Admin 2004
Friday afternoon my telephone rang and
I was surprised to be receiving a call from someone at the View promoting
their conference Admin
2004. It's not that the View doesn't
always heavily promote their conferences via email and snail mail, but
I can't recall ever receiving a phone call. It made me wonder if the market
for Notes/Domino conferences has changed.
In the beginning there was only Lotusphere,
the Lotus developer conferences and Lotusphere Europe. Then came the Advisor
and View conferences, with the Advisor focusing on developer conferences
and the View on a conference for administrators. In the years since, Lotusphere
Europe and eventually the Lotus developer conference have faded away and
the View has added developer conferences, workshops and seminars of their
own to the mix. Still, their was no real competition for conference attendees
in the Domino Administration space.
The past couple of years have seen new
European developer conferences enter the landscape. The ones I'm aware
of take place in Germany. They are :
Also in the mix is COMMON which in addition to other IBM related topics, offers Lotus Notes/Domino developer and administration sessions for iSeries users.
As a whole, conference attendance has been down in the US since 2001. Security concerns and economics have both played a roll, but I'm also wondering about the impact of outsourcing. Has the consolidation of Domino administration into large outsourcers drastically reduced the pool of potential attendees, or is it that the market is mature and the number of new Notes/Domino shops, and therefore the number of new Domino administrators seeking education has been reduced? Or is it that most administrators are able to, and would rather go to Lotusphere at this point?
I have personally never attended the Admin conference even though it is held in Boston, so I can't speak to the quality of the offerings or the size of the audience over the years. So I'm left wondering if - it's economics, market maturity, content, market size or something else. What do you think?
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