I’ve had this post in the buffer for about two weeks; I wanted to let the euphoria of the social aspects of hanging out with my friends/peers/partners wash off so I can give you an objective view of just what went down, the good, the bad and the ugly. In terms of disclosure, my company Own Web Now Corp was a sponsor of the conference, I presented there and was involved in some pre-conference discussions but was not compensated for it. Nor for this review, for what its worth.
Define “Valuable.”
For me, every conference has a value that can be summed up in two ways – I either got a tangible income from it or I saved me time. If I got paid for speaking, if I sold a service, if I found a partner in XYZ city that gives me local presence with a client – money in the pocket. The flip side of that is time savings – I obviously do not work in the eBay PowerSeller / printer cartridge swapping business; I run a very high tech business and need to stay on top of the latest technology, something that requires classes, lectures, training, books, webcasts, virtual labs, executive luncheons – so if a conference gives me all that in one sitting it’s valuable. Get both of those components and it becomes spectacular!
Let’s face it, time is money. You’re either saving me money or you’re saving my time – or you’ll never see me or my wallet again. Pretty simple, right?
SBS Migration ITPRO Conference
I had no idea what to expect. When Jeff first pitched the idea to me he first told me about the SBS cruise ship followed by “I just want to throw a community conference, I don’t see at this as a commercial venture so this can happen without vendors.” Naturally, I expected to show up in New Orleans and watch a giant SBS group meeting.
It wasn’t that.
The conference happened over the course of two days, both during the weekend as to impact the work-week the least. I have to congratulate McLennan, SBS MVP for running the entire operation like a Swiss watch store clerk. Everything in terms of presenting and festivities was controlled down to the smallest details, felt like a wedding – for the first-time conference the execution and organization was almost perfect. That in itself is likely what made the show go on and make it a worth-while investment of my time.
Presentation content was fresh, for the most part. What was particularly interesting was the exchange that went on back and forth between the podium and the audience. It wasn’t just “You should do this” but every now and then the audience would ask “How? Who do you use? Who do you recommend? How do you do this? What type of hardware do you use this?” As we all know, the devil is in the details. The details were very worth-while. What made the entire trip worth it was the Sunday “Disaster Recovery” presentation marathon where over the course of the five hours or so you could see how people prepare and execute a disaster recovery plan. Not just disaster recovery as in “Too bad your stuff blew up, here is what you should have done” but more of the “Things to plan, things to do, things to follow up with!”
What made the conference absolutely phenomenal isn’t a single presentation, single person, single speach. It was the overall sense of what I need to focus on that was more clearly defined by being surrounded by people, presentations, lectures and idea exchange. How do I quantify that? On the flight back home I wrote five pages of talking points, agenda items and research leads that will affect our 3–5 year plan.
Size matters.
What put this conference over the top was the relative size. There were maybe 150 people in the audience, give or take depending on the session, time, day, vendors, family members, etc. What this basically means is that you can easily find the person that said something that interested you and you could go follow up with them. “Chad, what do you mean SharePoint 2.0 restoration is not bullet proof?” Got a business question? Technical question? Poll? Hardware recommendation?
This is what made it for me. We’re all geeks, we talk about geek things. We also talk about how those things make us successful, lets face it, everyone there was successful enough to take the Memorial Day weekend out of town – so on that logic alone it might follow that they might know more than your local “Can I have a tshirt” SBSer.
The Challenge.
Perhaps I’m alone at this, but I can deal with the intensity. Pack even more stuff in the space of two days, show me everything I may need to know about even if I don’t care. The stuff I care about I’ll follow up on and research, I’d rather be over informed than ignorant. The challenge of course becomes whether the people that are next to me, that are on my level, keep on coming back. If the people in the audience keep on having the same problems I have – staffing, training, billing, policy management, business goals and decisions – I’ll be back as well. This is a huge challenge for the conference organizer. On one hand, you risk the fact that the more resourceful/trained an individual becomes, the less they need you – plus you lose that sweet sponsor money because vendors don’t want to keep on selling stuff to the same audience that either already bought their product or isn’t going to buy it no matter what. On the other hand, if you focus the conference on entry level 100 slide-o-rama you lose your community following and people start ignoring you as irrelevant, or worse, a sellout vendor whore.
From what I know about Jeff, I know he will keep it close to the interests of the community and the leaders in this field. Why? That’s just the kind of a guy he is, and if you saw his closing speech you’d know that the driving value of t/his effort isn’t commercial. Jeff is a very good and smart guy, the way 1.0 went off I wouldn’t be surprised if the conference easily doubled to twice its size next year. Like SMBTN conference in the spring, this event was worth-while to a lot of us that have been in the business for years, that need some more sophisticated in-depth presentations but most of all need a good networking atmosphere so we can share and solve our issues with the help of our peers. That’s what SBS Migration conference did for me, and for OWN. Worth the money? Absolutely. Do I feel good about sponsoring it? Absolutely. Do I feel like I’ve mislead anyone by talking up the conference in my Vladcast podcasts? Not at all.
I’ll be back next year.
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