Coming off our 10th annual ATT Live, I wanted to share an event review for this year's conference that was held in Las Vegas, May 15th through the 18th. For the previous nine years, ATT Live has been a December conference, with an occasional repeat in the early spring based on demand. However, this year... the sunshine and warm weather of May was a nice change.
If you have not had the opportunity to attend ATT Live in the past 10 years then you may not know much about the event. In a nutshell, Training Services has made this the premier technical conference of the year for our customers and partners. All of the sessions delivered are hands-on and presented by subject matter experts. Most sessions typically run up to 4 hours in length and offer an in-depth view of the technology or solution. A great opportunity to enhance your skills, learn new technologies and network with peers.
Every year we pride ourselves in meeting the training needs of our customers by listening to our attendee's feedback and making an improvement each year on the previous. This year will be no exception! Here are a couple of comments I felt were worth sharing:
"I'm self employed. Coming to ATT Live means not only paying for the conference, hotel and airfare, it also means giving up the income I'd earn working these days, but it was well worth it!"
"The core of the event was the quality of the instructors. They were consistently excellent and knowledgeable."
"I look forward to ATT Live every year, thanks for another great conference - best one yet!"
"An excellent forum to exchange knowledge with my peers"
"I love just having great sessions! Its a great value for the money"
Outside of the customer comments, which I regard as most important.... here are some highlights to focus on from this year's conference:
- 200+ attendees - The highest attended ATT Live to date. We initially set our resources to accommodate 150 students, but found ourselves increasing the number to 180 by end of April and eventually having 207 registrants by the event date.
- 80+ hands-on sessions - We extended our 4 day technical tracks from 10 to 12, offering a good mix of sessions across all three Business Units (Novell, NetIQ and Suse). This gave our customers an excellent opportunity to attend sessions needed for their current job focus, but also allowed them to explore some new products of interest.
- Learning Central App - We launched the new Learning Central App at the conference. Giving our ATT Live attendees the first chance at using electronic content distribution for both lecture and lab. It was a huge hit, and the feedback was awesome. This will change the future of how we distribute content and will also help us extend value for Ondemand training. To check out more on the Learning Central App visit https://learningcentral.novell.com/ or download the app from the Apple App Store - LearningCentral (One customer said - "Loved the Learning Central App. It was nice not having to lug books around")
- Adding SMEs - In order to extend our tracks and accommodate more students, we asked help from services employees to help deliver these sessions, adding their product knowledge and real world experience to the sessions. Several product managers also attended to present on their product futures. On behalf of Training Services, I want to thank them all for the value they added to the conference and the time they spent away from their day jobs developing content and delivering at the ATT Live Conference. The impact they had on our customers not only benefited the attendees, but also gave some good face to face time for them with customers.
- Testing - We offered both Certification and Practicum testing, included in the price of the conference. Many customers find value in validating their knowledge and improving their credentials.
The M Resort was a perfect venue for our conference. You would have to look long and hard to try and find a negative comment about the location, (Okay... maybe the pool closing at 6:00 and sessions running until 5:30). The M resort is known for its excellent food, buffets, and restaurants, so we took what worked well for us last year and extended our buffet vouchers for lunch, giving our customers a choice and quantity of food. Seems that a happily feed customer never hurts in the overall evaluation.
There were plenty of reasons for attending, and we were excited to have filled the hotel during the week with Novell, NetIQ and Suse customers.
We will be looking to add events to our calendar in the coming months that will allow those that missed out on the ATT Live event to still get access to the most popular modules delivered during the week. We will be bundling advanced modules to add advanced courses to the public schedule and plan to put a Virtual ATT Live events that focus on specific business units.
If you have any questions or comments, general feedback, you can reach my team at training@novell.com, training@suse.com or training@netiq.com. We will be watching the inbox for your feedback.
Jeff McMurdie