Organizing a conference is a little bit like staging fireworks: it’s a lot of tedious work for a short yet memorable experience, all the more so as you get to share it with a lot of people. The Office 2.0 Conference is not different, but some people get to do most of the tedious work, without enjoying much of the spectacle in the end. So is the case for my better half May, and I thought that she deserved a little bit of credit. Here is what she is working on in the background.

First, if you get an iPhone or a PlayStation 3 in the mail, May is the one to thank beside Steve Jobs or Ken Kutaragi. Apple Computer would not let us order 400 to 500 iPhones all in one shot, therefore we have to order them one by one as people register to the conference. Knowing that such a process could quickly become a nightmare without the proper back-office infrastructure, we worked with Coghead (powered by Intalio) to develop an application that would automate critical parts of the process. The application went live two weeks ago, and we started shipping iPhones last week. We expect to be done with them toward the end of this week.

Some folks have started to receive their iPhones, and we are collecting their first impressions on this page powered by Clearspace. Eric from Etelos loves it, Derek’s wife has serious envy, and Steve thinks it’s the best swag ever. I would expect a lot more feedback to be posted over the coming days, and I cannot wait to hear what people have to say about the applications that have been developed for it by Etelos. Our friend Don Campbell gave a preview on the Etelos blog, but the real deal is a lot more impressive. If you have not received your iPhone yet, just be patient, for it’s most likely in the mail, and you should receive it very soon now.

Another thing May is doing is going over every registration and checking that they are correct, then entering everything into our Salesforce.com instance. This year, we are using the Event Wax registration system, which works pretty well, but is not integrated with our favorite CRM application. Next year, we will most likely opt for RegOnline, which seems to address this issue nicely.

Yet another task handled by May is all the accounting, managing invoices sent to some sponsors, account payables, and account receivables. While EchoSign is making it easy to get the deal closed, getting cash afterwards remains an issue, and nothing seems to be fixing it all at once, so a lot of work has to be done manually. At this point, I hope that the good folks at Salesforce.com are busy integrating Koral and a good online word processor. If they are not, they are missing on a massive opportunity as far as I can tell.

Talking about Salesforce.com, I am pleased to report that we finally convinced them to send a speaker at the conference. While we understood that having Dreamforce taking place just a week after our event did not make it very easy for them to get involved in any significant way, we just could not accept the idea that our conference would not receive their participation at all. After much lobbying, we secured the participation of Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing, on the New Platforms panel to be moderated by Rafe Needleman from Webware. Welcome aboard Adam!

So here we are, with less than ten days to go, having just released our final agenda. By the look of it, this conference should be quite special again. If you liked the first edition last year, you’re going to love the second one. Not only the WiFi network should work this time around, but it will connect a whole bunch of devices that will make your head spin, all working with some incredible applications that you had no idea could run inside a web browser. If you’re not registered already, just do it now, or be sorry later.

Note to May: Thank you so much for your help. I love you!