Elevate 2021 - Day 2

Day 2

I started off the second day with the second of my own presentations: "PowerServer 2021: Integrating Third Party Authentication".  Then I watched most of "RunTime FunTime - Adding Column(s) to Your DataWindow SQL and Display at Runtime" by Mike Searer of SBT.  My third session to present, "PowerServer 2021: Performance Tuning", started before Mike was done.  

Then the Chat Cafe started up right as my session was ending.  After the Chat Cafe, I went over to "Catching the Runtime Error in the Act - Tracing and Profiling Your Application at Runtime" by John Strano of Intertech Consulting, Inc.  That was followed by a nap!  The conference is taking place on East Coast USA time, and so I'm getting up at 5AM to be ready for it to start at 6AM my time.  We may be doing it virtually, but I'm still getting to experience the jet lag that I normally have at the conference.

I had two sessions after that, the first was "PowerServer 2021: How to Deploy to Amazon Web Services" and the second was "PowerServer 2021: Using a Single Sign-On Solution for PowerServer and Other Apps".  I had one more session to do, but I also had a meeting in Orange County (I'm in Los Angeles County) 30 minutes after it ended, so after my next to last session I drove to Orange County and then did my last session ("PowerServer 2021: How to Deploy to Azure") from there.  That meant I had to miss watching the "Optimizing Automated Testing for PowerBuilder, PowerServer and PowerClient" session by Brian Le Suer, of Zeenyx Software live.  I'll watch that sometime later this week in the replays as well as others I missed that are of interest.

Summary

I can't think of anything (other than a couple of minor enhancements to registration process) that I would recommend changing in future conferences.  I think the 10 minute Q&A after each session and the 1 hour Chat Cafe in the middle of each day worked great.  For me it made it feel like I was able to do some of the networking that normally occurs between sessions, at meals and at the special event that I felt was missing in last years conference.

Actually, one thing.  None of the session recordings (or those I've viewed so far) show the chat that is occurring during Q&A.  So the last 10 minutes of each recording is just the Q&A and the background music they play during it and nothing going on.  It would have been nice to have captured the Q&A in the recording.  You can see that in the last 10 minutes of Brian's presentation.

And that brings up my last comment, I'll let you decide for yourself whether it's good or bad.  They played that same song in the background for the Q&A for every session.   By my count I sat through that for 10+ sessions (I wasn't able to attend some sessions to the very end).  Hours after the conference was over, I could still hear that tune playing in my head!

12/09/2021 Update:  The live chat appears in all of the sessions if you view them in Youtube.  It's only when you view them on the Appeon web site that they don't appear.