The entire Office 2.0 Conference is managed using online tools exclusively. This eat-your-own-dog-food approach allows us to see what works, and what does not. We learn quite a bit from these experiments, and share our fidings with vendors. Most of the time, they listen, and improve their products based on our feedback.
First, let's talk about what works: we've been using Jive Software's Clearspace 2.5 for about a week now, and I must say that we love it! Using this great piece of software, we managed to build an entire community website over a week-end, and are already starting to get some nice contributions from attendees and speakers alike.
Second, let's see what does not work, or could work better. Clearspace lets us create Word-like documents, but does not have native support for spreadsheets (beyond simple HTML tables). For some documents, such as a media list with the names, emails, companies, and websites of media attendees, a spreadsheet is what we need.
We could build one using Google Docs, save it as a .csv file, and attach the file to a Clearspace document, but it would require many extra steps every time we would add a new entry to the spreadsheet. Another option would consist in sharing the spreadsheet with all our sponsors, but this would essentially require that we update two databases whenever we sign a new sponsor: the Clearspace user database where we add new sponsors to a Public Relations group, and the Google Docs database where we would specify who the document is shared with. Neither solutions are satisfactory.
In a perfect world, Clearspace would be integrated with Google Docs, and would allow the creation of Google documents directly from a Clearspace community. Whenever such a document would be created, it would be automatically shared with all Clearspace users having access to it. I do not know whether Google Docs' API is complete enough to support such an integration scenario, but I'll make sure to ask at the conference.
In the meantime, our best option might be to store all media attendees in our Salesforce.com instance, and publish this content on our Clearspace community website. This would require the development of a custom piece of Java code to deal with the authentication process, but it would allow us to keep everything is sync, with no unnecessary manual steps. Good news: Clearspace makes it very easy to build such custom components. Bad (or good) news: Java developers won't be out of a job for quite some time...
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