No Sheep!

Summit 2006, A Great Success

// June 14th, 2006 // Technology Bits

In April Plymouth State University had a large showing at SunGard Higher Education Summit 2006. In fact, 13 PSU staff attended and gave 14 presentations.

While at Summit in Orlando it quickly became clear that PSU was a significant presence at the 7000+ attendee conference. A fairly substantial accomplishment for a small, public institution in northern New Hampshire. As a whole the conference was an amazing experience for many of us. We learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and felt a bit like rock stars for 3 days.

This was my third Summit attendance and the second time I was presenting. I personally had the pleasure of giving four presentations over the course of this conference. Two which were normal solo presentations, one less formal in the developers lounge, and a third with my colleagues Ken Kochien and Jen Hall. Being able to interact with this many people with great ideas, questions and general excitement was exhilarating.

New at Summit this year was the Luminis Developer’s lounge which was primarily organized by Jon Wheat of Messiah College and founder of the Luminis Developer’s Network. As far as I could tell, the lounge was a great success where many of us engaged in informal in depth discussions among each other and with some significant SunGard representatives including Vishal Goenka and Josh Horner. My time spent in the lounge was amazingly valuable and insightful.

I’m finally getting around to writing this article because I was notified today about the results of one of my two official solo presentations. Specifically in reference to the presentation titled Implement and Deploy Banner Channels. Apparently reviews on that presentation were exceptional, placing me in the top five Summit 2006 presentations. I left that presentation feeling good about it, but I was not aware it was that well received. As part of this recognition, I have been awarded a free 4 night stay in one of the Summit hotels for Summit 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada on March 19-22.

I figure I can take a brief opportunity to have a big head and share a subset of the comment feedback I received from the session evaluations:

• Best session yet. Did exactly what it said on the tin!
• Excellent Speaker–good topic–interesting discussion.
• Great presenter. Good info. Would have liked to see a few more technical examples. Good overview of deployment issues.
• He answered all my questions and saved me valuable time in guess work
• I found this presentation very helpful and found the speaker easy to identify with.
• Presenter seem real knowledgeable on the topic and seemed to appeal to many of the techies in the room.
• Totally relevent to where we are and what our issues are! Thanks!
• Very interesting and informative — hopefully this will help us dodge a few of these “gotchas”. Thanks!
• very knowledgable about issues that may be encountered, good advice on how to approach them for quicker resolution
• very well done, zach. timely topic, nicely presented.
• Zach held the best session I have been to all conference.
• Zachary is the Best presenter of the conference! Great presence with his audience!
• Zachary Tirrell was an excellent presenter, made the topic very interesting.

OK, so that is enough warm fuzzies to make me feel guilty about even posting it. Regardless, I have to say I would not have had any where near the success I have enjoyed with this if not for the support of the amazing MIS team I work with. Additionally, all aspects of ITS make any success we have with ventures like Luminis possible.

Summit 2006 rocked. From the great number of presentation we gave on varying topics, our Dan-athon through the Disney parks, the hilarious quotes extracted from our hugely entertaining group, to Laurianne’s participation in the closing session improv, Summit 2006 was a huge success for Plymouth State, my colleagues, and me personally. Here’s looking forward to Summit 2007 in Las Vegas!

conference, higher education, jon wheat, ldn, luminis, luminis developer’s network, plymouth state university, presentation, sct, summit, sungard, sungard higher education, zachary tirrell

Related items

• Summit 2006 Presentation Proposals
• Luminis Consulting
• Leveraging CAS with Luminis
• SunGardHE Case Study: Luminis Portal for Alumni at Plymouth State
• Luminis Modification Procedure