I attended the first day of the SSWUG Virtual Conference this week and I was pleasantly surprised. In a previous blog entry I had mentioned that I would be attending both this virtual conference on the web and the SQL PASS conference in Seattle in November. Here I will review the online version and will report on Seattle later. Let’s take a look…
First of all, signing in was easy. An email was sent the day before and the morning of the conference with links to test your system and to attend the conference itself. We were warned to sign in 20 minutes in advance which is always a good idea for live webcasts. I first entered the Conference Lobby which gave an overview of the conference as a whole. Then I entered the Exhibition Lobby which had various vendor “booths” to market third party products including the Idera SQL tools. I then ventured into the Sessions lobby which prompted me to select from the 4 simultaneous conferences occurring at the same time (these were originally supposed to happen at separate dates but were later combined together, presumably for economies of scale). I had signed up for the Business Intelligence sessions originally and the Sessions lobby let me know that I had not purchased the sessions for SQL Server, .NET and Sharepoint but would allow me to register (and presume pay) for those extra sessions. Maybe I misunderstood, but when Steve Wynkoop told us we would have access to all four conferences running concurrently, I did not realize I would have to register and pay 4 times. Being thrifty I stuck with my original single registration.
Entering the Business Intelligence lobby, there appeared 3 session rooms A, B and C with an image of three escalators to take you into these rooms. I chose Room B for “SSAS 101 Part I” with Scot Reagin. The quality of the video was very good, as was the sound. Scot did a good job with a calm controlled delivery. Demonstrations were effective and clear for the most part. (Sometimes the focus would be off slightly during a demo but would soon come back – someone was paying attention to this thankfully). The subject matter was good, although as a BI instructor myself, it was more useful for picking up effective explanations and demos that I can use with my students, than for learning something new technically. The chat rooms were open during the sessions, one for each room. There seemed more chat about getting the audio/video to work well than on Business Intelligence questions. By the later sessions, people were getting used to this and some valid questions appeared and were answered by the instructors. I could also access the other conference chat rooms even though I had not registered for them. For each session, you could download the slides and transcript. There were also buttons to download scripts and database files but they were inactive for the sessions I attended. The OnDemand Video feature allowed you to view sessions at the end of the day, with each attendee limited to two extra viewings per session. I noticed this when I started one, then realized I had already seen it live, stopped it and bingo, I was down to “1 viewing remaining”. This is fair, I suppose. It is a nice feature of the virtual conference.
Later
Brian
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