Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. Membership is open to institutions of higher education, corporations serving the higher education information technology market, and [...]]]> This years Educause conference took place in Orlando, Florida.

Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. Membership is open to institutions of higher education, corporations serving the higher education information technology market, and other related associations and organizations.

The association provides a social networking Connect site that supports blogs, wikis, podcasts and other platforms for IT professionals to generate and find content and to engage their peers; professional development opportunities; print and electronic publications, including e-books, monographs, and the magazines Educause Quarterly (EQ) and Educause Review[1]; strategic policy advocacy; teaching and learning initiatives; applied research; special interest discussion groups; awards for leadership and transformative uses of information technology; and a Resource Center for IT professionals in higher education.

Major initiatives of Educause include the Core Data Service, the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR), the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI), Net@EDU (advanced networking), the Educause Policy Program, and the Educause/Internet2 Computer and Network Security Task Force. In addition, Educause manages the .edu Internet domain under a contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce.^[1]

The current membership of Educause comprises more than 2,000 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 200 corporations, with 16,500 active members.

Below are pictures from the conference:

My schedule at the conference:

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

• Full Day Seminar – Cloud Computing Made Simple and Affordable: Using the Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) to Provide an Effective, Powerful, and Economical Rich Services Environment

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

• Discussion Session : Cloud Computing
• Emerging Technologies : Crafting a Campus Identity: First-Year Students, Residential Life, and Social Networking
• Discussion Session : Business Continuity Management
• Leadership and Management : Top-Ten “Gotchas” for the New CIO
• Networking and Infrastructure : High Availability and Server Consolidation with Virtualization
• Discussion Session : Policy and Law

Thursday, October 30, 2008

• Leadership and Management : IT Matters, but Information Resources Matter More
• Emerging Technologies : Developing Low-Cost Applications Using Offshore Companies
• Discussion Session : Network Management
• Enterprise Systems : CRM Adventures: Three Perspectives
• Networking and Infrastructure : Structuring Authentication Across the Campus Community
• Lightning Round Session : Security and Privacy Lightning Round
• Teaching and Learning : Are You Ready? A Systematic Approach to Training New Help Desk Staff
• Enterprise Systems : SOA Built on Open Source Web Service Technologies
• Networking and Infrastructure : Deployment of a Virtualized Server Grid
• Security and Privacy : Network Admission Control: A Survey of Approaches

Friday, October 31, 2008

• Enterprise Systems : IT Disaster Recovery Within the Framework of Business Continuity Planning
• Leadership and Management : Deploying an Open Source, Online Evaluation System: Multiple Experiences

Overall I thought it was an excellent conference, there weren’t as many people this year as previous ones.

The exhibit hall was fun as always. Some exhibits were great and others sucked which brings up another subject. Marketing.

There were two exhibits that stood out amongst the crowd. The first one from Bradford Networks and the other from Trapeze Networks. These guys not only gathered leads, but engaged their prospective customers allowing them to deliver their sales pitch. Two companies that I will definitely be following up with.

Other companies that did well on their marketing pitch were Turning Technologies, Novell, CDW, Zimbra, Elluminate, and Microsoft. Although the only thing Microsoft had going for itself was as great demo on a smart-board of Image Composite Editor.

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. The application takes a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location and creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all the source images at full resolution. The stitched panorama can be saved in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.

The things that characterized the good exhibits can be summarized in a few words. They were accessible, had an inviting environment, gave away free stuff (like free iTouch and laptops every hour) and had either professionals or very seasoned sales people giving the presentations.

On the other side of the coin, were the very big and expensive exhibits which just didn’t deliver.

Some that deserve mention are AT&T which has a very expensive three environment exhibit representing campus life and U-Verse all over the place. Alcatel-Lucent had a not very inviting exhibit and their staff sat down most of the time. Citrix was just offering a $5 Starbucks card for filling out a survey. Cognos had a closed exhibit that wasn’t inviting to anyone.

Its not that these companies were cheap, which they were; but they are spending a lot of money for lead generation when they could also be qualifying the leads and delivering their product demos to a captive audience.