A Tale of Two Conferences

I attended the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas last week and made notes during my stay there comparing the experience with our favorite annual conference experience. Thought some of you might be interested.

Registration
Registration lines not split by alphabet. One huge monster line that snakes around to a person who sends you to a final queue to sign in on a laptop....you enter first and last names and hit confirm... Then stand in line to get to a person who pulls your badge off the laser printer... Tears,folds and stuffs it into your holder. Then you join another equally long line to get to shorter queues to pick up your conference materials and bag. Nice messenger bag with a water bottle inside also get a conference shirt. This years conference theme seems to be people without noses.

Registration Process - advantage Lotusphere - logistics and line management were much better.
Registration Materials - advantage VMWorld - nice messenger. Bag and they had shirts in 2X for those of us who are fluffier.

Welcome Reception / Product Showcase Reception
This is two events in Lotusphere but just one at VMworld. Food stations and bar areas spread throughout the product showcase area instead of wandering waiters with hors d'ouvres. Fairly large variety of food including several sushi stations. A dearth of tables to set your plates on though so a bit awkward. No entertainment.

Reception food quality - advantage VMWorld. - More variety and better quality than I've seen at Lotusphere.

Reception atmosphere - advantage Lotusphere. - No entertainment, merger of two events so vendors don't get a chance to enjoy themselves.

Opening General Session
Location Sands Conference Center in Las Vegas. The conference center is attached to the Venetian Resort, one of the most opulent, classy, completely themed resorts. There is Italian marble mosaic tile design on the floor of the bathroom in my hotel room. The lobby ceiling looks like the Sistine Chapel. There's a canal full of gondolas in the shopping area. You'd think they'd spend a couple of bucks to at least paint the walls of the Sands conference center. Instead the conference main hall is a hulking bare rough concrete cavern with all the charm of a parking garage. There are 14,000 attendees at this conference being herded over an acre of unlighted concrete cave to the mass of folding chairs in front of a half dozen big screens. Good music blaring but nothing but static images on screen until Paul Maritz steps on stage.

Technical content was great. Less market speaky than Lotusphere. No special guests no big productions. Just a couple of demos. Note: day two general session with Stephen Herrod VMWare CTO had more depth and demos but still no big names.

Opening General Session production, entertainment and venue -advantage Lotusphere.
Opening General Session content - a draw - both provide good content.

Technical Sessions
VMWorld attendees received email notices to fill out their conference schedules on-line pre-conference. The conference website even provided an automated tool to let you tag sessions you were interested in and autoschedule. Sounds better than it works - if you pick too many it can't autoschedule. Lotusphere also gives you an opportunity pre-conference to register your interest for logistical and space allocation. At VMWorld they hold you to your choices more. Sessions have two lines one for preregistered and another for nonpreregistered... This does reward those who created their schedules but it limits flexibility.

All session attendees are scanned on entry and session evaluation sheets are handed out.

Session content has overall been excellent. One tip Lotusphere could take from VMWorld - sessions are tagged in conference materials as beginner, intermediate or advanced. Speaker types are also coded as customer, partner, VMWare, analyst or academic. I only went to one bad session.

Can't comment much on the labs and BOFs because I spent my time in sessions instead. There appeared to be many self paced and instructor led labs. BOFs seemed a bit less organized than Lotusphere BOFs usually are.

On technical sessions the conferences are a draw. There are plusses and minuses to the VMWare preregistration.

Vendor/Product Showcase
In square footage the VMWare showcase area was probably twice as large as recent Lotuspheres. The hall area was much bigger than what's available for Lotusphere and so booths were sometimes much larger. There were 14 aisles with the larger vendors grouped near the front center part of the hall. Showcase opened Monday night and stayed open 9 to 5 from Tuesday thru Thursday. Food was provided in the showcase area only for the Monday night reception. The hall area was huge. Even with the vendors in place there was a large section partitioned in the back to provide each vendor with a private meeting area and at the front of the hall there were ping pong, pool and other game tables for attendees.

Giveaways were pretty much the same as you see at Lotusphere. Lots of iPod touches, nanos and iPhones. A couple of laptops. A prius. A 50" Plasma TV. Several Garmin GPS's. The freebees included.... the requisite T-shirts (though many vendors did have 2XL), stress toys, USB keys with trial code installed, tool kits, pens, tape measures, USB Hubs... I even got a Rubic's Cube.

Product Showcase - advantage (slight) VMWorld - Definitely more variety and space. Similar giveaways.

Wednesday Night Party
The VMWorld Wednesday Night Party was held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Entertainment included - 140 mph rides around the track with trained drivers (3 passengers per car on one track 1 passenger per car on a second), go-cart rides and a bunch of race and pit themed attractions in the center area. We were asked to fill out health forms and waivers on the bus there - poor logistical planning there. There were plenty of fast food options - Pizza, burgers, hotdogs, sandwiches, etc. Good variety of food and beverages available. There was either a DJ or band playing in the center of the entertainment area the whole time. Lines were a bit long for the ride alongs and carts so I stuck with food and drink and hanging out. It was a unique venue. Logistics were a bit off. Lots of people just seemed to be hanging about (like I was) instead of doing something. Compared to most of the Lotusphere parties it was a bit ho-hum.... but it ranked higher than the All-Star Sports party at my first Lotusphere.

Wednesday Night Party - advantage Lotusphere

Website
The VMWorld website was well designed, quick and responsive. It had virtual interactive room areas to interact with vendors and peers, it linked with blogs, forums and other resources. It seemed a bit more useful and relevant than the Lotusphere websites have been. VMWare has incorporated lots of community and Web 2.0 type features into the site. Twitter feeds, webcasts, surveys, virtual pavillion, photo wall, video spot.... the site was designed for conference attendees to collaborate and share their thoughts, experiences and opinions about the conference. The site included the schedule builder for autoscheduling your calendar and the calendar data was exportable in iCal format.

Website - advantage VMWorld

Accommodations
Meals for VMWorld were held in the lowest hall level under the area we had the General Session and the decor was more of the same. It looked like they'd set up tables and chairs in the parking garage. Box lunches were available every day to those manning booths or who didn't want to sit and eat... didn't try them so can't report on their quality. The table service meals for breakfast and lunch were very good. Like Lotusphere it seemed we had themed eating days - Southwestern, Asian, California cuisine.... well themed deserts to match the meal. Always a vegetarian entree choice available. Disposable plates and eating utensils. The plastic forks and knives really weren't up to the task.

Snacks were available only once a day around 3 p.m. but they were plentiful. Popcorn, cookies, ice cream bars Tuesday, a make your own sundae bar Wednesday, mini cheeseburgers, mini corn dogs and hot pretzels on Thursday. Coffee and sodas were only available during the snack break and the only water available was from large plastic urns and small plastic cups - nothing like the ubiquitous Lotusphere water bottles.

The session rooms were adequate and comfortable. You rarely see a window in Las Vegas and the conference was designed to keep you from needing to go outside. Sessions spread over four floors. I can't comment on the WiFi quality because my laptop hard disk decided to die on the way to Vegas so I was stuck with Blackberry access and the terminals available for email use. The terminals were plentiful and had adequate bandwidth. The equipment was all HP thin client systems with 20" flat panel monitors running VMWare's virtual desktop. I was able to get to Gmail, Google home page, Google reader, Facebook and our corporate webmail. I didn't try running a Citrix NFUSE session back to the office because I didn't want to monopolize the terminal.

Accommodations - advantage (slight) Lotusphere. The atmosphere, snack quantity and the Lotusphere water availability beat out VMWorld's offerings.

Venue
Every year someone gripes about Lotusphere staying at the same location in Orlando. VMWorld moves around - next year's conference is in San Francisco. Vegas is nice but it's a bit overwhelming to me. At the Venetian all paths lead through the casino. There are great places for eating and shopping, there are theaters and great shows. Disney like care has been spent on making the place look authentic and grand. The rooms were definitely a step ahead of the Dolphin, Swan or any other conference hotels at Disney. My room (at approximately the same room rate as Lotusphere) had a living area with sofa, two chairs, desk and breakfast table, a king size bed, a gigantic bathroom with separate soaking tub and shower and a separate WC.... it also had two flat screen TVs and a stereo and someone came every night and turned down your covers and left a couple of pieces of Belgian chocolate. On the other hand if you wanted to use the internet in your room (cable connection not wireless) - you were charged $10 a night.

It's a matter of personal preference but I have to give the advantage here to Lotusphere. The location is familiar, the general atmosphere at a Disney property is a family friendly one and seems much more light-hearted than Vegas.

Overall
VMWorld was a great conference and I'll definitely go back if the opportunity comes up. The conference was much bigger than any Lotusphere I've attended but it didn't seem too crowded. I didn't feel the same level of community I've come to find at Lotusphere but then after my first Lotusphere I probably felt about the same... it took finding the Gonzo Unofficial Lotusphere site and connecting with people before the conference started to make Lotusphere feel special. I haven't yet gotten involved with the VMWare on-line community but I will.

Advantage Lotusphere - it's something special and I'll certainly miss it.

VMWorld

I'm going to the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas next week. If any of my blogging buddies are going to be there look me up.

I Ainn't Ded Yet

I'm still shutting things down when we transition to Exchange but in the mean time.... I just ran into a new weird Notes bug that I thought I'd pass along.

We've been having issues with user getting new mail notifications and then looking in Notes and not finding any new mail.... I thought.... hey it's just crazy users when it was just one or two but it soon became apparent that it was happening to everyone (except me - I turned mail notification off a long time ago.)

I looked everywhere online trying to find an answer and couldn't find anything - then today I stumbled across an IBM technote about the problem.

Turns out if you have an entry in the Domino directory with a blank username there's a bug in pre version 7 servers that will cause everyone to get random false positive new mail notifications.

You might ask.... why would you have an entry in the Domino directory without a username.... well that's interesting too.... seems a member of management traded in his Blackberry for an iPhone and wanted us to set it up so his mail was being pushed to the iPhone.... he didn't want his mail forwarded - he still wanted it saved in his Notes client. I'm sure there are several ways to fix this but our quickest solution was to set up a dummy entry in the Domino directory that actually points to his Notes database, setting up a mail group that contains the dummy entry email address and the gmail address we have set up on his iPhone and then change his regular entry in the directory to forward all his mail to the mail group. I went back into the dummy entry and put a dummy value in the username field.

If I have time I may post more about our migration off of Notes/Domino. I've been writing the transition plan and reading all the Microsoft marketing literature for Exchange and Sharepoint. I can already say the new system will be more complex, less robust and much less capable. If we'd been heavy users of clustering, encryption, had lots of current customized databases that couldn't be easily replaced then the process would be very difficult and users would complain.