There are only 3 conferences I make a point of going to each year if I can: Convio Summit, Salesforce Dreamforce and NTEN NTC.

Wouldn’t you know that this year, Convio Summit and Dreamforce were the same week? Originally, I was only going to go to Dreamforce. Not to say that the Convio conference isn’t excellent. I just feel more connected to the Salesforce nonprofit user community. And let’s just say that Marc Benioff knows how to put on a show. At least next year, Convio Summit will be in Baltimore in October, while Dreamforce will be in December in San Francisco.

Convio invited me to present at a Common Ground session at their Summit and made it possible for me to do both conferences. I flew out to Austin, Texas on Monday afternoon. I was honored that C3 received a notable mention in the CRM/Common Ground category at Convio’s Innovator Awards on Monday night. I prefer to call it the, “what you can do with Common Ground when you have a small staff and no budget for custom development” award. 🙂

I presented in a panel with Astadia’s Jerry Huskins and Convio’s Tompkins Spann on Tuesday morning. The focus of the session was the wide and wonderful world of the Force.com platform beyond Common Ground. We live-demo’ed how easy it is to install an app off the appexchange, and I showed some real-life use cases for some of the applications and integrations that C3 uses.

It was wonderful to finally meet the great folks on the Convio Common Ground team that I hadn’t already met. I’ve said it before: they’re taking this very seriously. This is no side project. I have no regrets whatsoever for making the switch. I enjoyed talking to people who approached me who were either on the fence about Common Ground or just beginning to roll it out.

I arrived in San Francisco late last night, only to find that I had been bumped from my hotel. “Despite your confirmed reservation, you were the last guest to arrive and you have been eliminated.” They put me in a cab at 11 pm to Villa Florence on Powell Street. Okay location but the room is freezing (circa 1980s wall unit air conditioner is making noise and blowing cold air but it’s set to “off” and at the warmest setting), the wifi sucks, it has no windows and I have to climb over the double bed to get to the bathroom. Welcome to San Francisco.

I hope to post more about Dreamforce later this week. I don’t know for sure what will be announced later this morning, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of “Pro” offering for Twitter powered by Salesforce, along with better integration of Twitter into the Salesforce UI. Which is good, because I find the current Salesforce/Twitter offering to be a bit ho-hum.

If you’re in town for Dreamforce and would like to say hi, drop me a note on Twitter.