A usual, the last day of a conference ends on a half day... so I imbibed some Chimay Red with lunch. I was able to get a few others in the crew to follow suit. The usual suspects, indeed...

Michelle won the cookoff to see who had the coolest ECM implementation... woot! The prize was one "silver" ladle, and a $100 gift certificate. Besides Folios, annotations, and the new Site Studio contributor, she showed off Kyle's PicLens integration with Stellent's RSS Feeds, which went over quite well... nice and flashy! The roadmap and ECM focus groups were good as well... although in the future I'd do the cookoff first, then the roadmap, and lastly the focus group. That way, people have their feature lists and questions fresh in their mind.

As usual, a conference this large left me feeling like I missed out on a lot. I networked with a lot of people, and discussed ECM a lot... but I wanted to learn more about identity management, performance tuning, and Hyperion. There were simply too many options, and the handful of non-ECM talks I attended were a tad too high-level for my taste. Maybe I'm too technical, but I don't feel like I learned that much.

Brian Dirking wanted some feedback, so I guess I'd make the following suggestions:

• After people register (and pay) for Collaborate 09, give them access to the presentations from 08. Then we'd better be able to determine who is a good presenter, what topics are too technical, or which ones aren't technical enough.
• Have some level of continuity between years... I've given the "50 ways to integrate with the content server" talk about 4 times, but its always a bit different, and people continue to be surprised at how flexible Stellent is.
• Have some kind of easy trends analysis to help people find "what's hot" in their industry. Ideally this would be community based, to avoid sales pitches and promotions. For example, send out a survey to ask people what their industry is, and what topics they are interested in... perhaps even which technologies or presentations that they might find useful.

I'm used to more focused conferences, like the O'Reilly ones... so this many high-level presentations makes me sad. I personally would like a bit of community feedback to help everybody find which topics are most relevant to their background, goals, and needs.

Not an easy undertaking... but I'd wager a lot of conferences would appreciate something similar.