What a great day of training and education and networking! This year’s event was no less than awesome. With over 200 people registered for the event, watching live from four sites in two countries, and a great lineup of speakers who gave nothing but deep technical content, everyone had a blast! Well, except for Lee Benjamin, who got snowed in in Dallas and spent the entire day trying to get back to Boston.
Virtualization Alliance. The event was the second run by Virtualization Boston, a local user group here in the Boston area. This year we joined together with user groups in New York, St. Louis, and Calgary to bring the event to their users. With time-zone issues, some of those groups joined us late and extended the program with locally delivered content as well. I firmly believe that this is the future for local user groups. The ability to share speakers and content – reaching beyond the limited personal contacts we each have – will create a tremendous uptick in the quality of the training and education that we each can provide. We also learn from each other what works and what doesn’t, what people are interested and what they aren’t. We call this loose pooling of interests for user groups interested in Virtualization the Virtualization Alliance. Once we have time to review what did and did not work on this event, we will look to expand these efforts.
Recordings. We managed to get three of the five parallel tracks recorded. Although we charged an extra $15 to view the recorded sessions, 60% of those in attendance live also subscribed to the recorded version. It will take a little time (because we were able to add the extra rooms without sufficient internet capacity, it will take more than the 3 days) than we hoped to get it all ready. But those who signed up will get an email explaining how to access them when ready. We will also turn back on the subscription registration so others can purchase access.
