Last week thorsten.franz3/blog (@thorstenster) wrote about why he attends SAP TechEd at every opportunity, after reading it I thought 2 things,
1. I am jealous as hell that my SAP Mentor brothers and sisters are out in Vegas and I am not there,
2. No-one has talked about how those of us left behind can take part in SAP Teched - so here we are.
In recent years, SAP has embraced the social aspects of conferences using YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, which I love, it shows how much SAP has changed and wants to engage with it’s customers – getting them to listen is still a challenge but they’ll have the conversation. I remember last year when I went to Las Vegas and was contacted by Gunther Schmatzalf through the social connections provided by the TechEd website, it was a productive meeting and completely facilitated by social media.
In addition to all the social connection stuff, SAP also stream a great many sessions online, so for those of us left at home we can watch the sessions on-line (Virtual SAPTeched) – it remains to be seen as to whether people will be able to ask questions in the same way they were for the Virtualisation week in April, but I will be hoping.
For me I will be taking part in TechEd as much as possible, being in the UK the time zones work in my favour as many of the sessions will be at the backend of my business day so I can usually watch them in peace. Also I will be keeping up with my friends at TechEd using twitter and e-mail, during the week ASUG produced a great list of the best people to follow on Twitter for TechEd Insights (ASUG News.) As usual there will be a lot of hashtags to follow on Twitter, this link will show you the major hashtags, and there will be some unofficial hashtags used between friends which can yield some very good information too
Like all things, you will get as much out of it as you put into it, the information and session information is out there it is up to you to make the effort to string it all together and get the information from it. So good luck and happy engaging :-).
