Gearing up for MacWorld Expo

So now, with Macworld Expo upon us, the question begs, ”Why should

enterprise IT people go?”

It’s a valid question, and one that should get a serious answer.

Obviously, if you have Macs on your network, or are thinking seriously

about Macs on your network, you need to go. Even if it’s one person from

your shop, someone in your organization should go. First, the sessions at

Macworld are phenomenal. These aren’t marketing wonkfests where you’ll be

showered with beautiful Powerpoint presentations and no useful

information. The sessions are conducted by people in the trenches, doing

the work, from companies you’ve heard of, like Apple, and ones you

haven’t, like digital.forest.

(Disclaimer: I’m doing two sessions myself at Macworld this year. One session

is on the Nagios network

administration toolset, and the other session is an overview of

SOX, HIPAA, and GLBA.

Other sessions will focus on Mac OS X forensics, software asset

management, enterprise database systems, Mac/Windows integrations,

‘neutered admins, collaboration/groupware for Mac OS X Server, hardening

Mac OS X 10.4 Server, and a ton of others. I’m planning on being at every

one I can physically attend, and I plan on begging for slides from most

of the others.

But that’s just the Mac IT conference. There are two-day Power Tools

conferences on Filemaker Pro, Wireless Networks, Mac OS X Server, (It’s

sold out, in case you were wondering), two AppleScript sessions, (one is

sold out) and more. There are hands-on labs, market symposiums and more.

You can, without trying, spend the entire week and never once have to go

near the show floor, and easily get your money’s worth in time and

effort. Look at the titles for the presenters of the sessions — sys

admins, network engineers, consultants and trainers. No marketing people,

no PR pros. They’re sessions we want to see, because in a sense, we’re

giving them. By themselves, they’re reason enough to go.

But that’s not to say the expo floor is worthless, because it’s anything

but. I’ve made, in the 10 years I’ve been going to Macworld Expo,

hundreds of contacts with various ISVs and hardware companies. Apple,

Adobe, Microsoft, Thursby — you name a company in the Mac enterprise

space and I probably have a contact or two with them. If I don’t, I will.

The chance to meet and talk with people from the various companies that

make Mac products, including Apple, is invaluable. This personal contact

can take you from just another customer to someone who knows, and is

known by, the people doing the work on the products you use.

That’s one of the interesting things about Macworld. You don’t have the

usual flood of’booth babes’ with nary an engineer to be found. Maybe it’s

because there aren’t as many big companies in the Mac space, but

the ratio of engineers to PR people at Macworld is quite good. I think it

must be a Macworld thing, because even at the Adobe and Microsoft booths,

the engineer/project manager count is really quite high. This high

engineer count makes the floor time quite productive.

It’s amazing what a 10 minute conversation with an engineer can do for a

problem you’ve been having. The problem may not get fixed on the show

floor, but you’ll go from a random person with some licenses to a person

with a problem that’s probably affecting a lot of other people.

That’s the ‘untrackable’ benefit to Macworld. It’s the set of business

cards, both real and virtual, that you walk away with. You can’t

duplicate that via email or newsgroup or chatroom. Even in this day of

WebEx, and remote everything, the gains made from a couple of good talks

in person — perhaps on the show floor, perhaps at a vendor party — will

net you far more than emails. A lot of what I do at a Macworld is keeping

these relationships going, and it’s well worth it.

I sat down once and figured out how much I had gotten in real,

dollar-trackable value from Macworld. It was easily three to five times

the costs.

The ability to talk directly to the people making the stuff you use

approaches priceless, and Macworld Expo is one of the best venues for

this if your network currently includes Macs, or might include Macs in

the next year or so. If nothing else, it gives you a target-rich

environment for future resume pushes, should the need arise. I’ll

personally attest to the employment benefits that a Macworld Expo contact

or three can provide.

Yes, it can be hard to budget for things like trade shows. But the truth

is, even with the constant drumbeat of how the Intarweb will replace

face-to-face interaction between vendors and customers, trade shows, at

least the better ones, still provide a real value to the attendees. And

Macworld Expo is definitely one of the better ones — a reason why it’s

still around and Comdex isn’t.

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