[Educause 2004] Opening reception and dinner with Meeting Maker folks

Tonight was the opening reception for the Educause 2004 conference in the Exhibit Hall. Educause has gotten huge - something in the neighborhood of 6-8,000 people!

Is it just me, or do the exhibits at these trade shows seem completely off the mark? I wander around, wondering if there's anybody who can really talk to me about the things I want to know about product lines. I went by the Novell booth to see if I could talk to somebody about their upcoming desktop Linux product, but nobody at the booth knows anything about it. Then I went by Apple to see if anyone can talk to me about whether the WebDAV client in Tiger will be able to work over SSL and to find out more details about authentication in the Jabber server in Tiger server - but again, nobody at the booth knows details about that kind of stuff. Oh, well.

I had a nice time chatting calendaring with Debby Umbach, Ed Karish and Michael Harris from Meeting Maker. They are trying to understand the lay of the standards landscape. One thing we're all wondering is what's the state of RSS event standards. I talked up the CalDAV and Calsify efforts, and it sounds like they'll participate in future interop and CalSched consortium meetings.

And now to sleep, in order to make it to the 7 am speaker's breakfast tomorrow (ugh).