Lotus Rock Star

Category Collaboration University
One of the new benefits we have this year at Collaboration University is the creation of pre-conference sessions as videos for attendees. They will be posted the week before the conference and range from 20 minutes to an hour in length - whatever the topic dictates. The past couple years, we've noted that coming into CU people have a variety of skill sets and are at different levels of expertise in different subjects. This is to be expected of any group, but with the intense training we tend to put together, it creates a conference producer's dilemma - some people really can use the basics, while some are beyond them and want to dive right into more advanced topics. For instance in 2007, we had a number of people who were new to Sametime, and two from IBM who were responsible for the entire IBM Sametime infrastructure as attendees. See the problem?

Our approach the past two years has been to quickly get the basics out of the way on the first day then progress rapidly into meatier stuff by afternoon. Even so, we'd get a few complaints from those who have more experience, because they already knew all the morning content. That worked "OK", but this year with the delivery of these early sessions outside the confines of the three onsite days, we've found a great solution. Those who need and want the basics get them - and can attend all of these sessions on their own time - and those who don't are not missing anything because we're starting the conference at a higher level.

Of course the side benefit is that instead of 30 sessions, we are delivering nearly 40. More work for us, more content for you. We decided to do the following sessions as pre-conference videos (subject to change), and I'm considering adding one more myself...you'll not the conspicuous absence of my name here...

- Basics of the Dojo Toolkit (Viktor)
- Using DDM in your Sametime and Quickr Environment (Gab)
- Installing Sametime Standard Server (Chris)
- Domino Reporting & SNMP Traps (Warren)
- Installing and Configuring Eclipse for Sametime Plug-in Development (Carl)
- REST for the Lazy Developer (Julian)
- Fundamentals of Quickr Development: Forms, Themes, and Placebots (Jerald)
- Deconstructing Quickr: Understanding Quickr Behind the Scenes (Troy)

As an example, Carl Tyler put together this 5-minute segment of his pre-conference video on Installing and Configuring Eclipse for Sametime Plug-in Development. It is the prerequisite session for his live session on creating Sametime plug-ins (makes sense), and in the full session you can follow along and prepare your own machine to be ready to use those live materials. Enjoy!