It’s a bad idea. Co-locating the BI conference at TechEd has created a lot of confusion and annoyance. If people aren’t allowed to flow between the conferences, why have them together?
Brad McGehee ran into this yesterday when he went to attend a session and was turned away because he didn’t have a BI badge. That’s OK if it’s publicized, but I wasn’t aware that was an issue. Apparently quite a few people weren’t sure of this.
Today I was waiting for the BI keynote to open, annoying in itself. They kept the doors closed until way too close to the keynote, IMHO, and people were piling up by the doors. Then when a few people at the front tried to get in, they were turned away because they had regular TechEd badges. I was held up since they initially had press people “not on the list”, but after a few minutes, I was allowed in.
There’s some confusion as I saw a couple regular people in the auditorium that had come in the other door and hadn’t been stopped. Applying rules differently is a hassle for attendees and it goes a long way towards ruining the conference experience.
It would be easy to just put a small note in the schedules that say “BI only” so that all the people that registered for TechEd itself wouldn’t walk to a session only to be turned away.
The wifi is working in the auditorium, which is a relief. It was very spotty yesterday, and even died for a couple hours. Today there are less people in the keynote and hopefully it will hold.
