EndUserSharePoint.com: SPC2008 – I am REALLY pissed off…
The Seattle Conference is so overbooked, it is impossible to get into many sessions.
The morning started off well with two interesting keynotes: one from Bill Gates, the other from Kurt DelBene. I will include my rough notes from those speakers in another post. After the keynotes, lunch went smoothly and then all hell broke loose. Virtually ever conference room on the sixth floor was overflowing, except the main ball room that had a beginner’s overview of SharePoint. All other session doors had guards on them saying no one else could be admitted because of fire laws.
I went down to the second floor. Nope, couldn’t get in there either. I was denied access to the four sessions I tried to get into. I finally gave up. Let’s be clear here… I was not late. I arrived ahead of time and still could not get into the sessions. I finally went to the main room just because there was at least standing room against the wall, but left after five minutes because the topic wasn’t relevant to me.
I asked one of the room guards who was in charge of managing room scheduling and he instructed me to check with registration. The girl in registration was polite, but her answer of “Well, there are over 4000 people here” just got me more upset. There were literally hundreds of people camped out in the hallways with no place to go, sitting along the wall, sitting on window ledges, wandering around looking for a place to sit. We have all spent thousands of dollars to be here in travel expenses and hotels, not counting the conference fee. When I brought this up to the girl at registration, she took my card and said she would get my message to a supervisor.
I saw the same thing happen for the second sessions of the day. The poor girl at the door of room 615 was getting hammered by dozens of people trying to get in. She held her ground, but it’s just bad management to put someone in that situation and give them no instructions or back up other than saying “Keep people out.”
It is now 7 hours later and I haven’t heard from a soul. I AM PISSED OFF! Who arranged this room management fiasco? Thousands and thousands of dollars got pissed away this morning because of lack of forethought on space requirements. If the conference rooms were not large enough to hold the sessions, why did they sell so many registrations?
I think that’s the bottom line, isn’t it. Who approved the sale of all those registrations when there wasn’t enough room to handle that number of people. I don’t see how it can be any better for the next three days. The space is the space, and the number of people won’t change.
Let’s hope they prove me wrong.
At least I am not the only one experiencing this. I was turned away from two of the sessions I wanted to attend. I believe one was the 615 room with the poor girl holding down the fort. I wrote a small blurb about this on my latest post(http://liebrand.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/sharepoint-conference-spc-2008/) but not to the degree you did. Hopefully somebody listens and they get this resolved.
I saw the same thing – room 615 is the room from hell… the smallest room where they seem to put the most technical (and popular) sessions.
If you do get in (I got in for the 2:30 session by leaving early from the previous session), you are crammed together, worse than having the middle seat on the plane!
There must be other rooms in the convention center that could be used instead – hopefully adjustments will be made.
Paul and Joe – Thanks for verifying my observations.
I think if we can find a way to let the organizers know of the shortcomings of the conference, it gives them a chance to make adjustments. As Joe said, hopefully adjustments will be made.
Couldn’t agree more! I also tried to get into the 615 room and actually made it into the room before it was closed but there were no seats left. This was at 2:05 – 10 minutes before the current session was to be over and 25 minutes before the next session was to start.
Steve – Good to hear from you. I hope to run into you on the exhibit floor.
There were just too many people turned away yesterday. Word should have gotten back to the organizers by now. Let’s see what kind of changes they have made to the room arrangements.
Hi Mark, sorry you’ve had trouble getting into the sessions you wanted to see. We are trying to catch the sessions that are full and will try to repeat them (In room 613-614), all of the event staff have been briefed to let us know as soon as a room is full so we can try and organize a repeat. The repeat sessions will be posted on the conference web site and the plasma screens in the conference area. We planned space using session voting buttons that were on the conference site last month, with a conference this size both in number of people and session count it’s virtually impossible to avoid a few full sessions. I’d be happy to chat to you in person (if you go to one of the registration booths and ask them to call me I’ll come meet you)
Once again I’m sorry you’ve not been able to see all the sessions you wanted.
Richard.
p.s. The only exception is that we can’t repeat the Partner sessions in rooms 615 and 613-614 as they were purchased as part of a sponsorship package – they are all being recorded though.
Hey Mark,
It was nice bumping into you yesterday. I was also turned away from a few sessions and found the best way to absolutely get in is to leave your current session before the Q&A (with is sad) and show up to your next session before the previous topic is complete.
Again, it was nice seeing you in Seattle.
Richard – Thank you for your response. I also received an email from Sahil. As you can see from the above comments, it wasn’t just me that was affected yesterday.
In response to your statement “it’s virtually impossible to avoid a few full sessions”, virtually everyone I spoke with at breakfast and lunch today, Tuesday, had some kind of war story about the sessions yesterday. Many people left sessions early today just to guarantee a seat in the next session. I know that I didn’t feel comfortable today not knowing whether or not I would get to see the sessions I wanted.
My post was done after I had cooled down abit, so you can imagine how frustrated I was yesterday afternoon. From my perspective, things were better today, but that was because I was in the larger conference halls most of the time. I don’t know what happened in the smaller session rooms.
The information being presented at this conference is critical to getting End Users and Admin the information they need to get buy-in from their community of users. The frustration of coming to the conference yesterday and not being able to attend the first series of sessions was a bit tough to swallow.
Again, thank you for your response.
Mark
Mike – Good to see you, too.
For the record, Mike and I ran into each other in a SRO group on the back wall of one of the large conference rooms during a Monday session.
While I’m in complaining mode….
I have to say that the bags given out at the conference are quite annoying…
The Velcro is jarringly loud! Near the end of a session, you hear all of the “rips” popping all over the room.
Obviously, there are too many people at the conference. In fact, Im actually part of the problem (wait-list invitee). That being said, my experiences at the conference seem to differ quite a bit from what a lot of you are seeing. The first day, I bounced around to a few sessions per time block (at least 2, sometimes 3) and didn’t run into a single locked door…besides the time I tried to enter from behind the stage. I didn’t even “see” a closed session while walking around during, which I did quite a bit. There was one instance where I found no seating room, so I left. However, each of the others (again, at least 2 per block) had a seat for me.
Makes me wonder which topics were more prone to lock-out…
Just another perspective… obviously more people than appropriate, but for me, hasn’t had that big of an impact.
Hé look at the bright sight of it, at least you had a decent internet connection, something they forgot in Berlin last year…