The conference's schedule is now online. The content of each panel will be developed on the conference's Socialtext Wiki, currently open to speakers only, and to be made available to the public early next week. Speakers, attendees, and anyone interested to participate online will be invited to submit topics for discussion, questions to be answered, and desired follow-up actions. Panel moderators will then use these contributions to run what should be highly-participative discussions.

Our first press release is out! We only have 75 passes left. Please register today if you have not already.

Demo pods at the conference will be equipped with Apple 24-inch iMac Core 2 Duo computers. 10 to 15 of them will be available for puchase at 25% off retail price ($1,499 instead of $1,999, plus taxes) immediately after the conference. If you want to get one, please see offer details there.

Hotel reservation at the St. Regis is now open. Book your room now.

52 confirmed speakers. 115 registered participants. 24 sponsors. It looks like we're on track. And this is even before we issued a first press release. Blogs can be pretty effective marketing tools nowadays it seems. So, without further ado, here is an update on the Office 2.0 Conference.

On the registration side, we've got good news and bad news. Good news: we received plenty of them. Bad news, we've got so many that we won't be able to extend the early bird registration period. September 1st will be the last day to benefit from the $395 early bird special. After that, the registration price is $595. So if you want to save a cool $200, make sure to register now.

On the sponsor side, we're proud to be joined by ThinkFree, which has one of the most complete Office 2.0 productivity suites currently available. Also, Coghead has decided to use the event has launch pad for their product. This makes me pretty happy, because I wrote about this company six months ago, and I was really eager to know what they were up to. It looks like the wait should be well worth it: if you want to know what BPM on demand should look like, look no further, for my friend Greg Olsen has it all figured out.

For managing the marketing of the event, we joined forces with SugarCRM and will use their on-demand deployment option. Our account will be activated tomorrow, and we will upload all our data for participants, speakers and sponsors. Blogtronix will demonstrate their corporate blogging solution, and Socialtext will provide the conference's Wiki, which we will launch next week and will use to collectively refine the content for each panel. Also, Netvibes will be used as virtual desktop on all demo pods. Many thanks to Jeff Clavier for this one.

Over the past seven days, we received more and more pressing requests for an Enterprise 2.0 track to be developed throughout the conference. Our Editorial Board, which is made of members of the illustrious Enterprise Irregulars group, took this advice to heart and started inviting companies that have interesting things to say on the subject. As a result, ActiveGrid and BEA decided to join us as sponsors. Now, all we need to do is make sure that the super-stealth and ultra-cool Abgenial uses the event as launch pad as well. With Oren Michel's Mashery added to the mix, we should have a pretty good overview for the state-of-the-art technologies that are available today for enterprise mashups. And if yet another 2.0 meme is confusing you, just memorize this simple equation:

On the speaker side, we added biographies and pictures for all 52 speakers and panelists, which now include Michael Arrington, Editor of TechCrunch, Jeff Benrey, CEO of Trovix, Stowe Boyd, Managing Director of A Working Model, Kevin Hale, Co-Founder of Wufoo, J.B. Holston, CEO of NewsGator, Robin Hopper, CEO of iUpload, TJ Kang, CEO of ThinkFree, Paul Kedrosky, Venture Partner at Ventures West Management, Tariq Krim, CEO of Netvibes, Michael McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks, Vassil Mladjov, CEO of Blogtronix, Craig Remy, CMO of Intacct, Peter Rip, Partner at Leapfrog Ventures, Paul Wiefels, Managing Director of The Chasm Group, and Peter Yared, CEO of ActiveGrid.

Regarding the final program for the conference, our Editorial Board will meet tomorrow evening at Socialtext's headquarters in Palo Alto and dispatch speakers and panelist across keynotes and panels, for both plenary and breakout sessions. The schedule will be published on Friday this week, or Monday next week at the latest, using the excellent 30 Boxes calendaring service. If you're a speaker and do not like the spot you will be granted, please do not complain to me, for I won't be directly responsible for it. The Editorial Board is. Only problem: it does not have an email address, and I do not have any desire to create one at this point. So I really hope you'll like the spot these guys will give you. Really.

From a logistics standpoint, the promotion code for the  St. Regis Hotel should be communicated very soon now. If you think it's long overdue, you're absolutely right. All I can say is that Starwood would certainly benefit from a good injection of Office 2.0 productivity. If you know anyone there, please make sure to send them an invite to the conference.

Last but not least, all demo equipments for sponsors will be purchased before the conference. We're talking about 20 complete setups made of a cute Apple Mac mini, a 20-inch Apple Cinema Displays, a keyboard, and a mouse. We will sell 10 of them for 25% off retail price immediately after the conference. If you want to buy one or two, just drop me a line, and I'll put them aside for you, all neatly packaged in their orignal boxes.

The venue for the event has now been secured: St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco.

In order to secure the best possible venue for the Office 2.0 Conference, we have decided to move the event forward by one day. The new and final dates are October 11-12, 2006 (please update your blogs). We received the contracts for the venue and expect to get everything signed today. The venue is absolutely stunning, and should be announced either today or tomorrow. While we were busy sorthing this out, several new speakers and sponsors decided to join the party.

First, we're pleased to announce that Rajen Sheth, lead Product Manager across Google's enterprise collaboration products - including Gmail, Calendar, Writely, etc. - will participate in the event as a speaker. Many thanks to Rod Boothby for the original introduction that eventually lead to this.

Second, we have good reasons to believe that we should also be joined by someone from the Office team at Microsoft. Rod Boothby and Tim O'Reilly made fantastic introductions there, and discussions are taking a very nice turn. More on these exciting developments very soon.

Third, joining this august panel will be Anil Dash, Vice President, Evangelism at Six Apart, Joe Kraus, CEO at JotSpot, Matt Marshall, Columnist at The Mercury News, Marc Orchant, Vice President of Marketing at Foldera, John Roberts, CEO at SugarCRM, and Dylan Schiemann, CEO at SitePen.

On the sponsor side, we are now supported by 83 Degrees - the folks behind the excellent 30 Boxes calendar, Foldera, Joyent, and System One, coming all the way from Austria. Some of them will complement the current Office 2.0 setup used to organize the conference. In particular, all participants to the conference have been invited to join the office20.collectivex.com group, which will be used to hold discussions, share documents, and facilitate introductions.

On the media side, we signed our partnership with LEWIS PR, and are expecting excellent coverage from the traditional media as a result. This will nicely complement our partnership with CNET, and the work being done by the 50+ bloggers who are currently registered to the conference. If you would like to promote the event on your blog or website, please use one of these banners.

Early bird registration ends in less than ten days. After September 1st, the participant fee goes from $395 to $595. And we will have to limit the number of registrations to 200 anyway. So make sure to register as soon as possible if you want to secure your spot at the conference.

Thank you again for your help.

Welcome to this blog dedicated to the first Office 2.0 Conference. It will take over this thread from the IT|Redux blog, where the conference was initiated originally. Please make sure to register to its RSS feed in order to get regular updates on the event. We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco on October 11-12, for what is turning into a major event for Office 2.0.