Shedding Some Light

The biggest questions I got about the Southwest Fox speaker list was:

1. Where is Craig Boyd’s name?
2. How could we freeze out Craig Boyd from speaking at your conference since he is one of the more popular speakers in the community?
3. Do you and Craig have a problem since you replaced him at OzFox?

(OK, I made up the last one, but heck, there is not enough turmoil and friction in the Fox Community at the moment {g})

I was considering creating a FAQ page on the site just so I could point people to it. If I had a dime for every time I had to say: we would have loved to pick Craig Boyd, but he did not submit sessions, I think I could be closing in on fully funding two kids in college.

So now that Craig has officially let the cat out of the bag on the real reason he was not on the initial list of speakers (and why his blog has been quiet – leading to a huge drop of VFP on the Tiobe index), it is my great pleasure to announce he is speaking at Southwest Fox 2007! Even if you don’t want to read the details of the real reason, you have to check out the cute picture of Scarlett Elizabeth Boyd.

I will keep you in suspense a little longer about the sessions (Doug will get the Web site updated with the new sessions when he gets a moment on Monday or Tuesday) to help get some traffic to the SWF Web site, but I can guarantee you will find them very Boyd-esk.

I cannot wait until October!

I am very excited to announce SweetPotato Software Inc. (owned by VFP MVP and Fox Guru Craig Boyd), and Cully Technologies, LLC (owned by Kevin Cully who runs the FoxForward conference) are Bronze sponsors added today for Southwest Fox 2007!

Craig has been helping the organizers by hosting the Southwest Fox Web site and handing administrative details concerning the email accounts we have. This has been a huge help behind the scenes here at SWF, and is one of those things we flat out have not had to worry about.

Both of these gentlemen are huge supporters of the Fox Community and we are very excited to have them aboard as sponsors. You can check out the complete list of sponsors on the Southwest Fox 2007 sponsors page. Please help us show appreciation for their support of the conference and Fox Community by visiting their pages, and checking out their offerings.

Thanks again guys.

Yes, I religiously read Eric Sink’s blog (Eric.Weblog()) and find the posts very optimal, extremely useful, and enlightening. In fact, Eric would be on my short list of CEOs to invite to a CEO Weekend Retreat.

So when he posted his Trip Report: SD West 2007 back in March and offered the Evil Mastermind shirts I took him up on his offer. I am always up for a free geek shirt. Just ask my kids who think my entire wardrobe is made of of geek-ware.

So here is my obligatory photo:

So have I sunk to the level of promoting someone’s company for the sake of getting a shirt? Sure, but I don’t promote products or companies unless I believe they service their clients well. I really like SourceGear’s SourceOffsite. It is a great product. If you are using Visual Source Safe (VSS) and need to access the source code repository outside of your network (i.e over the Internet via a VPN), it is a tool I consider indispensable. I consider it indispensable even when working with VSS on my network. It just plain works better than the VSS client.

I see Rick Borup got his shirt too and is making an offer to Southwest Fox attendees. Another Southwest Fox speaker Alan Stevens also got his shirt. Hmm, am I sensing a trend here? Maybe we won’t need speaker shirts! {g}

Interested in getting your own shirt? Go here… and they will be giving them away at Tech-Ed if you are in Orlando next week.

I want to make sure to thank the newest sponsors of Southwest Fox who recently signed up:

DBi Technologies (Gold)
Moxie Data (Silver)
Micromega Systems (Gold)

I think it is very important to recognize the companies who are supporting the conference and the Fox Community. All three new sponsors are going to be vendors at the show too. Each of these companies (along with our first set of sponsors West Wind Technologies, Stonefield Query, Tomorrow’s Solutions LLC, and White Light Computing) have really stepped up and helped us out, and each have offered to do more if asked.

We have a lot of people already registered and the deadline for the early-bird registration is still more than a month away. This is very exciting and very encouraging since we only expected a couple of people to register right away and the bulk to register closer to the deadlines.

The organizers of Southwest Fox have always supported FoxPro user groups over the years. All three of us have presented at user groups across North America and two of us are directly involved in the day-to-day operations of our local user groups.

So we sat down and tried to figure out a way for Southwest Fox to benefit the FoxPro user groups. Normally you see conferences like Southwest Fox offer attendees a discount off the registration. While this is nice for the attendees, it really does nothing for the user group, and is a pain to deal with administratively.

With this in mind, we came up with a new concept for user groups to make money by getting their members to attend Southwest Fox 2007. Basically, we will help the user groups by giving $25 back to the group for every member who attends our conference. We figure most user groups can use the cash to cover expenses of the organization, or can help cover the costs of travel for outside speakers (we know most groups cover these costs).

All the details are on the Southwest Fox Web site, check out the “User Group Discount” link in the site menu. I think we figured out a painless process to administrate this discount.

This is a really cool way for us to show our support and give back a little to the Fox Community.

Don’t belong to a Fox user group yet? What are you waiting for? Not one in your area? Drop me an email, or give me a call and I will be happy to talk about my experiences in helping set up the Detroit Area Fox User Group and running it for more than a decade.

Sessions, Speakers, Sponsor, Registration is open, and Scholarship news!

It is my extreme pleasure to announce the sessions and speakers for Southwest Fox 2007 are posted on the conference Web site. Check it out. See how blessed we are to have a great speaker lineup offering great topics during the conference. I am very geeked by the knowledge these individuals are bringing to Southwest Fox in October. The line up is very strong and packed with expertise.

The sessions are top-notch material you will be able to us immediately in your VFP development. The presenters know we require each session to have a white paper you will be able to reference when you return home.

You can review the sessions by speaker, by track or alphabetically. Sliced and diced. We have color coded the tracks so you can see what sessions belong to what track.

I also get to announce our first sponsor – West Wind Technologies. Rick Strahl has been one of the brightest stars in our community and has really stepped up to support our conference as a sponsor, and is hosting a Web Connection 5.0 training session a couple of days before Southwest Fox at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center. You can make it a two-for-one trip with some Web Connection training as the opening act and Southwest Fox as the second act.

Registration is now open. We have a bank of operators waiting in our call center ready to take your call. OK, we have one operator waiting in my office ready to take your call. But seriously, if you are trying to be the first to register, the opportunity might be available. I know you are all a very competitive bunch {g}.

White Light Computing Scholarship – this is not on the Southwest Fox Web site yet (because I forgot to tell Doug to add it)… White Light Computing will be offering a $300 scholarship again this year to one attendee. The name will be drawn from all the attendees who register during the early-bird period (ends July 1, 2007). More details to be posted soon.

So get in early, save US$75 on the registration fees, get one free pre-conference session, and a chance to get more than half of the registration cost covered by my company. Hope to see you in Mesa in October. Only 170 days to go!

(updated to link to the SWF 2007 Web site)

…the envelope please…

When I talked to Bob about taking over Southwest Fox he told me a number of things that I should be worried about, and all the work that would was ahead of me. He did not warn me how difficult it would be to pick the sessions and the speakers for our event.

I knew it was not going to be easy since we determined the budget would allow for 14 speakers and last year there were 19 speakers. I also know we wanted to invite some “rookie” speakers to grow the speaker community. This is something we admired about Whil’s approach in the past with GLGDW and something I know Kevin did by default with his approach for FoxForward. This meant we could not invite a handful of speakers back from past Southwest Fox conferences, and I knew this would make the speaker selection the hardest part of being an organizer this year.

The submissions surpassed my high expectations. The quality of the abstracts and the ideas presented blew me away. I could have easily invited everyone if we were charging US$1200 per attendee, but we are not so we had to get picky. I remember my first email after seeing the list from Tamar: “Holy….” (ripping off the Volkswagen commercials {g}).

I spent one morning evaluating and rating the choices. Sorting the table, dumping it to Excel and seeing how the sessions rated. Then the hard work started. I had to begin the elimination process. Every session had some merit, but we only had room for 28 sessions because we are committed to giving most sessions twice (there will be some sessions in the Fundamentals track given only once). I think I had something like 38 highly rated sessions. Some people submitted 3 or 4 sessions I wanted, but as a speaker I know preparing and giving four new sessions is completely unreasonable even though we are giving the speakers nearly five months to prepare them. Each of us (Doug, Tamar, and myself) whittled the list down to speakers we absolutely wanted to invite with some alternates. At this point we did some virtual wrestling and debating during a 1.5 hour conference call. Amazingly the three of us had picked 85% of the same sessions and the other 15% were not brutal since the session submissions were so good.

All of this was accomplished on Friday April 13th as we had posted on the Southwest Fox Web site. Some people interpreted this as the deadline to announce – I apologize for that, we should have added another set of dates (notes for doing better next year). We made the picks and then Tamar (who is ultimately the person in charge of speakers) wrote individual invitations to the speakers we selected. We had to wait to hear their acceptances before we started to send out the “sorry – not accepted” emails. All of this takes time and we waited patiently for the speakers to accept. I am happy to say that all the speakers we initially invited did accept. Those who did not get invited this year could easily be invited next year. It is sort of like going to the fruit market and picking the best apples from the stack. Returning a couple of days later and the stack will still have great apples to select from. Most of the people we could not invite still expect to come to Southwest Fox because they really like the conference.

This was a tough process that I am glad is complete.

I am really geeked about our session tracks, the offerings for sessions in the tracks, and the great people you will hear present the sessions. Here is the line up of speakers for Southwest Fox 2007 (sound of envelop ripping…):

Marcia Akins
Rick Borup
Toni Feltman
Tamar Granor
Kevin Goff
Doug Hennig
Whil Hentzen
Michael Hogan
Andy Kramek
Cathy Pountney
Steve Sawyer
Rick Schummer
Alan Stevens
Rick Strahl
Christof Wollenhaupt

Definitely a couple of surprises, eh?

I am not going to spoil the rollout of the session topics yet. We also have started to frame out the keynote, which will be kept under wraps until the night it is given, but you can trust me, it is not to be missed. So many surprises and so many things in the works, and probably more that we have not thought up yet.

Doug is hard at work on the Web site and we are hoping to roll this out Monday or Tuesday in time for the opening of registration on Tuesday. You will see all the sessions, the abstracts, and more of the compelling reasons we hope will entice you to join us in Mesa in October.

Based on some feedback from some folks who want to promote Southwest Fox on their Web sites we had some new banners created that are narrower than the original one.

Original:

New slightly narrower:

New portrait format:

Thanks again to Dave Aring for his excellent effort and rapid turnaround.

If you are interested in helping us promote Southwest Fox, head over to the SWFox conference Web site and click on the Promote Conference link on the left side menu. And thanks to everyone who is helping spread the word!