Welcome to the SDN Day at or actually just before SAP TechEd '06. In the never ending quest to better serve you we listened to your feedback and have combined last year's SDN meets Labs with the presentation part of the SDN Clubhouse to a whole day of SDN festivities.
Last year you really liked the SDN Meets Labs we did in Palo Alto, Walldorf and Bangalore, but you also told us that it is hard to convince your company to send you to that event in addition to TechEd. This is why we combined it and start TechEd a day early and focus on just SDNers. In Las Vegas the SDN Day is going to be on Monday September 11th.
We also had lots of Top SDNer sessions in the TechEd Clubhouse last year, often in parallel to the general sessions. This year we made sure that your favorite SDNer sessions are integrated in the regular TechEd schedule. You can check out the Las Vegas SDN Sessions as well as the Amsterdam SDN Sessions. The Bangalore ones will be available soon too.
SDN will come alive at the SDN day. The goal is to have a day where you can meet, learn from and collaborate with your fellow SDNers. It is such a difference to have met top contributor Bhanu Gupta and Detlev Beutner at last year's TechEds. I hear their voices now in my head when I read one of their many posts.
This element of getting to know your fellow SDNer has center stage during the SDN day. The Unconference movement has been started by the realization of many people that the best things happening at regular conferences are the hallway conversations, the chance encounters with interesting people outside the sessions. I once went to a Brainjam here in the Silicon Valley and it really opened my eye for new possibilities.
One of them is the Power Networking session right after the Welcome. Participants come together in groups of 6 for 20 minutes of networking, which will be repeated 3 times. Giving you the chance to connect on a semi deep level with 20 of your fellow SDNers. My suggested 4 questions to answer are: Who am I? What am I working on / current challenges? What do I hope to get out of the SDN day as well as TechEd? How do we make it happen this week? It is amazing what you can learn during these sessions.
Agenda Framework
08:00 a.m. — 09:00 a.m. Conference Registration and Check-in Continental Breakfast
09:00 a.m. — 09:20 a.m. Welcome SDN
09:20 a.m. — 11:00 a.m. Power Networking: Four 20-minute Sessions with Six SDNers per Table
11:00 a.m. — 12:30 p.m. SDN Breakout Sessions (3-5 in parallel)
12:30 p.m. — 01:30 p.m. Lunch
01:30 p.m. — 06:00 p.m. SDN Breakout Sessions (3-5 in parallel)
06:00 p.m. — 09:00 p.m. Fun Evening Event
True Unconference would be to put up a whiteboard time slots and rooms for people to write down what session they are offering when and others to just join them. We will leave some space for spontaneous sessions, but we also give you the opportunity to suggest a session in advance. Via this webform. (Unfortunately we haven't integrated the form with SDN yet, so you have to tell us your name, email and phone number again. Sorry.) What sessions are we looking for? Simple sessions that show solutions that would interest other SDNers. BPXers are welcomed too, if they provide enough sessions we may even be able to do a seperate BPX track.
For the more traditionalists, we are also offering one 6 hour SAP Discovery System Workshop.
Featuring the SAP Discovery System for Enterprise SOA, the Discovery Workshop provides a hands-on look at how a typical business process can be enabled at each step with the latest SAP technology including SAP Visual Composer and Adobe Interactive Web Forms. This workshop has been held to great success before ASUG and Sapphire this year as well as in a couple of locations around the world. They promised to have version 2 ready for our enjoyment by then.
SAP TechEd '06 Registration for Las Vegas is open. Please sign up and while signing up you can mark that you want to participate in the SDN Day too. Which I think is very convenient. The admission fee, which doesn't even cover all costs of room, tech support, food and evening event is only $200.
Now if you are one of our Top Contributors and have earned at least 500 points on SDN in the last year (Since last contest) as a token for our appreciation we let you in for free. You have still time to get over the line of 500 points. We count until Friday, July 28 at 5:00 p.m. PDT. The danger is of course that we will be sold out by then.
Another way to guarantee you a place at the SDN day is by offering a session via this webform. (Sorry that only gets you in for free to the SDN day, but not for all of TechEd.) If there are more offers than sessions available we will form a committee of SDN elders to select the winners. Deadline for posting your session for Las Vegas is also July 28. If your session is not selected we will hold a place for you to pay even if we are sold out for the general public at that time.
Update: If you have enough points to get in for free to the SDN Day or you give a session, don't sign up through regular registration. We don't want to go through the refund process. We have set aside tickets specially for you and will send you the discount code and separate link to sign up next week. Questions regarding the SDN day can be sent to sdnday@gmail.com.
Stealing shamelessly from John F. Kennedy: Don't ask what SDN Day can do for you, ask what you can do to make the SDN day better.
If you SDNers come with such an attitude the SDN day will be an amazing event.
