I'd say it was well worth the trip and it was great to finally put faces to names. I'm already pretty experienced with most of the subject matter, so some of the sessions were review for me. Even with that being said, in ALL of the sessions I learned pearls of wisdom, which will save me countless hours and many headaches in the days and weeks to come.

The location was great, the hotel was perfect with free breakfast and free cocktail hour, so you truly did not need a car. [Thanks Ward]. In the opinion of my backside, the classroom chairs were terribly uncomfortable, but no worse than most hotel conference rooms.

The show did suffer from a lack of polish, some first time logistical problems and jittery nerves. (I’ll bet the next time they will bring spare batteries for the presentation laserpointer with them).

None of the presenters were professional 'trainers', which is both good and bad.

It is good in that you are getting information straight from the horse’s mouth (With Phileppe and Ethan, quite literally, the ones who wrote the software are training you on it.) All of the people involved were people you would want to have a beer with--and very probably will.

Bad, in that lack of previous classroom training experience shown through. No one seemed comfortable in front of the classroom. The sessions were all in the format of ‘Put all the information on your slide and then read it to the class’. (Which is the cardinal no-no of presenting.). Because of that I found myself skipping ahead when covering information I already knew. [I know, my bad] The beneficial side effect is that you wind up with fantastic notes that contain all the information you want to retain.

Having Diguim, Sangoma, Rhino, Snom, Aastra and iSymphony present was a treat (and the hands-on experience at the show will very probably change my phone vendor of choice away from Polycom).

The show freebies and raffles were fantastic and made a seminar that was already worth the money a slam-dunk.

The work Ethan is doing with the 'Magic Button' is nothing short of, well...magic :)

Two things that could have made the seminar better would be:
1) More roundtable discussions with the group. Some of the best tips I came home with were from side conversations with other attendees. (The linux ‘screen’ command comes to mind).
2) Perhaps have a ‘day zero’ session for beginners. They could take all of the ‘basics’ out of the presentations; roll it into one day and hold a beginner’s day right before the event starts (for an additional fee of course). Day one suffered a bit because we lingered on some basics and glossed over the more advanced topics—and I’m sure most of the room would have preferred the time be spent on the advanced material.

In summary, I’ll give a 4 out of 5, and while I’m glad I was at the inaugural seminar, the next time (with a few tweaks) it could easily be a 4.5 or a 5.

I agree with all comments to date. The information was quite valuable, and went way beyond simply being user training on the technology. I agree with the fact that there were rough edges (network), but, it's aways the case that Version (X+1) is better than Version(X). This was a very good Version 1, well worth the time and money.

Many thanks to Phillipe, Ethan, Tony, Ward and cosmicwombat for putting this together. Thanks also to the snom, Aastra, sangoma, and Rhino representatives for being there with goodies. Also, special thanks to Jared Smith from Digium.

rb

First of all, I want to thank everyone who came to the first event and has provided both candid and extremely positive feedback on the event. I have to admit, I had a big case of the jitters for the first 15-30 minutes when I first got in front of the 45 people at the event.

I mean, I personally had hundreds of hours into the content, knew it backwards and forwards (because it is my life), and yet it is still hard to present. First of all public speaking is worse than death for most people (statistically), and then sometimes you can "feel" that some people in the audience don't agree with you or know more than you do about a subject, yet you move forward. In my case it was the real world anecdotes that peppered my presentations and gave me the confidence to know that I would eventually give someone in the audience a little pearl that would save them some time and frustration in the future...and then during social times getting positive feedback on these very things in my presentations.

Of course, the fact that my knee conveniently gave out in the middle of the isle when I was moving the "question microphone" around to the audience didn't help much. It was one of those movie-like moments....I hit the ground in .01 seconds, slamming a table on the way down, water glasses on the table making rattling noises, me screaming "SH**", the entire audience in unison "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...pause....pause...Are You OK?". And the whole thing on video. Awesome.

Despite the incredibly crappy wireless Internet connection at the hotel/conference center, the jitters, scheduling issues and potentially the most embarrassing moment of my life, I am very happy with the way things turned out. Thank you all for your incredibly positive feedback and great discussions during the social times in the evenings. It was really great to see almost 100% of the participants attend these socials and dinners, and I found these off-hours events to be incredibly enlightening, as I think and hope all of the participants did as well.

I'll be honest, I absolutely crashed the weekend after the event after travel and five 18 hour days of no real alone time, but I am extremely excited for the next event (Vegas?). If it does turn out to be Vegas, I hope some you in the next group can stick around for some real good times the weekend immediately following the event.

Ethan