Pictures of AU

I looked at someones blog today and found a link to Pictures of AU 2005 . I was not able to figure out how someone can post an AU 2005 picture several days before the event – but this might just be me. Now, seeing those posts gave me an idea. I know, many of you will bring your digital camera (or camcorder) to AU and you will post your pictures to some public site. I was thinking of publishing pictures of AU 2006 to the new AU Online in December. If you tag your pic or video on any of the public hosting sites with “AU2006″, I will link to it from the NEW AU Online site (which will launch in December).
Feel free to share any links you find AU 2006 pictures on, on this post. We love seeing pictures with anything AU 2006 specific on them but would like to include anything clean and relevant. If you take pictures or vids of people, please include names if possible.

AU Changes

AU presenters have to submit classes by end of April.  The AU team works on selecting class/content and prepares content for AU during May/June/July to be ready for the AU web site to go live in early August.  Many of you registered the first week of the site being live – and by end of August we had received over 1/2 of the anticipated registrations for this year.  This said, it might have been a while since you registered and classes change.  Content changes, speaker availability changes – or we are made aware of errors on the website.   You might want to check AU website for most recent updates and changes.  Today, the presenter for GS41-1 (Gary Rosen) made me aware that his class was listed as advanced where as it should have been intermediate.   Most changes like this are noted on the update AU class update page.

Assessing Clients

Michelle Rasmussen from Rand will be teaching ED12-1 Assessing Clients and Preparing to Deliver Training at AU.  Her class is offered on Tuesday.  Michelle would like to do a short survey before her session.  If you are signed up ED12-1 (or are curios about it) please download the survey, complete it and send it to Michelle. Not only will this help you get more out of class, it will also help Michelle deliver a better, more tailored class.

Share you C3D project at AU!

Dave Simeone, Sr. Product Manager at Autodesk is looking for project samples for his Civil 3D class at AU.  See what Dave is looking for and if you have any project you would like to submit, send it to him.

You Found James Bond

Today we finished the first round of the “Find the Mystery Agent” on AU Connect and Steven, Susanne and LeAnne are the winners of a gift certificate for a spa treatment in Las Vegas.  The mystery agent was – surprise, surprise – James Bond.  Congratulations – and thank you everyone for playing.

 We will do another round of “Where is Waldo – type game” closer to AU.

Resellers at AU

Over the years we have noticed that quit a sizable number of Autodesk Resellers sent their staff to the event – some as exhibitors, others to meet with customers and many to take advantage of the great classes AU offers. We recognize that Resellers are a very important part of the greater Autodesk Community and this led us to offer the AU Co-Host Program this year. The co-host program is designed to allow resellers and their customers/potential customers to connect with each other, away from their usual place of business in a non-sales environment. We believe having your reseller at the event, will make it easier for you to continue the dialog after the event and allow the reseller to understand your needs better.

I believe 12 resellers are participating in this program this year. To see who they are, go to the Co-host Page on the AU website. One of the Platinum Co-host is BETECH Data from Denmark. This will be their 2nd time coming to AU and this year they will bring 80 of their  customers so they can experience AU.

We are looking forward to hearing what you think of the co-host program and if it did add value for you.

Make your own AU Agenda

If you have been to AU before, you know your name badge for the conference will include a listing of the classes your signed up for. If you have been, you would also know that you will receive a show guide with all classes listed – and this year, this is a pretty long list. From my previous posts, you may have learned where classes are and may have verified that you did indeed select the best class for each timeslot. How can you combine all this information (and more) into something that might be useful to you at AU. Answer is the AU 2006 Session Tool. This Excel worksheet includes all 482 courses of this years event and includes all relevant information about each course. You can filter by expertise, product, time, track, speaker – or any combination of the above.

• Timecode identifies all classes that happen at the same time.
• Occupany identfies all courses that are above 90% full as of Oct 21, 2006.
• Product column not 100%

You can use this document to make your own notes in the last column, sort document by timecode and then print your own AU Agenda on only those course you are interested in. If you signed up for a class and it does not meet your expectations, this list can help you quickly identify what other classes you can take at the same time.

Did you Select the Best Classes?

By now you know in which room each class will be offered.  But did you pick the best class for each time slot?  AU will have up to 38 sessions going on at any given time (7 hands-on labs and the rest lectures) Take a look at  AU Classes by Timeslot/Alpha

What could be done with the attached document? 
Print it out, and for each timeslot, pick your top 3 classes.  Hopefully you are enrolled in your first choice.  If you overlooked anything, perhaps you want to update your registration (Reg closes by Nov 10 – after that date, it’s all on a standby basis)

Where is my Class?

We finalized room assignments today. If you want to get the Lay of the Land now, take a look at this Classes by Room PDF. This information, together with some cool graphics is the meat of all the signs that will be produced for AU.

AU Speakers!

This year we will have 277 speakers that will teach 484 courses.  Of those 277 speakers, 98 work for Autodesk.   Like every year, we will ask attendees in every session to fill out a survey to evaluate the session and the speakers.  A speaker must have received a 8.5 or higher to be asked back the following year.  (A few years back, a fire alarm went off during class and some speakers did not make the 8.5 – but we invited them back anyway).  Please take the time to complete the survey – and we LOVE written comments.  It is often the comments that really tell the story what went on in class. 
Interested in becoming a speaker?  Every year, it seems we have about 20% new (new to AU) speakers.  Many start out as lab assistant.  Others signed up on the Speaker Corner and submitted a super cool class that we just had to have on the schedule.