The second Office 2.0 Conference is just over, and it’s time for a debrief. Overall, it was a success, and we received some amazing feedback about it. Attendees had a blast, sponsors got lots of traffic, and the press covered it extensively. Awesome! Now let’s review what worked, what could have been improved, and what failed miserably, in order to make next year’s show even better.

The Good

Participation
The second edition of the conference was marked by a significant increase in terms of attendee and sponsor participation. From an attendee standpoint, we went from 350 actual attendees to over 600, with a total of 625 registrations and less than 25 people not showing up. From a sponsor standpoint, we went from 46 sponsors to 64, which is pretty much the maximum we could deal with based on the size of the venue. Next year, we will shoot for 750 attendees, but cap the number of sponsors to 40, in order to increase the value we deliver to each sponsor.

iPhone Applications by Etelos
We gave Etelos two weeks to build a set of applications for the iPhone, and in the alloted time they pretty much re-invented the way people can interact with each other at conferences. If there was any need to prove that Etelos can help you build the coolest applications in no time, here it is. Many thanks to Danny and his team for their support. We very much look forward to working with you again next year, developing even cooler applications.

Website by Jive Software
Last year, we used the excellent SiteKreator for the conference’s website. This year, we went with Clearspace from Jive Software, and absolutely loved it! We got lots of help from the good folks at Jive (many thanks to Sam and Barry in particular), who built a very clean stylesheet for us and helped us understand how the whole thing works. As mentioned in this past article, we used only a subset of the features offered by Clearspace, but the little we saw convinced us that we found the right tool for the job. We were especially impressed by the built-in search engine, the advanced versioning capabilities, and the fine grain permission management. Perfect!

Live Broadcast by Veodia
This year, all sessions have been recorded in video and broadcast live on the Internet in DVD quality by Veodia. The archives are now available there. The whole thing worked so well that my friend Steve Hargadon watched the opening panel in his car with his laptop on the passenger seat while being stuck in traffic. The Veodia application is truly amazing, and the video crew we hired totally professional (thanks Jen). Next year, we’ll pretty much do the same, and we might even compile the best shots into a DVD if we manage to find some time for it.

WiFi by Covad and Swisscom
The one thing that people complained about last year was the poor quality of the WiFi network. This year, we worked with Covad and Swisscom, as explained in this article. Everything went as planned, and 600+ attendees pounding on their iPhones could not bring the network down. Many thanks to Covad for the bandwidth, and congratulations to the Swisscom team for a very impressive piece of work. You will certainly be part of the show next year. Many thanks to Andy Abramson for the introduction to Covad, and to Eric Norlin for the hint on Swisscom.

Demo Pods
The Demo Pods on the second floor worked very well for sponsors. Granted, it made for a pretty noisy area, but it created a sense of excitement that sponsors seem to have liked a lot. Traffic was high, and discussions lively. This thing worked well last year, and worked again this year. Pods on the fourth floor did not get as much traffic, therefore we won’t have any next year, thereby limiting the total number of pods to 45, which means that sponsors will have to register early in order to secure their spots. The new iMac also was a hit, and we sold more than 30 to attendees and sponsors, keeping about 25 for future events. The external 19" flat panel displays used for logos and mounted on arms clamped to the tables worked very well, so we will re-use them next year. The only thing that must be improved is the setup of the Demo Pods themselves, which we will try to complete a day earlier so that sponsors can get ready ahead of time.

Sony PlayStation 3
We used Sony’s powerful gaming machine as a way to display the conference’s agenda on a couple of gorgeous 46" BRAVIA W series TV sets. We should have had a couple more, but they were broken when we received them, and we did not have time to order replacement units. The PS3 was running Firefox on Linux, with a dual boot configuration, displaying in full 1080p resolution. Superb! Support for Flash is in the works, and people interested to replicate our setup can follow these instructions. The PS3 was also a very popular alternative device for attendees who already owned an iPhone, or did not want to subscribe to an AT&T plan, and we gifted over 100 of them. Many thanks to Oliver Marks, R.J. Mical, and Will Barrueto for their help.

Enterprise 2.0 Track and Mobility & Productivity Track
These two tracks were very well attended, and offered a good balance between keynotes and panels. Most speakers showed up (sorry Jeremy), and most sessions were well attended. Many, many, many thanks to Susan Scrupski, Catherine Shinners, and Jevon MacDonald for their help putting the Enterprise 2.0 Track together. The same to Marc Orchant, Brian Solis, and Oliver Starr for the Mobility & Productivity Track. Next year, we will keep these two tracks pretty much as they were this year, but reduce the number of daily sessions per track from 8 to 6 or 7 in order to give people more time to go from one session to the next.

Unconference
Everybody we talked to who attended the Unconference loved it. Next year, we will run it on the day before the conference again, but advertise it earlier, and setup a better system for attendees to suggest discussion topics ahead of time. We will also provide more meeting space, in more rooms. Registration will be free for conference attendees, and kept at a very low cost for others. Many thanks to Kaliya Hamlin and Ross Mayfield for putting it together in an absolute record time.

Staff
We had a lot more staff to help us this year, and this made a huge difference. Next year, we will bring even more, just to make sure that everything goes as smoothly as possible. If you want to organize a conference on your own, just make sure to talk to Birgess Moore at B Line, for her team is absolutely top notch. And if you need help with PR, there is nobody more efficient and nicer to work with that Susan D’Elia and her team at TECHMarket Communications. Also, many thanks to Dale, Ihab, Lorenzo, Sebastien, Teresa, and many others for setting all the Demo Pods up and helping us tear everything down when people had fun celebrating the week-end. We look forward to working with you again next year.

St. Regis Hotel
We loved the St. Regis Hotel last year, and loved it even more this year. The place is small, but it has class, and the staff is amazingly professional. Even though we could grow the conference into a much bigger event by going somewhere else, we will focus on quality versus quantity, using the hotel’s physical limitations as a way to keep the event relatively small. We might go from 600 to 750 attendees next year, but that’s pretty much the maximum the place will ever be able to accommodate, and that’s fine with us. Special thanks to Martina and Reda, whose teams far exceeded our wildest expectations. You rock! Let’s make sure we all have dinner together soon.

Name Tags
We spent a fair amount of time looking for the right name tags, and I am pleased to report that the Fargo DTC550 Card Printer worked beautifully. We now have a way to print clean badges that can embed an RFID chip and a smart chip, and we will make sure to take advantage of it next year. Many thanks to the good folks at ID Zone and pc/nametag who got us all our supplies on time.

The Bad

Registration Process
Our registration process using Event Wax worked better than last year’s, but there still is ample room for improvement. Integration with Salesforce.com is a must have, and some attendees still cannot use PayPal as a payment option. For next year’s event, we will most likely use RegOnline, which worked well for this year’s Unconference, and is nicely integrated with our beloved CRM application. Also, the invitation process on Event Wax is totally broken, and leads people to believe that they are registered just because they accepted your invitation. To be avoided!

iPhone as Attendee Device
We had very high hopes for the iPhone, but while the device delivered on its promise, and the applications developed by Etelos were absolutely stellar, its use as an attendee device was unconvincing at best. We’re still trying to understand what went wrong, but we feel that attendees would have benefited from being able to play with the Etelos applications ahead of time, and that having a significant number of attendees not having an iPhone (about 200 out of 600) made the device less useful for attendee-to-attendee interactions overall. Next year, we will make sure that every single attendee gets the very same device, including the press. We might ask media attendees to return their devices after the conference if they cannot keep it for corporate policy reasons, but we want to make sure that they can take part in the overall experiment. Stay tuned…

Meeting Space
While we had reserved the Vitrine restaurant for private briefings to be scheduled from 3PM to 7PM, it turned out to be a waste of money, and very few attendees took advantage of it. We’re not entirely sure why it did not work, but lack of proper signage must have played a role in it. Next year, we will reduce the number of tracks from four to two, and use the extra meeting rooms as meeting space for attendees. We will rent comfortable sofas, play some lounge music, and let people use the space pretty much the way they want.

Time Management
We did a really bad job keeping sessions to their alloted time this year, and this is not a good thing. Next year, we will make sure that speakers and moderators are properly briefed, display big clocks with flashing red lights when time is running out, and hire retired sergeants from the U.S. Marine Corps to keep everything on track. Almost.

Website for Social Networking
While Clearspace worked very well as a website, its use by attendees as a social networking site was not as prevalent as we would have liked it to be. There are many reasons for it, one being that the site went live too late in the game (our fault), another being that attendees had to register to it, on top of their regular registrations. We will address both issues next year, by having the website go live a full year ahead of time, and by having attendees automatically registered to it when they register for the conference. Simple is beautiful.

Salesforce.com
For two years in a row, the Office 2.0 Conference took place almost at the same time as the Dreamforce conference, making it impossible for Salesforce.com to participate in any meaningful way. This year, we felt lucky to have Adam Gross’ participation in The New Platforms panel, but next year we would really like to have Salesforce.com as an active sponsor, so we will make sure to schedule our event at least a full month apart from theirs. There should be no excuses then.

The Ugly

Demo Tracks
The one thing we’re the most unhappy with this year is the abysmal management of our Demo Tracks. We failed big time on this one. The two rooms did not have the right equipment, demos took too long, and attendees were nowhere to be found, preferring to attend sessions from the two other tracks or to get one-on-one demos from exhibitors. This is bad, and we must apologize to our sponsors for these poor results. Last year, we had a Demo Blitz with 14 presenters, everybody loved it, and people asked for more, so we felt that we would make everybody happy by inviting 72 companies to present on the Demo Tracks. We obviously went overboard, and the whole thing went bust. Next year, we will not have a single demo on our public sessions, and focus on one-on-one demos instead, delivered in two ways: the Demo Pods, which worked very well, and the Demo Room, which will be a large meeting room fitted with tables that can sit 8 or 12 guests, each table having two or four 24" LCD displays that demoers can plug their laptops to. Access to the demo room will be open to all attendees, and sponsors will be able to schedule demos with anyone they want using a new scheduling system. They will also be able to post a recorded demo of their application on the conference’s website ahead of time.

iPhone Shipping
Everybody loved the iPhone, but shipping it turned out to be a total nightmare. Contrary to what many of you thought, we got no discount from Apple Computer, and could not even order the iPhones in bulk. Instead, we had to order them one by one from the online Apple Store. We got a lot of help from Coghead to automate part of the process, as described in this article, and the whole experiment would have failed miserably without their help, but this did not prevent May to have to spend almost three weeks working around the clock to get about 400 iPhones delivered to the right people. Quite frankly, we are a little bit disappointed that we could not get any help from Apple Computer on this front, and might be looking for an alternative supplier down the road. That being said, the Apple Store in Palo Alto did an amazing job at supplying about 100 iPhones at the last minute, and we’re grateful to Bob and his team for their help. And again, we would like to thank the Coghead folks for having built a marvelous application in less than a week — quite simply, they saved the day!

iPhone Activation
Activating the iPhones for attendees who came from abroad also turned out to be pretty challenging. In order to benefit from the pay-as-you-go plan that exists but is not advertised by neither Apple Computer nor AT&T Wireless, we had to let attendees discover how it can be done on their own (following the advice of our lawyers), then let them use our own credit card in order to pay for the activation fee, for the credit card needs to have a billing address in the U.S. for it to be accepted. A complete nightmare, and a lot of wasted time for a lot of people. Again, we would have loved to get some help from Apple Computer on this front, and the lack of it contributed to spoil the pleasure we got to offer a cool iPhone to over 400 people.

Systems of Records
Another big failure this year was the multiplication of our systems of records, especially for attendees. In total, we had four of them, Event Wax for registrations, Salesforce.com for CRM, Coghead for the shipping of iPhones and PlayStations, and Clearspace for the community website. This is 3 too many, and next year we will do everything we can to get only one. We should be able to achieve this goal by using RegOnline integrated with Salesforce.com for registrations, ship a single device to attendees ahead of time, or have it available at the registration desk, and automatically create user accounts into Clearspace using Apex code in Salesforce.com and an API in Clearspace. We might even get some help from our very good friends at Global Logic in order to get this done.

Data Gathering
Even though the good folks at Smarthsheet.com had developed a JSON feed that we could use to syndicate information about speakers and sponsors, we did not have time to put this thing into production, and as a result we had to enter information about sponsors into Clearspace manually, and we did not provide any link form our agenda to the speakers’ profiles. This created all kind of issues, including some outdated information about speakers displayed on the iPhone applications developed by Etelos. Next year, we will put all this information into Dabble DB or Smarthsheet.com, share it at the row level with speakers and sponsors, and syndicate it for display on the conference’s website using JSON feeds. We might even link the whole thing back into Salesforce.com if we find a way to do it.

Scheduling System
One last thing that attendees complained about was the lack of a proper scheduling system. Etelos had offered to develop it for us, but we felt that we did not have enough time to specify it well enough. This was definitely a mistake, and next year we will make sure that attendees can schedule meetings with each other, before, during, and after the conference. The scheduling system we will use for it has not been identified yet, but many options are available, and we will make sure that all the attendee information is fetched from Salesforce.com in order to preserve a single system of records for all attendees.

So here we are, another successful conference under our belt, already dreaming about the next. While it has been a lot of fun to put the first one together in less tahn six weeks and the second one in about two months, it’s getting a little bit old, and we want to make sure that the third one is as professional as it gets. Also, because we’re considering building our own device for the occasion (more on this tomorrow), we’d like to give ourselves a little bit more time next time around. For this purpose, we will open registrations for the third Office 2.0 Conference sometime next week. It should take place in late September or early October, at the St. Regis Hotel again, over three days, Unconference included. See you next year!