It's a new year, and BriForum is just around the corner. As we announced in October, BriForum 2008 Chicago will take place June 16-18, 2008, at the Chicago Navy Pier. We've updated BriForum.com with all the information about this year's conference. (Can you believe this will be our sixth BriForum?)
This year's conference will still focus on our core area: application delivery and its related techologies. (Or is this called application virtualization now?) We'll focus on Citrix XenApp / Presentation Server, Terminal Services on Server 2008, application streaming, desktop streaming and virtualization, and generally connecting users to their apps.
For those of you who would like to present, our call for papers deadline is April 1. As always, if your submission is selected, we'll pay all your travel expenses and registration costs for BriForum.
For those who would like to attend BriForum, early-bird registration is now active for a price of $895. That special price is valid through the end of February. Begining in March the full price will be $995.
Like previous years, this year's BriForum will be three full days, Monday through Wednesday. We're also video recording all of the sessions, and all attendees will be able to watch the sessions they missed online for free. Non-attendees will be able to buy DVDs for $495.
Even though we're keeping the conference in Chicago for 2008, we're moving to a new venue. The Gleacher Center was cool, but unfortunately it could only hold 400 people, and last year we sold out and had to turn people away. So this year we're moving the event down the street to the beautiful Chicago Navy Pier. This venue is absolutely gorgeous and it's HUGE! We'll have plenty of room for everyone and plenty of room for fun.
Perhaps the biggest change for 2008 is that we're doing away with the sponsor marketing area and replacing it with what we're calling a "Demo Lab." We're giving vendors as much space and power (er, make that "electrical power") as they need to bring in whatever they want: servers, racks, thin clients, networking gear.. the works! So instead of just walking past vendors reading signs, you can walk through their equipment and roll up your sleeves and play with / break their stuff. They'll bring their supergeeks to match wits with the supergeek attendees.
We're trying harder than ever to make this the best technical conference you've ever attended while staying true to our independent and funky roots. Even though 96% of attendees said they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with last years' BriForum, we read through every single suggestion and feedback idea to continue to refine this event.
See you all in June!
(And by the way, remember that you can access many videos from past BriForums for free at briforum.com/videos.)