Are there plans on making all Momentum presentations available on EDN for those of us who could not make it? It will be very helpful.
I agree, would be a great idea
Sticky question. The presentations are the main reason to attend. (Although the main reason should be to hang out with your EDN buddies.) Give those away and you take away a major incentive to attend. Sure, your company may have paid your attendance fee, but others went out of pocket to have download access. It's also a way for EMC to cover costs for EMC World. Those that attended last year will know that the money we spent, went a long way and they treated us very well. (I still get a minor sugar rush just thinking about the Rice Krispie treats made available.)
I can see exactly what you're getting at though. There have been years when I didn't attend that I was dying to get my grubby hands on the powerpoints. So what do to to keep everyone happy? At some point I think they should be released for public consumption. Is that point 6 months afterwords? A year? Another question is do all of the presentations need to be released? A selection of key presentations could be a compromise.
In the end, it's EMC's decision. I could see them going either way. One thing that we all can do is share the information that we learned at EMC World. (By that I'm not saying spread around the presentations.) Blog about what you've seen and heard. Talk to others and post questions. Become really good pals with your EMC sales rep and get to know the Xbox Live names of EMC Developers. ("Sorry 'bout that head shot. Say about the upcoming TaskSpace 7.0 release...." ) And above all, keep your fingers crossed.
Chris,
This has been a pet topic of mine for some time. So let me take off my EMC hat and talk as a developer who has presented at, and attended many conferences.
It's true that attending the presentations is a significant reason to attend any conference.
However, the fact of the matter is that most customers simply cannot attend. Whether the reasons are financial or geographical, for everyone who can make it, there are likely hundreds or thousands of people for whom this is not an option at all.
The slide decks without the accompanying narration are of limited value, but might still be useful to some people.
That's one of the reasons I and other EDN team members scurried around capturing some of the EMC World developer sessions on audio.
We posted the DFS best practices session (Mike Mohen and Paul Kwitkin) last week, and we'll be surfacing more soon.
I understand the desire for conference planners (not just EMC's) to try to protect their registration numbers, but I believe it's time to rethink the situation.
I know I'm over-simplifying it (for the sake of this discussion), but let's put it this way: What's the goal of the conference sessions?
If the primary goal is to increase registration, then making content available only to registrants makes sense.
However, if the primary goal is to educate the community, who in turn spread the word about the new technologies and products, then there are ways to use the conference materials to do this. The more people that can be exposed to the material, the better!
Are these two approaches mutually exclusive? I don't think so.
It looks like we are thinking along the same lines. I've suggested that this might be fair:
Anyone who attends a conference gets the presentation slides within 30 days of the session.
The rest of the community has to wait 60 days (or 120 days, or some other agreed upon time lag).
This way, those that attended can quickly distribute the material to their teams back home and do knowledge transfer using the materials as collateral. The rest of the world can try to intuit the session content from the slide decks.
Of course, this is just one small suggestion.
Now I'm putting my EMC hat back on.
Let's hear from the community. What do you want? What do you think is fair?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Speaking only for myself, not attending is mainly geographical, not even mentioning that I'm busy up to my neck so I wouldn't mind waiting a couple of month as long as I can get to the information.
I also agree with Chris that attending is not only about the presentation but also to put faces on names we see regularly and get in touch with the community. Forums are nice, Linked In is not bad either but nothing bits a big plate of hot wings and a couple of beers
My 2 cents
I agree with all of you. The primary reason for not being able to attend Momentum for me has been due to project timelines. I feel EMC should release the presentations at some point to the Developers primarily for educational reasons. 3- 6 months is a fair time period.
