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posted 12/04/06 by Anthony Governanti Las Vegas reflections

Well, as you may have seen form all the other Civil 3D bloggers out there, AU is over, and I'm just today felling normal again. It was a great - no awesome -conference this year that saw attendance up some 41% over last year!

For me there were some significant events:

Beta preview for Civil 3D - I had the pleasure and the privileged to demonstrate some of the future technology the Civil team is working on to an invite-only crowd of AU attendees. Along with Dan and Dave, we were able to give a sneak peak into what might be coming in future releases, and judging by the applause, ooh and ahhs from the crowd, i came away very excited for our future. Plus, I was able to have a couple beers AND demo, which made it even more fun :-)!

ISD General Session Main Stage - This was a session that I took part in, again with Dave and Dan, where we gave attendees a snapshot of where Civil 3D was a year ago, where it is today, and where we are going tomorrow. Our Geospatial counterparts did something similar for the MapGuide and Map 3D products. The session went well, but I was disappointed in the attendance. I can attribute the low attendence to two things; 1 - classes were still going on during the session, and if you were an attendee, would you go to class or a presentation? 2 - The ISD party was the night before, and I must say that this party was one of the best industry parties I've ever been too at AU. Since the general session was the next morning at 8 AM, I'll assume that a lot of ISD attendees took the morning to sleep in and "recover" if you will.

So hopefully lesson learned there; don't schedule classes at the same time as general sessions, and don't have it the morning after the industry party.

Friday Morning Classes - this year both Dan and I had our one and only classes for the week on the last day; Friday. Since our classes were closely related in topic, we sort of made them into a part 1 and 2 session. Dan did a great job, and had the higher attendance of the two, but it was still about 75% of what it was supposed to be. My class was similar, with about 60% of what I expected. This is not a big deal though, because after all, this was the last day of classes, and these were the last classes of the day. Anyway, I felt my class went well despite the attendence, which was still about 300 die-hards. It was a great way to end a week of networking, talking shop, drinking/partying, and most of all fun. This isn't to say that it wasn't a lot of hard work too, but that all pays off with a successful event and a productive week.


Well, that's my recap of last week's events. There was a lot of work done, and a lot of fun had, and from my perspective, a great conference was had by all.

Till next time,
Cheers,
AG

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