The Office 2.0 Conference now has its own website, thanks to the support of Ivaylo Lenkov at SiteKreator. Please use this registration page to benefit from our early bird special, and check our updated list of speakers.

The website is available at: www.office20con.com

The story behind this website is actually quite amazing. I first met Ivaylo three months ago, following an introduction made by Vladimir Miloushev, CEO of 3TERA. He gave me a nice demonstration for SiteKreator, a very powerful website creation application entirely built with AJAX. I told him that I was thinking about organizing a conference for Office 2.0, and we agreed that we would keep each others updated on our respective endeavors.

Two weeks later, I received an email from Ivaylo, with a link to office20con.com. He had purchased the domain name, pulled various pieces of content from the IT|Redux blog, and built an entire website using his tool, in less than a couple hours. At first, I was a little bit surprised, and just answered that I would take a look at it. In reality, I was not even sure that the conference would even take place. So I left the website there, and did not advertise it.

As things started to take shape, I came back to it, played with the tool, and quickly became amazed by how powerful it was, and how good a job Ivaylo had done developing it — put aside the inclusion of a terrible picture of myself on the home page that broke every single aesthetics rule I live by. I removed the picture, fixed a couple of things here and there, and that was it: our website was done, up and running, all for free.

I will provide a more detailed review for SiteKreator in a later post. In the meantime, I am pleased to include them in our list of sponsors for the conference. Also, I just received confirmation that Kaliya Hamlin, author of Identity Woman, and freelance evangeslist for open standards in user-centric identity (OpenID2, i-names, XRI/XDI, SAML, icards, Higgins) will join the conference as a speaker. Many thanks to Jeff Clavier for the introduction. Kaliya’s participation should help us understand if there is a chance that we could get single sign-on for Office 2.0 in our lifetimes.

Also, Jeffrey McManus, CEO of Approver, will join a panel that will focus on new workflow processes made possible by the combination of multiple communication protocols, such as HTTP, SMTP and Fax. EchoSign, Zoho, and a couple other companies will be part of the panel as well. I am still trying to convince a couple of speakers who could extend the panel with demos of BPM 2.0 + Office 2.0 mashups. If you know good candidates, please let me know.

Last but not least, many thanks to Vladimir for the introduction to Ivaylo!