Hey Andy,
I have an opinion and as usual I'm not hesitant to share. But keep in mind this was my first Engage.
Accessibility to people was probably the biggest issue for me. I went with that goal and I accomplished it. Some of the Exact folks I had hoped to meet were not there, someone has to keep the company running. But the people that were there were very accessible. There are many people at Exact Software and in the customer/partner mix that I made contact with. Hopefully some of those people will remember me.
I went to Engage with a significant amount of prepared material. That material was well received and the agreed up on follow up plan is in process. Only time will tell how successful that process will be, but the initial feedback is positive.
Many of the sessions that I attended were fairly technical in nature. A few of those had a staggering amount of valuable information provided. I found the presenters to be quite knowledgeable and mostly good at communicating to a group. (That’s not always easy for us geeks!)
My only real complaint of the whole thing was the lack of hand outs for a few of the sessions. Good material really increases the retention and value realised from these sessions. I don’t like that I have to wait a couple months to get my hands on some of that material. Other conferences that I have attended provide both paper handouts at each session and a CD of the full set of handouts on the last day of the conference.
What was really interesting to me was the mix in the customer base. When you looked around the room in one of the breakfast or lunch sessions and saw the 1200 or so people, I found myself analysing who was what. So there were a little less than 1100 actual customers. About a quarter of those were Macola customers, about 275. Then my gut says maybe 60% of those were Progression; so maybe 110 Macola ES customers. Given the ‘manufacturing’ focus of the product, maybe less than half were doing ‘distribution’; say 50. Of those how many were multi-location, binned and lotted? Maybe 10 or 15.
So all of a sudden I understand how seemingly obvious bugs and flaws have gone unnoticed.
Most of us that have careers supporting technology learn to leverage the accumulated knowledge of others. That is what drew me to this bulletin board. I always ask myself ‘has someone else encountered and resolved this issue’. I am not an early adopter, so I should never be the first to deal with an issue.
Now I understand that maybe I am sitting on the bleeding edge. That conclusion made the cost of attending engage worthwhile. Oddly enough it also contributes to the value that might be unlocked from that binder of material that I brought with me.
Oh yeah, and on leveraging some of the contacts… It was good to meet you Andy. I will let you know if I have any Flex questions!
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