Today, we're officially announcing the first batch of sessions that we'll have as part of our sixth BriForum in Chicago from June 16-18. (We'll have 60 sessions total. I still have to work out some more details with a few presenters, which is why we're only looking at 40 sessions so far.)

We've never had separate "tracks" per se at BriForum, since this was a narrowly-focused conference that centered on Citrix and Terminal Services. Over the years we've slowly evolved it into the more-broadly defined application and desktop delivery areas, including topics like application streaming and isolation, VDI, and to some extent, hardware virtualization. (Although really we only look at general hardware virtualization as it pertains to application and desktop delivery.)

This year's sessions cover these core areas, but I wonder whether there's any way that we can divide them into multiple tracks? Well, I don't want to use "tracks" as much as "tags." I'm thinking that we should pick some very high-level tags and then apply them to each session (along with color codes in the conference guide to keep it simple).

I'm thinking something like the following tags: (I'm using Microsoft's terminology here, along with an explanation of each.)

• Presentation Virtualization / Server-based computing, both to multi-user (TS) and single-user (VDI) scenarios
• Application Virtualization (App streaming and isolation, like SoftGrid, Thinstall, etc.)
• Hardware Virtualization (VMware ESX, XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Kidaro, as well as Ardence OS Streaming.)

I like the "tag" concept instead of the "track" concept because then we can apply more than one tag to each session where appropriate.

I think that most would agree that this tag system makes sense. My only question is whether we should lump TS-based and VDI-based solutions together into a single "Presentation Virtualization" tag, or whether we should separate them out into tags like "SBC - TS" and "SBC - VDI?"

Another question to answer is what we should call Citrix's product: XenApp or Presentation Server? The session proposals that were submitted were split about 50/50, but I think we should provide some standardization to make it easier for attendees. I'm leaning towards calling everything "Presentation Server" this year since that's really what the actual product is called today. Then we can use the "XenApp" name if we're very specifically talking about the Delaware or newer version of Presentation Server.

Please share your thoughts about all this belo1w:

Registration for BriForum is open for $995.  Visit the BriForum website for more details.