SpiceWorld 2014
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820 attendees this year, up slightly from last year. This is the first year in six that the attendance was allowed to go as high as it could rather than being capped by the venue (e.g. it did not sell out.) So this is the organic limit of the conference at the moment. It many ways, I wouldn't want it larger - the event is too short and too "busy" to get to spend enough time with everyone as it is. The more people that attend the harder it gets to spend time with the people who are there.
64 vendors this year, which is great but it keeps you really busy on top of seeing people. SO many vendors to see.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's a tough venue for advanced sessions. And as the event gets larger, the number of more entry level people as a percentage goes up. The intimate group of old timers stays at roughly the same size while the general pool grows.
Not even talking about old timers, but what about a person who was there this year and wants to come next year but to do more advanced topics. The schedule could easily support a couple longer sessions. Not many, certainly, but a couple.
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@JaredBusch said:
Not even talking about old timers, but what about a person who was there this year and wants to come next year but to do more advanced topics. The schedule could easily support a couple longer sessions. Not many, certainly, but a couple.
Not much of the stuff that they cover is material on which you can grow, too much. Any particular topics of which you are thinking?
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I'd like to see some panel sessions that are specifically just Q and A. What if we took 4 of the top VMWare pros, for example, and just let people hammer them with questions?
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Doing a Q&A requires a much higher level of expertise.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Not much of the stuff that they cover is material on which you can grow, too much. Any particular topics of which you are thinking?
In a longer session, better material can be covered. The intro to poweshell session is a great example of a basic session by good presenters.
But on the same token, you could easily go deeper and turn it into a powershell scripting session by skipping the repetitive how do i do X? questions that work well in a basic course. Instead you simply tell people here is what we are going to write a script to do. It uses this command, and you can look up the extras later.
The proceed to go over the logic and flow of script writing.As a (more or less) competent programmer, I do not need this, but I am sure there are plenty of SMB IT guys that would like session like that. Guys that have little to no understanding of script logic. A 40 minute session + QA is not enough for something like this IMO.
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@JaredBusch I totally agree. I feel that the conference focuses very heavily on the entry level. It is hard because it has created a "core" of mostly high level, always returning folks like you and me that have been coming for years and were above the level of the conference the first time that we were there. That group, which is less than one hundred people, are there to see each other, not to attend the conference. For us, it is a networking event.
For the vast majority of people at the conference, any material past the most basic is unusable. They are there to learn mostly how to use a product that often can be used effectively with no training or documentation. It is quite easy to be effective with SW right out of the box with just a few minutes of poking around, common sense and a few quick searches in the community for common issues. Having six or seven hundred of those people at a conference all of whom found SW challenging enough to need additional training and guidance creates a pretty solid base to determine what type and level of sessions can effectively be provided.
Similar to local SpiceCorps events. If you use SW as a base to attract people, it is hard to have the local events take things to a higher level without leaving the base attendees behind.
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This is where the possibility of an ML conference might be really exciting. A smaller conference focused more on the core IT skills and vendors rather than on a base product primarily with everything else being ancillary. That base product creates a lot of attention and focus but also caps the value of the conference from an IT perspective. It's a double edged sword.
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Can the catchphrase be "Bar opens at noon."?
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Keep the ideas of what you would like to see coming. I am watching and reading. We are looking at getting together an ML conference sometime in 2015 but want to make it very affordable so have to look into sponsors etc. as well. But the goal is for it to be for HIGH level IT Pro's and as such with give Vendors a real way to step up and work with us and really dig deep.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Keep the ideas of what you would like to see coming. I am watching and reading. We are looking at getting together an ML conference sometime in 2015 but want to make it very affordable so have to look into sponsors etc. as well. But the goal is for it to be for HIGH level IT Pro's and as such with give Vendors a real way to step up and work with us and really dig deep.
I'll be there!
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I ended up walking out of the VMWare sponsored DR session. It was a few slides of terminology relating to DR, and the rest was VMWare stuff specifically. I was hoping for more of a high-level overview, but alas, I should have known...
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...and thanks for the kind words about our Powershell session! Martin and I love doing it and would enjoy doing a tool building session (like SAM said, a logic flow toward solving a problem).
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@Minion-Queen said:
HIGH level IT Pro's
What's a HIGH level IT Pro?
(You'll probably answer, if you have to ask Carnival Boy then you're probably not one).
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You hit the nail on the head.
At the other conference things are geared towards their market demographic, that is who their users are. Many people are looking for higher level actual training but this is not who they are their to work with. So we hope to offer that but not based around a single product as we are hardware and software agnostic.
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@Rob-Dunn said:
I ended up walking out of the VMWare sponsored DR session. It was a few slides of terminology relating to DR, and the rest was VMWare stuff specifically. I was hoping for more of a high-level overview, but alas, I should have known...
It's a very "sales centric" conference. I've heard of lot of complaints that all of the vendor sessions are nothing but sales pitches.
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@Rob-Dunn said:
...and thanks for the kind words about our Powershell session! Martin and I love doing it and would enjoy doing a tool building session (like SAM said, a logic flow toward solving a problem).
Maybe a higher level session to be delivered at MangoCon?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
What's a HIGH level IT Pro?
I think that in this context it is those who would be interested in learning more, rather than getting hands held on installing an app. The focus of SW is very much on the newbie audience (those that would be unlikely to return more than once.) As opposed to a conference for those that want to build on what they know year over year.
More like where Microsoft, Veeam, VMware and similar conferences are focused.
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I have to confess, I'm not a conference guy. I'm a big fan of YouTube at the moment. I find you can watch really good seminars or training sessions for free from the comfort of your home, versus driving for a couple of hours only to find that the speaker you've signed up to see is actually a bit crap. With YouTube, if you get bored or its not relevant, you just click on something else. Sure, the quality varies massively, but there is some great stuff out there.
I get that conferences are good for networking, but I'm just not great with people so fail to get as much out that side of things as I should.
I mainly go to them for a free trip to London, which I suspect is why most people go. Some boring seminar in the morning, followed by a few hours wandering around the The National Gallery looking at paintings - that's my idea of a good day at work!
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I have to confess, I'm not a conference guy.
I wasn't until I started going to SpiceWorld. I was invited as a speaker or I would have never even attempted going. I had no idea why it would be useful.
Needless to say, I've not missed a SW since and have attended some like Microsoft's Partner World (also as a speaker) and it was really great. Dell World was okay. @Katie just did the GFI conference and thought that it was really good.
