by
Gabe Knuth
There's a few things we really, really like about what Brian and I do. We like being able to work from home, the office, the road...pretty much anywhere with an internet connection. We like being involved with the same technology as we were ten or twelve years ago and watching it evolve. And we like...no...we love BriForum.
We love BriForum because it's our show, the way we want it to be. It's not the marketing-fest that all those national, touring shows are. It's not a vendor-centric event that only provides one perspective on a single group of products. Sure, there's a need for those shows, and they have some usefulness to us as IT people, but when we came up with the idea of a conference, we wanted it to be different. Refreshingly different.
BriForum is a collection of people, both attendees and presenters, that all work with the technology day in and day out. Each year we see a dozens of new presentations from people that were only attendees the year before. This year alone we have 130 sessions to sort through, 80 of which are from new speakers who at one point or another have attended BriForum, seen the atmosphere, and decided that they have something to contribute. Each year, we have to sort through these submissions and pick the best 50 or 60 for the show (which we should have done by mid-April).
We have so many sessions that we don't repeat any of them during the show like other conferences. Unfortunately, that means that attendees might miss one great session while attending another. Because of this, we decided at the very first BriForum that we would video record each and every one of them. Before today, every video from every BriForum from 2005 through 2008 was posted online at www.brianmadden.com/videos, free to watch. And today, we're releasing the videos from BriForum 2009 for everyone to see.
These sessions are about all sorts of topics that relate to desktop and
application virtualization. VMware View, Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop,
Microsoft App-V, and Quest vWorkspace, among others, are all talked about in sessions,
in the demo lab (we tell the sponsors to send their engineers, not just
their marketing people), and in the hallways. The speakers aren't
in-and-out, they stick around all day...all show, even. The
attendees are from all walks of life and experience levels, too. The bottom line is, if you
have a problem when you come to BriForum, chances are you'll leave with a
solution or a direction to head in.
So, if you've never been to a BriForum or haven't been in a while, check out the videos and see what we've been up to. They're all there, and they're all in our custom-made video player that makes the experience as close as possible to being there by showing both the presenter and the screen in separate, synchronized video streams. It's just one more thing we love about BriForum.
We'll be featuring videos several times each week between now and BriForum, so stay tuned to the site if you don't watch them all ahead of time. Remember, you can swap the videos by clicking the arrows under the smaller video window, and you can enter full screen mode by clicking the button in the lower left corner of the player. Happy watching!
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