After attending VMworld 08this past week, I was able to develop and document methods for attending the conference that are extremely effective. The intent is to avoid standing in line, avoid dull content, attend the best sessions, and know about the best after parties. Despite the fact that giving away this method may actually erode the advantage it gives me, I have outlined it below.

1. Arrive just a couple of minutes before doors open for the morning keynote. Follow the guidance of the ushers, but at the first chance you get go directly to the press / analyst area near the front and sit down. Get out notebook and begin looking as busy as possible, which usually means catching up on twitter.

2. Arrive about 5 to 10 minutes late for all breakout sessions. You won't have to stand in line and you can still get a great seatby just walking to front row. This also allows you to avoid the intro slides and get there just in time for the best content.

3. Use twitter constantly. This has lots of advantages. The biggest is that you can find out what the good sessionsare, so that when your session is a dud, you can go directly to a much better session.

4. The second benefit of twitter is that you will hear about all of the parties and dinners that people are attending AND hopefully get yourself invited. To get invited you will need to have done enough twitter posts that others know you are and are curious enough to want to see what you look like.

5. Wait until the last day to get trinkets and swag from the expo hall. None of the exhibitors want to take that stuff home and they will absolutely load you down with bouncy balls, t-shirts, and usb memory keys just to avoid having to pack it back up.

Just a having a little fun on Friday with this post! I hope that everybody enjoyed the conference as much as I did.

Todd

I used the auto session builder thing on vmworld.com to put together my schedule for the conference. Tool works great. I went through and 55 sessions that I really wanted to attend, unfortunately the auto scheduler can only deal with 30, from which it helps you to resolve conflicts and schedule about 5 or 6 a day. This indicates to me just how good I think the conference will be this year. I plan to check out all of the sessions that I couldn't attend via the vmworld.com site after the show.

I also put together a very rough outline of blog posts and tweets I would like to do while at the show. I'm sure that this schedule will completely change once I get to Las Vegas, but the exercise was good to get me thinking about everything from a tweetand blog perspective. I'm looking forward to meeting many from twitter and delltechcenter.comthat will attending.

Todd