous company. Second, it allows companies to flex costs based on the economic situation and to avoid shelfware.
  • SMB and technology companies first — It sounds like the first to adopt SaaS are young companies, technology companies, and SMBs. There are many department-driven sales as well.
  • The CIO needs to become a real business partner — both before the session and during the session we got to speak a lot about the changing role of the CIO. Now, when departments can make software decisions and the issues of deployment are removed, the CIO needs to become a business partner and help the business units to make product decisions and help integrate the relevant pieces to the overall business process. CIOs that will protect their turf and will try to control everything will find themselves out of the strategic decision loop.
  • SaaS empowers SMBs — SaaS allows small and mid size businesses to benefit from features that were once used only by large enterprises. With little implementation and monthly per user price point, everyone can get the best e-signature solution, or start managing projects more effectively. TakeEchoSign for example, British Telecom (BT) is using exactly the same tool to get 1,000s of sales contract signed a day as a limo service provider renting 3-4 limos a day, and they both realized the same exact benefit: getting agreements signed in an hour instead of a week.
  • Security — I was sure no one would ask the question, but it was asked… all vendors said that with SAS 70 and self-imposed standards, SaaS provides better security than a server you maintain in house. Intacct, for example, is hosted in an IBM data center guarded by armed guards and using retina scan for identification — very few customers will go that far to protect their data… Jeff mentioned that a security glitch for a normal company can be unpleasant, but for a SaaS company it can be a death sentence — something that motivates SaaS companies to be very carful.
As Ben noted, we didn’t get to speak much about the future of SaaS. The audience had enough questions about SaaS today that we were stuck in the present. If there is anything telling about this fact, it is that SaaS still has a long way to go before it is measured feature vs. feature, application vs. application when enterprises are shopping for new capabilities.
Cross published on a la 360.
0 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: 100%_saas, saas, adaptive_planning, bill.com, ingres, intacct
Ben Kepes

I'm at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where day 1 has just concluded. As with all conferences, the most valuable parts have been the discussions outside of sessions. And I can tell you that the corridors have been humming here. The conference is a who's who of business-centric cloud computing — everyone here believes that the future will exist in the clouds.

 

Here are some of the sessions I've enjoyed today, including the Google keynote, Project Management 2.0, and Money 2.0 (with video embedded below)...

 

Google Keynote

 

Matthew Glotzbach (Google Enterprise) listed the ten things that he can do in the clouds today that he couldn't do a year ago. It was a very Google centric presentation — but nonetheless a good reminder of how far we've come in a short space of time. Matthew's list included:

 

  1. Having access to everything on the go — iPhone
  2. Being able to search through all my email — Gmail
  3. Chatting with customers and partners — in any language — Matthew gave a very cool live demo of inline translation of chat!
  4. Collaborating simply — Google Docs and Sites
  5. Organising travels — TripIt (the only non Google product making the top 10)
  6. Easily collecting data from co-workers and customers — Google Forms
  7. Building a scalable business application on the cloud platform
  8. Using online templates for docs, spreadsheets, and presentations
  9. Running fast, secure and stable web apps — Chrome
  10. Securely sharing video in apps with Youtube for Google Apps

 

There was lots of backchat on Twitter from attendees that it was very much a Google pitch, however it has to be said that if Google is at the forefront of cloud computing, then they have a right to crow about it.

 

Project Management 2.0

 

Fellow blogger Zoli Erdos moderated the panel. The panelists were:

 

  • Dean Carlson (Viewpath)
  • Andrew Filev (Wrike)
  • Bruce Henry (LiquidPlanner)
  • Mark Mader (Smartsheet.com)
  • Guy Shani (Clarizen)

 

It was interesting that there didn't seem to be a huge amount of differentiation in the offerings — they're all perhaps fighting for the same customers. Comments were raised around PM 2.0 bringing the end of siloed information. Participants claimed that no one is a project manager anymore — everyone is a manager, responsible for tasks. Differentiation between mass scale PM projects that need Gantt charts, top-down control, massive documentation, etc. However for 99% of PM work that isn't needed. New way of thinking about a federated PM model where users can work in whatever way is best for them, and behind the scene information is federated backwards and forwards between apps.

 

Project managers today spend their time battling with crappy software — Project Management 2.0 releases them to do real project management instead of being a project secretary. The main takeaway, and one which I concur with, is that no one player will replace Microsoft Project. Rather, there will be an ecosystem of varied flavours of PM app that all have a share of the market.

 

Money 2.0

 

I'm biased here, as I moderated this panel. However feedback from participants and attendees indicated that the panel was really rewarding. We were a little time-compressed as the previous session had run late. The participants were:

 

  • Aaron Forth (Mint.com)
  • Marc Hedlund (Wesabe)
  • Justin Kitch (Intuit)
  • Jeff Schultz (Bill.com)
  • Mike McDerment (FreshBooks)

 

It was hard moderating a panel that was so polarised between the consumer and business space, but notwithstanding that it went pretty well. The audience was a little jaded, but the participants appeared to enjoy themselves and said they got something out of it. It was great to be around the real players in this space. There was some excellent discussion around what the Money ecosystem will look like in a few years time — the value to be gained once connectedness is all pervasive.

 

Check out the video from the panel below.

0 Comments 0 References Permalink

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