Today is the Day

Catalyst has begun. We have special interest groups that are starting at 8:00AM. Workshops start at 1:00PM today. Registration opened yesterday. This is where we see if our months of planning are going to pay off.

There are still some things to do, but I think we are mostly ready to pull this conference off. The registration system is running well. The speaker management and presentation management system is up and you can download from it. The schedule/meeting management piece had a problem yesterday and we have the vendor working on it. I hope they can get the problem figured out.

Burton Group employees from around the world started to arrive yesterday, and I was able to talk to some of the guys I usually IM or phone with. This is one of the weird things of being in a virtual company. You spend a lot of time working with people that you rarely meet and interact with. I work out of an office with about 50 other people. But there is another 75 people that are not in the office. The rest of the company starts to arrive today and tomorrow.

Our attendance numbers for this years Catalyst are just about to pass last years. Which, in the current economic climate, is pretty good for us. We will have over 1150 paid attendees, 125 Burton Group staff, about 30 vendor attendees that assist us in pulling of the conference, and over 400 hospitality suite personnel. That is a lot of people.

The madness has begun.