International Spectrum 2013 Conference Report

Two representatives from Ladybridge Systems were at the International Spectrum Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, 15 – 18 April. We met with existing and prospective users, delivered a QM related presentation, and had a booth in the exhibition hall. If you were not at the conference, here is a little of what you missed.

Dating from the 1930’s, the Wigwam Resort is set in 440 beautifully maintained acres with over 330 guest rooms, four pools, nine tennis courts and three championship golf courses. There are four on-site dining facilties and further venues close at hand.

Monday

The conference opened with a breakfast and welcome address by Nathan Rector of International Spectrum. This was followed by three streams of breakout sessions covering topics mostly related to connectivity. Kevin King of Precision Systems displayed his usual infectious enthusiasm in highly informative and entertaining sessions on Apache, HTML and PHP. Other sessions on the first day included web services, GUI and event driven programming, and advice on how to talk to an SQL programmer without swearing.

During lunch there was a talk by Chuck Barouch on Augmented Reality in Business and a product specific presentation by Rick Weiser of DesignBais.

Tuesday

The majority of the day was devoted to four streams of breakout sessions. Kevin King continued his series of talks by showing how the power of cascading style sheets and jQuery can be used to achieve a great deal with minimal effort when building web sites. Susan Joslyn of SJ+ Systems Associates delivered a series of presentations on cyber security, IT governance and version control. Other speakers covered mainly topics related to web development and user interfaces. Ashwood Computer Company demonstrated their mvTools package for rapid development of GUI applications using AccuTerm.

These sessions were followed by the “Vendor Speed Dating” session Peter Schellenbach describes AccuTerm at which each vendor was invited to give a five minute presentation on why conference attendees should talk with them during the week.

The Exhibition Preview Party then gave an opportunity for attendees to see what was available in the exhibition hall and to enjoy the food and drink provided by the conference organisers.

Wednesday

The morning was devoted to a further four streams of breakout sessions, including Bob Rasmussen presenting Print Wizard, Peter Schellenbach showing how to convert a green screen application to GUI with AccuTerm, and Nathan Rector discussing disaster recovery planning – while being affected by a wide area disaster as a result of vandals cutting multiple fibre optic data lines!

The QM presentation this year was on Connectivity and Integration, looking at three critical interfaces in the QM product; QMClient for incoming connections from a variety of environments, the Virtual File System for access to external data stores, and the new External Call Interface that allows QMBasic programs to call subroutines written in other languages without compromising the managed environment of QM.

Lunch was served in the exhibit hall, giving attendees the opportunity to talk with the exhibitors through the afternoon, discussing the benefits offerred by use of the products being shown.

The day concluded with a Developer Lab and Expert Q&A session at which attendees were encouraged to discuss topics that might perhaps not be covered elsewhere.

Thursday

Three further streams of breakout sessions and a second Developer Lab and Expert Q&A session brought the conference to an end, leaving just the The closing party closing party for the evening. Held outside on a gloriously sunny evening, this was the final scheduled event of four busy and informative days though informal gatherings at the bar continued until late.

It was good to see that many of the product demonstrations during the week were run on QM. Feedback on our product was all very positive.

We look forward to returning to this spectacular venue for the 2014 conference, April 7 – 10. Hopefully you will be there too.