ComNet Changed for the better? You tell me.
Follow up below…
ComNet has been a staple of TechEd since TechEd ’96 (The beginning of the [MS] internet era). A means for attendees to communicate with each other and the outside world. Now the focus is more on the outside communication. Gone this year is internal email and a a list of attendees. This makes it much harder to hook up or find people you know at the conference. It is now literally like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I wish I knew why they stopped this, did it have something to do with Privacy?. Also gone are the MS Exchange public folders and discussions – Didn’t Microsoft like what they saw there?.
There is a new approach this year is distributing the computers all over the place. This is a really one GREAT new idea for TechEd. One of many clusters of 20 – 50 PC’s all around the convention center. Here is a shot of one such group. You can see they get plenty of use.
- There is no overall list of attendees
- There is no way to find attendees from a specific company
- There is no way to find attendees from a specific geography unless they manually edited their profile.
- There is no ad hoc communication ability
As I think of other reasons they should bring back Exchange, I’ll update the list. In the meantime I did find an obscure link to a TechEd discussion forum here (requires login)
posted in TechEd2006 | 3 Comments
