In order to secure the best possible venue for the Office 2.0 Conference, we have decided to move the event forward by one day. The new and final dates are October 11-12, 2006 (please update your blogs). We received the contracts for the venue and expect to get everything signed by tomorrow. The venue is absolutely stunning. While we were busy sorthing this out, several new speakers and sponsors decided to join the party.

First, we’re pleased to announce that Rajen Sheth, lead Product Manager across Google’s enterprise collaboration products — including Gmail, Calendar, Writely, etc. — will participate in the event as a speaker. Many thanks to Rod Boothby for the original introduction that eventually lead to this.

Second, we have good reasons to believe that we should also be joined by someone from the Office team at Microsoft. Rod Boothby and Tim O’Reilly made fantastic introductions there, and discussions are taking a very nice turn. More on these exciting developments very soon.

Third, joining this august panel will be Anil Dash, Vice President, Evangelism at Six Apart, Joe Kraus, CEO at JotSpot, Matt Marshall, Columnist at The Mercury News, Marc Orchant, Vice President of Marketing at Foldera, John Roberts, CEO at SugarCRM, and Dylan Schiemann, CEO at SitePen.

On the sponsor side, we are now supported by 83 Degrees — the folks behind the excellent 30 Boxes calendar, Foldera, Joyent, and System One, coming all the way from Austria. Some of them will complement the current Office 2.0 setup used to organize the conference. In particular, all participants to the conference have been invited to join the office20.collectivex.com group, which will be used to hold discussions, share documents, and facilitate introductions.

On the media side, we signed our partnership with LEWIS PR, and are expecting excellent coverage from the traditional media as a result. This will nicely complement our partnership with CNET, and the work being done by the 50+ bloggers who are currently registered to the conference. If you would like to promote the event on your blog or website, please use one of these banners.

Early bird registration ends in less than ten days. After September 1st, the participant fee goes from $395 to $595. And we will have to limit the number of registrations to 200 anyway. So make sure to register as soon as possible if you want to secure your spot at the conference.

Thank you again for your help.