Overall Concerns of this years conference.

I am a bit concerned about the quality of the conference this year. Brad's latest e-mail on the fact that we have no abstracts for presentations has me very concerned. The presentations are the heart of the conference. If we still do not have any, then what is the agenda like? If we are requesting this late in the game, then the presentor really does not have that much time to prepare, thus quality will go down hill. We will be stuffing binders then at the last minute or we will need to during the presentation because the presentor could not get copies soon enough!

Mike, Seems like there should be lots of topics for presentations given the listings in the Newsgroups: "Silkscreen Fonts for ME10" and "Printing/Plotting with ME10" come immediately to mind. Sometimes at our CAD meetings at the lab, we have one experienced user of ME10 go over one of the menus in detail. We did "Splines" one time and it seemed that everyone learned something from it. Having someone explain how to set up the "Company" section of Dimensioning would be helpful. I'd offer to do one of these but I'm not attending the conference this year. Any volunteers? Any other suggestions?

It was a little surprising to read that no abstracts had been submitted yet. In fact it was extremely surprising because I have submitted mine and Brad has accepted it. The subject of my paper will be "Password protection within the ME10 environment". I would gladly present a second paper, but time is running short for preparations. I agree with Joyce that from the looks of the Newsgroups that there should be hundreds of suitable topics - and no shortage of people to discuss them with.

I wish I could make it to the conference, just once. Last year it was vacation and this year my second child will be a week old. Is it going to be the same week next year? If so, I will plan around it.

It's always been hard to get presentations. Maybe we should ask the user community what kind of incentives it would take to get them to present??? Free admission to conference; Free copy of ME10 or SolidDesigner? There definitely are a lot of topics....

Well it turns out that a good number of generous people will give presentations at the conference. It was a good idea to publish the program - the topics look very interesting and should attract delegates. A little bit of a shame that there aren't more CAD papers. I hope more will appear on the list soon. What do others think about the program?

Mike, I want to reply to some of your concerns. Our CAD customer presentation total is climbing. We are up to 7 which by the way is more than last year. We have 15 PDM customer presentations which is an exceptional #. I was hoping to bring the # of CAD customer presentations closer to the # of PDM customer presentations. By the way, all of this is posted on our public website at www.cocreate.com/english/users/invite.htm. I should have looked at the different product newsgroups. It is a little to late now but I will definitely do that for next year. We are looking forward to a good conference. We have learned many things from last year and expect this to be an even more successful event. For those of you attending the conference. I try to get weekly updates posted on our public website. This includes Vendor fair details, presentation details, and eventually a detailed agenda and map.

Brad, Thanks for replying. Glad to hear that the number is climbing. I'm not trying to complain, only concerned. I've had this same difficulty in previous years. It seams that even when you try to start early we still have the problem. I agree with Bob's comments concerning incentives. We as a group could address this issue at the business meeting and maybe we'll have even more response later on.

Mike, I appreciate your concern regarding the timeframe for the preparation of previous and current user conferences. I agree that we should be planning things earlier. The problems with the past two conferences are due primarily to organizational changes. Of course, we will always have organizational changes but we are taking steps to ease the transition should this occur in the future: 1) I will put together a "kit" at the end of this conference with deadlines and guidelines for next years conference including recommended changes. 2) We will pick the site for next year shortly after this years conference. 3) We'll get on track with the newsletters In addition, we have this website and the cocreate webpage to communicate now. It has taken a year but I think everyone is getting used to using this medium.