With only a few weeks until The Office 2.0 conference E20portal.com arranged a chat with the organiser Ismael Ghalimi to find out more about this years event. Oliver Marks, the ZDNet writer attended the last two Office2.0's and describes the event as a "collective experiment" and a "fascinating cutting edge experience".  The conference focuses on collaboration, mobility and productivity. CNET posted a list of the themes and vendors from last year’s event.

Dan Farber from ZDnet called the event "work 2.0" saying its about "changing the way people work, especially with collaboration technology as a foundation, beyond having a group of people in different locations and sharing documents."

Who is the Office 2.0 conference target audience? 

The maximum of 600 attendees are spilt into a mix of industry people including vendors; speakers; old and new media.  There are 250 places for end users from small to large enterprises at VP level.

How is the Office2.0 concept moving into the Enterprise?

It is slow in terms of large numbers, however those which do it, do it big and really see huge benefits. GE has implemented Office 2.0 on a large scale and are presenting their experiences at the conference. 

How has the Office2.0 experiment changed over the last three years and what have you learnt?

The first Office 2.0 was an accident and the second was about end user adoption. This year’s event is about maturity and how Office2.0 works in enterprises. We have learnt there is confusion out there in the market. Our own experiences have shown a lack of integration between tools. We are using Salesforce.com for everything where possible because we need a single task list as part of the Getting Things Done approach.

You said on your website this years Office 2.0 will have "a bit more users, a bit less vendors, a bit more fireside chats, a bit less panels"

We have decided to be more selective with the speakers by reducing the speaking slots by half, even though we have over 200 submissions. This year we are also using the enterprise vendor’s internal experiences of Office 2.0 as user cases.

Which sessions are you most looking forward too?

The opening Getting Things Done chat with our keynote speaker David Allen. The project management panel because this is such a new developing area with more integrated task management. The GE user case session and the un-conference session with David Coleman.
 

What do you see as the conference of the future?

Branding at conferences will be much more than having big conference booths. There will be more involvement of panellist moderators. Social networking will be available before, during and after the event using tools such as Jive’s Clearspace. Attendees will use internet tablets. The back channel's will be projected for everyone to see and remote attendees will be given a good experience.

A ticket reduction is available here

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed