Knowledge Conference - Some thoughts on how to get the most out of it.

[scott barnard1]

So Knowledge 20 is coming up fast and some folk may be wondering what benefit they can get from going.

First off there is the cost of entry and the time away from your day job to justify. If you are local then it's less of a barrier but if you need to convince a budget holder on the benefits then there are a few things to consider.

This one is in Florida and that a lot easier than saying to a budget holder you want to go to Vegas for the week. That can be a real tough sell, let me tell you. International travel is expensive and America is not the cheapest place to stay but this is a once a year event you don't want to miss. Snugs are great, Dev meet ups cool but all pale when compared to Knowledge.

Tip one go get registered and get your goody bag and lanyard etc as early as you can. Queues get big on first day of conference itself and it's way easier to float in ready for your first keynote etc rather than be waiting in a queue to register.

The conference is a big affair and one of the massive things to think about is the simple raw number of folks there. As the conference progresses you will be next to strangers, waiting on sessions and hunting down food and power sockets whilst cussing the latest version of the mobile app.

There are a lot of folk there with varying levels of experience with ServiceNow. Some folk are there to make the choice about whether to go SN and others are longtime ServiceNow players with amazing amounts of real world experience.

Why does this matter you may ask? The expert resource pool this represents is enormous. Between conversations sat on the floor in a corridor, the Community lounge, the lunch table etc I solved some real issues that we were experiencing simply by having a series of cool conversations.

When the schedule comes out you may be tempted to pack your schedule with labs, breakouts and user exp sessions. These can all be great but I totally recommend making some time for the community lounge and the breakouts. Leave some time unscripted and meet folks. Massively worth it.

The key notes are cool and the DEV areas showing cool new features are great but a note of caution. SN are a fairly Risk tolerant organization and they will be showing you stuff that the paint isn't even dry on. So SafeHarbour is basically  - we will show you this stuff but it may not end up this way. So be aware that some of what you'll be seeing is 2 versions off if not more or it may never appear.

You will find a bunch of Partners and outfits with stands in the main conference hall. Now these are not ServiceNow they are folks that have made a business from their expertise in using SN to deliver some solutions. Definitely worth a look around these guys.

So there is a lot of other stuff that I've missed off like dev challenge, pre-conf training modules and such but you get a sense of the conference and the benefits you can get out of it. The more you put in the more you get out but for me getting the go ahead to go to Knowledge is always a huge plus for me.