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.

While the 2008 edition of the Office 2.0 Conference is still going on, we're already starting to plan for the next one. For the first three editions, we've done everything in less than 2 months, as a way to prove that Office 2.0 tools and the GTD can significantly increase productivity. Today, I think we made our point, and moving forward, we'd like to take the event to the next level, especially with respect to the quality of the online infrastructure we're building to support it. As a result, we decided to give ourselves a full year to organize the 2009 edition. At present time, we're looking at Monday through Wednesday, September 21-23, 2009. Please let us know if you can think of any other event taking place at the same time, or close to it.

This stuff really works! I love it...

Make sure to try it. We want at least one video per participant.

See you online!

It looks like some attendees are finding it difficult to setup their HP 2133 Mini-Note. Quite frankly, I'm not surprised. The device is running Linux, and Linux on the desktop is not really ready for prime time. Also, its default configuration is not fully optimized. The screen resolution is set too low for example. It should be WXGA, at 1280 x 800. If you want help getting your device up and running and connected to the amazing Wi-Fi network deployed for the conference by Swisscom and Covad, join us in the Impressionist at 5PM tonight (Wednesday). I'll give you step by step instructions, unless an expert wants to step up. In which case, I'll continue answering emails and trying to get the agenda heat map uploaded to the site. 2133 expert, anyone?

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.

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.

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

Yesterday, Raju Vegesna (of Zoho fame) asked me whether we'd consider using Zoho Share for sharing all the presentations that will be given during the conference. My answer was: "sure, we'd love to, but only if you support single sign-on with Google Apps." Quite frankly, I was expecting his answer to be either "sorry, we can't do that," or "sure, we'll build it for you." But to my surprise, such an integration is already implemented, as illustrated on this post. That's Zoho magic for you. And if you wonder why a company like Zoho would develop single sign-on with applications developed by their primary competitor, stop wondering: these guys are different, and understand karma better than anyone else. So here we are: we invite all speakers to upload their presentations on Zoho Share once they receive their complimentary office20.com Google Apps account, to be sent later today or tomorrow. I'm loving it... Every bit of it...