Kudos to the MSPAlliance Education Committee

A bit late saying, but I wanted to share my positive impression of the MSPAlliance MSPWorld Conference held in Orlando two weeks ago.  The conference was well attended as usual and there was great knowledge exchange amongst the attendees.  I didn't get to witness the full educational content as I was working our Nimsoft booth, however I did see a fantastic opening educational activity (in a format I hadn’t seen before) that immediately followed Charles Weaver's opening remarks and the inspirational keynote speech by Craig Brenner of Kiva Systems. 

In the same general session room where Charles opened the conference the full set of ~175 attendees where broken into 4 groups, then members of the MSPAlliance Education Committee (seen and listed below) each approached an easel facing each of the 4 groups.  The MSPA Education Committee members were assigned one of 4 subjects to discuss with the group they were facing – the subjects discussed/taught were as follows;
 
-         New Service/Product Development
-         Sales/Marketing Techniques for 2009
-         Pricing Guidelines for MSPs
-         Vendor Selection

After 20-30 minutes of sharing/capturing ideas on the easel in front of their group the MSPA Education Committee member would shift to the next of the 4 groups – this shift was done 4 times so that each of the 4 groups would ultimately get the full set of education.  Keeping this all in one large room instead of separating into 4 smaller breakout rooms made for a high energy learning environment and experience – I could tell that the full room of 175 attendees were feeding off of each other.  Big kudos to the MSPA Education Committee for sharing their extensive knowledge with the MSPWorld attendees and managing knowledge exchange in this interesting training format.

Pictured below; The MSPAlliance Education Committee in action at the MSPWorld Conference in Orlando – the following committee members as listed and shown below led educational discussions as previously described;
 
Lane Smith - DoITSmarter 
Dan Wilson - Waypoint Solutions Group 
Mark Scott - The Utility Company 
Steve Moisoff - Mericit Systems