At IT|Redux, we like to eat our own dog food, and when time comes to work on the next edition of the Office 2.0 Conference, we put together a complete setup made of various online applications that we use to do pretty much everything. Here is a sample of what we have been using so far.
Most of last year's conference was put together by a very small group of people with lots of goodwill and some free time available. This time around, we felt that we needed a real staff to help us organize a professional event. This created the requirement for a proper time tracking system that we could use for billing purposes. After reviewing a dozen options, we selected 14Dayz for its simple user interface and its ability to manage multiple contractors working on many projects.
For the conference's website, we looked for a solution that would make it easy for multiple people to develop content without having to worry too much about presentation. We also wanted to offer an engaging interface for supporting collaboration among participants, with the ability to share documents and conduct polls, all integrated through an easy-to-maintain application. The best solution we found is Clearspace, developed by Jive Software.
In order to stay in touch with past attendees and sponsors, we publish a newsletter using Constant Contact. It gives us the ability to send our newsletter to more than 250 people at once (limit currently imposed by Salesforce.com), while automating the opt-out process. It's email wizard is certainly one of the most effective editor for designing professional looking emails that contain dynamic fields and can be sent in both HTML and plain text formats.
For structured content maintained by a limited set of contributors and published on the conference's website, we are using the Dabble DB online database. It sports a highly intuitive user interface, and supports the syndication of database records through JSON feeds, making it very easy to embed content onto third-party websites. It also provide a fantastic geographic map generator that we will use to show the set of countries represented at the conference. Last year, we had 15 of them.
If you include sponsorship agreements signed with sponsors and statements of work signed with service providers, about 100 contracts have to be signed by the multiple parties involved with the conference's organization. In order to make it paper free and reduce time-to-close, we are using the excellent EchoSign electronic document signing solution. The workflow we used last year has been described in this past article, and will remain pretty much the same this year. Yesterday, I even signed a contract directly from my iPhone.
During the conference, all attendees use the same WiFi capable handheld device to connect to the Internet and get access to a host of applications and services enabling mobile and real-time collaboration. These applications are developed using the Etelos platform, and are used to support real-time surveys during sessions, secure exchange of contact information among participants, and many other use cases to be experimented for the very first time at the conference.
For attendee registrations, we are using the most excellent - and free - Event Wax service developed by Vivabit. It supports the creation of complex tickets with promo codes, deadlines, and limited quantities. It is integrated with PayPal, allowing payments by credit card or electronic check, and provides clean reports and data exports for integration with a separate CRM system. Registration forms can be served directly by the application, or embedded within the conference's website.
Networking before, during, and after the conference is one of the primary objectives for the event. For this purpose, we have created a public Office 2.0 Group on Facebook, complemented by an Office 2.0 Conference event opened to all attendees. We also use Facebook to support collaboration among track directors in order to define the content of sessions and select speakers. The recent integration of Zoho with Facebook allows us to share documents, spreadsheets, presentations and databases, without having to log into any other application. Single sign-on that finally works!
Once or twice a week, the conference's organizers coordinate their efforts with the track directors through conference calls. For these, we are using Gaboogie, a new service that calls participants directly instead of having them dial in to a specific number and remember the access code. The application has a very clean interface for adding participants and managing recurring calls. Furthermore, calls can be recorded, making it easier to catch up for anyone who could not join a call.
For email, we are using Gmail with a Google Apps account, which allows us to use our own domain name. Each account gets 10GB of storage, which is enough for storing five years worth of emails at the rate we are currently using it. Unfortunately, Gmail support on the iPhone is fairly brittle today, so we are forwarding all incoming emails to a .Mac account used as a gateway. Nevertheless, we expect this situation to improve in the no so distant future.
When looking for potential speakers and sponsors, we need to get in touch with people who have never heard about us nor the conference, and getting a direct introduction through LinkedIn can make things a lot easier. Even though Facebook is a much more promising platform for social networking, LinkedIn has a richer base of business users. Nevertheless, LinkedIn's reluctance to provide an API that would have allowed integration with Salesforce.com significantly limits the set of scenarios that can be supported, thereby reduces the usefulness of an otherwise amazing network.
For brainstorming, some people like to use a mind mapping tool, and one of the best online implementations is
MindMeister, developed by Codemart in Germany. The tool has a superb user interface, which is the reason why Codemart recently received the Best User Centered Design Company award delivered by Hasso Plattner Ventures. We use it for gathering ideas early on, then create the actionable tasks that will turn vision into execution. Such tasks are then recorded into Salesforce.com for project management purposes. Now I just wish the two were integrated together...
From a business prospective, a conference organizer has to deal with two very different kinds of customers: attendees and sponsors. While the promotion of the conference to potential attendees is a relatively simple process that can be easily managed with a blog and a newsletter, the signing of sponsors requires a more sophisticated sales process involving multiple people. Implementing such a process with a CRM solution is not a bad idea, and Salesforce.com is one of the best options currently available. We are using Salesforce.com to manage all our accounts and contacts, sales opportunities, contracts, and calendars. We customized it to support the management of referral fees for registrations and sponsorships brought by affiliates, and recently built a simple application for managing accounts receivable and accounts payable.
For structured content maintained by a large set of contributors and published on the conference's website, we are using the Smartsheet.com online database. It works pretty much like Dabble DB, but allows content to be shared at the row level. This lets us implement very efficient workflow processes for managing public information related to speakers and sponsors. For example, when a new speaker is added to our list, we record her contact information and biography onto a new row stored into a Smartsheet.com document, then share the row with the speaker, letting her modify the information directly at any time in the future. We are currently working with the good folks at Smartsheet.com to add JSON syndication capabilities to their application, in order to support the publishing of content onto the conference's website.
For documents that have multiple page and need specific formatting such as sponsorship contracts and statements of work, we are using the ThinkFree Write online word processor. Similarly, our complex spreadsheets are built using ThinkFree Calc, and our presentations are designed using ThinkFree Show. This allows us to support standard .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats, through a user interface that is a carbon copy of the one sported by Microsoft Office 2003, thereby improving the learning curve for our contractors.
In order to open up the event to as large an audience as possible, we are recording all the sessions with professional video equipment and broadcasting live video feeds using the amazing Veodia service. Based on the MPEG-4 / h.264 technology, Veodia supports the creation of TV-quality video feeds from a simple web browser and their distribution to virtually any device - including Apple's iPhone and iPod - without having to purchase any expensive hardware or software.
For the development of the conference in partnership with the bloggers community, we are using the trustworthy WordPress blogging platform. It has been serving us well since 2005, and no other tool can match its customizability and extensibility. We also use it to power the Office 2.0 Database, using a design contributed earlier this year by Brian and Tim Benzinger of SolutionWatch fame.
Last but not least, we are using the Zoho suite of applications for addressing a list of needs that is simply too long to describe here. Thanks to its open API and its integration with Facebook, Zoho is the very best solution for large groups of people that are not part of the same company. Zoho Meeting is a great alternative to much more expensive web conferencing solutions, Zoho Writer is an easy-to-use word processor for documents that do not need to be printed, and Zoho Notebook is an incredibly powerful way of putting together content coming from many different sources. Better yet, Zoho provides single sign-on capabilities across all these tools, making it the most complete integrated Office 2.0 suite currently available on the market.
link to original post