Recently in Conference Report Category

Although not conferences specifically tailored to the AEC professional, there are two events fast approaching in which Adobe Acrobat will receive top billing.

The first event is the Adobe Acrobat and PDF Central Conference scheduled for September 22-24 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's a great way to learn more about how Adobe Acrobat and PDF can solve your most critical business needs.

Several Adobe product specialists like Lisa Croft, Paul Gilbertson and PDF gurus like Ted Padova, Duff Johnson, Angie Okamoto, Bob Connolly, Thom Parker and others will be there to present and meet with Acrobat users itching to learn more.

Details are at http://www.pdfcentralconference.com/

The registration fee for the 2- day conference is $395, however if you become a member of the Acrobat User Community (Free) you will get $100 off the registration. You can't beat that!

So if you like go to: http://www.acrobatusers.com/events/1918/adobe-acrobat-pdf-central-conference to learn more.

The second event is the Adobe MAX conference. Scheduled for Oct 4th though the 7th in Los Angeles California. The conference offers hundreds of sessions and hands-on labs for designers, developers, and anyone interested in learning more about Adobe suite of products.

The Fiatech Technology Conference delivered once again.  For those of you who are not familiar with Fiatech or more importantly have not joined Fiatech need to engage.  I attend and sit through countless presentations that identify the issues that the industry currently faces, but what continues to impress me about this organization is it is delivering solutions for its members and giving a direction to the technology companies as it relates to standards.  The conference started with James Porter of DuPont not saying if they were going to implement ISO 15926 but how they were going to require it.  This was a very strong statement, and really indicates how far and viable ISO 15926 standard has become in truly addressing Interoperability.  Fiatech has delivered in many respects and now it is your opportunity to use and capitalize on it.  Adobe was able to participate in an emerging technology panel that gave us an opportunity to present our vision and direction.  For those of you who were unable to attend I would like to share some of this with you as well as give you some thoughts and opinions as it relates to the conference.

We are just getting back from daratechPLANT.  Adobe had a table top exhibit which took most of our time, but we were able to attend some of the key presentations.  The two goals we had for this show was evangelizing the EPC/OO community on the functionality we are putting into our applications to address their business needs, but also to keep up to date on the industry standards as they progress. There were several exciting announcements that came from Ric Jackson - Fiatech and Robin Benjamins - Bechtel.

I was able to attend the AIA/QUOIN Forum to hear Ken Simonson, Kermit Baker and Kim Kennedy speak on the 2008 Construction Economic Outlook.  I use Ken's outlook extensively in writing my business plan each year.   There was a quiet buzz in the room when I arrived, and it seemed like those in attendance where anxiously awaiting the news.  I wanted to hear how the talk of the economy possibly going into recession is going to impact the AEC industry and when the heck was the housing market going to improve.  It wasn't long before Ken delivered the news.

We had an overwhelming response at the Greenbuild Conference!  There were many interesting conversations over the course of 3 days.  The biggest question that we had to answer was "what are you doing here?" There are many reasons we attended and exhibited at the Greebuild conference, but here are my top 3.