Training Sessions
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@brianlittlejohn said:
I'm glad we are talking about longer/more in depth sessions. This year was my first year to attend spice world and I was a little disappointed in the breakout sessions. I was hoping there would be more in depth topics. Also a couple of the sessions I went to the speaker spoke nothing about the topic they were supposed to.
Par for the course. They are curtailed by being a split conference: partially IT but primarily a "very basic helpdesk user" conference. This second part means that the bulk of people at the conference are there for IT assistance so basic that they are essentially non-IT people. There are whole sessions traditionally on things like "what are the features of this software you've started using" and "how to double click the installer."
It's not their fault, it is a helpdesk conference that has grown into people wanting it to be an IT conference. But having both in one spot is very tough. You don't want to act like the people there for one part aren't viable IT people, but if you make some clear indication of "classes for people struggling to install a super simple app" and "classes for serious IT people" you'll get very unhappy people.
So really it has become a social conference for IT people and the breakouts are just for the non-IT or fringe IT people, so the topics and material are super basic, as they need to be.
MLC will be IT only, none of that other group. So the conference will be a lot smaller, but the makeup of attendees very different.
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Interesting take. I know I didn't really talk to that many people there, primarily the ML crowd, but those I did speak to were all most certainly IT folks. Don't recall speaking to any purely helpdesk types. Unless Danielle counts herself there (but I don't).
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@Dashrender said:
Interesting take. I know I didn't really talk to that many people there, primarily the ML crowd, but those I did speak to were all most certainly IT folks. Don't recall speaking to any purely helpdesk types. Unless Danielle counts herself there (but I don't).
That is because the orbit of Scott's reality bubble is not overlapping the rest of reality very much.
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First @Dashrender thanks for the compliment. Second I talked to so many that are just basic helpdesk people, those of us that have been attending for years tend to be higher level than those in the last few years.
Remember their product is helpdesk software so that is who it attracts. There were very few decision makers there outside of the been attending for years crowd.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Remember their product is helpdesk software so that is who it attracts. There were very few decision makers there outside of the been attending for years crowd.
No, their product is an inventory scanner. The helpdesk is an add on. Always has been.
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Do you know how many people I talk to that only use the helpdesk and didn't know the other exists? Not just at SW.
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LOl, while that may be true, I don't think he's wrong from the perspective of the conference itself.
I agree, SW is really non technical in nature. That's one of the reasons I was so looking forward to the Deep Dive on a Hacker and apps.
SpiceWorks themselves aren't making this an IT conference, they're making it a sudo-IT conference.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not sure they themselves could do anything but. If there were 5 deep dive topics, real educational material - the question would be, how full would those rooms be?
Frankly I wouldn't necessarily want a specific vendors solution given as a deep dive, but then again there might not really be any other choice.
Another example. I attended that panel on GPOs. I would have loved to see him actually spend 2-3 hours starting from scratch building a GPO, then applying it to a workstation OS - and show us that in action.
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@Minion-Queen said:
There were very few decision makers there outside of the been attending for years crowd.
I'll agree there.
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@JaredBusch said:
@Minion-Queen said:
Remember their product is helpdesk software so that is who it attracts. There were very few decision makers there outside of the been attending for years crowd.
No, their product is an inventory scanner. The helpdesk is an add on. Always has been.
Their homepage suggests they feel both products are of equal importance.
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@JaredBusch said:
@Minion-Queen said:
Remember their product is helpdesk software so that is who it attracts. There were very few decision makers there outside of the been attending for years crowd.
No, their product is an inventory scanner. The helpdesk is an add on. Always has been.
I was wondering why Jared felt this way - but then I remembered Spiceworks is all about gathering data. And they probably gather more data from the inventory scanner than they do the helpdesk side.
If users of SW whole sale moved to the hosted helpdesk instead of the on prem scanner/helpdesk, I wonder how much SW would lose?
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@Minion-Queen said:
Do you know how many people I talk to that only use the helpdesk and didn't know the other exists? Not just at SW.
Obviously, I cannot know that number as I most certainly don't fit in your shoes
But the smaller amount (compared to you I am certain) of people I talked to often mentioned scanning issues and rarely discussed the helpdesk. The other big topic was making use of the new Network scanner.
That could be because they were not having problems with that portion or they were not using it, I do not know.
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@Minion-Queen said:
There were very few decision makers there outside of the been attending for years crowd.
@Dashrender said:
I'll agree there.
I would say there were still a lot of decision drivers if not decision makers.
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@JaredBusch said:
@Minion-Queen said:
There were very few decision makers there outside of the been attending for years crowd.
@Dashrender said:
I'll agree there.
I would say there were still a lot of decision drivers if not decision makers.
Oh yes there are drivers. But how much do they get to drive is the question. There is such a wide range of attendees it's always interesting to really dive in to see what they do day to day.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Oh yes there are drivers. But how much do they get to drive is the question. There is such a wide range of attendees it's always interesting to really dive in to see what they do day to day.
I think that is an issue with any conference. As Scott put it so perfectly as a thread title, IT Is not just a series of checkboxes... A lot of what we do is similar and translates well from one company to the next, but none of it is cookie-cutter.
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@Dashrender said:
Interesting take. I know I didn't really talk to that many people there, primarily the ML crowd, but those I did speak to were all most certainly IT folks. Don't recall speaking to any purely helpdesk types. Unless Danielle counts herself there (but I don't).
Sure, all of the IT people talk to each other, it's self fulfilling. The non-IT people, the non-community people all or nearly all skip the social events, don't go looking for us because we already know so many people. There are very clearly two groups of people at the conference.
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@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
Interesting take. I know I didn't really talk to that many people there, primarily the ML crowd, but those I did speak to were all most certainly IT folks. Don't recall speaking to any purely helpdesk types. Unless Danielle counts herself there (but I don't).
That is because the orbit of Scott's reality bubble is not overlapping the rest of reality very much.
I've spoken to a LOT of people at the conference over the years and looked at a lot of the feedback. There are a majority of attendees who actually find those sessions that we find silly and frivolous to be great and full of value. There are huge numbers that attend the super basic "day before" training stuff too, that stuff that walks through how to scan and things like that. Really basic stuff. Those people almost never switch over to the other side.
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@JaredBusch said:
@Minion-Queen said:
Remember their product is helpdesk software so that is who it attracts. There were very few decision makers there outside of the been attending for years crowd.
No, their product is an inventory scanner. The helpdesk is an add on. Always has been.
But that's not the main focus. So much so that "Hosted Spiceworks" is helpdesk only. They started with the scanner but added the helpdesk almost immediately and it became at least on par nearly from the beginning.
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@Dashrender said:
SpiceWorks themselves aren't making this an IT conference, they're making it a sudo-IT conference.
Hilarious UNIX - Freudian slip there. pseudo-IT
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@scottalanmiller said:
But that's not the main focus. So much so that "Hosted Spiceworks" is helpdesk only. They started with the scanner but added the helpdesk almost immediately and it became at least on par nearly from the beginning.
I completely disagree. Creating a hosted helpdesk was a no brainer simply because it was low hanging fruit. It made it look like they were doing something cool in a hosted fashion because there is no way to make a hosted scanner without agents or a remote collector.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
But that's not the main focus. So much so that "Hosted Spiceworks" is helpdesk only. They started with the scanner but added the helpdesk almost immediately and it became at least on par nearly from the beginning.
I completely disagree. Creating a hosted helpdesk was a no brainer simply because it was low hanging fruit. It made it look like they were doing something cool in a hosted fashion because there is no way to make a hosted scanner without agents or a remote collector.
But they have agents and a remote collector and you can do VPN too. Many people at SpiceCorps events aren't aware of the scanning and only use the helpdesk, from my experience at them. That they can do hosted helpdesk and call it hosted Spiceworks and have very few people asking for more is pretty surprising if the scanning is that big of a thing relatively speaking.
They can do a hosted full product pretty easily, if we had access to their code that they have we could do it for cheap.
