VMworld 2018 Call for Papers

calendar Feb 20, 2018 · 2 min read · vmworld vmw2018 vmware  ·
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The Call for Papers for VMworld 2018 is now live, running until March 13th. As with last year, this is for both the US and Europe legs of the event, even though the Barcelona date has been moved to early November.

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This seems a little odd given the speed of change in tech, submitting a topic eight months before the event, but I’d hope that space is left in the program for new developments and releases to be covered when the show comes across the Atlantic.

If you’re interested in submitting a session, Eric Siebert has some good tips over on vsphere-land.com on how to get it approved. Having never submitted for the conference (with the exception of a vBrownbag appearance), I’m not going to offer any further advice from that point of view, but I do have one request as a regular attendee:

Appropriate Naming

Please, please, title and describe your session appropriately. Whilst phrases like “Deep Dive” or “Customer Story” often draw in the audience, they are going to leave disappointed if they get an introductory level view of the product, or the only reference to the customer is “we sold it to them”. A big crowd leaving bad feedback isn’t going to impress.

At last year’s event I saw some excellent Deep Dives - the vSAN Troubleshooting DeepDive (STO1315BE) and the vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive (SER1872BE) are great examples of talks with some awesome in-depth content. However I was in another “Deep Dive” where the presenters spent a sizeable amount of time giving an introduction to the product in question before trundling through marketing slides. I’m not going to name and shame here- I raised it appropriately in the session feedback at the time- but it did feel like I’d wasted an hour out of my schedule. Time at the event is valuable and limited, so attendees try and get the most out of every hour.

Don’t let this detract anyone from attending and registering for sessions- in my experience the majority of sessions are well labelled in the Content Catalog- but if you are thinking of presenting please make sure to describe your session correctly and help improve the experience even more. I’m looking forward to seeing what sessions are going to be on the list this year, and hoping to be there in person (subject to obtaining a conference pass).