Hey guys,

I’m going to recap day 1 of CISD’s Annual Tech Conference and Expo, which targets the IT field in Louisiana. Overall I found the majority of the presentations enjoyable, but here goes what I took home from the conference personally.

The Keynote by Ed Driesse

The keynote speaker was the new CIO of the state of Louisiana. The man is passionate about what he does and it comes across in how he speaks. His vision is of a unified state system that has the necessary branches of information per department.

Ed spoke of how there was no unified users database for the state, and if one existed that the redundancy of the system would be minimized. He also spoke of the need for greater disaster recovery, and a unified recovery for all departments of the state.

Christopher Reade on “Who visits my site and why?”

I found Christopher’s speech especially interesting. Chris covered how aggregated clickthroughs do not give an accurate snapshot of site usage, and with tools such as CrazyEgg.com you have a deeper understanding of the website’s usage.

Christopher’s presentation was sadly rushed, because I would have loved to hear what else Chris had to say.

Optimizing your Infrastructure by Eric LeBlanc

Eric is a representative of Microsoft, but he gave a speech that anyone would value. Eric’s speech covered the future of how Microsoft products will make IT easier. For instance, the loose coupling between Vista and the hardware on a machine would allow for images to be made that can transcend the hardware barrier.

I don’t if you’ve ever had to deal with ghosting computers, but the truth of the matter is that any image on XP was so hardware dependant that if the hardware was purchased identically you would run into a large amount of difficulty when imaging. And even when they are identical, you still have trouble with the SIDs.

Apparently with Vista and some upcoming products, these concerns have been vastly minimized.

Conclusion

I haven’t mentioned every speaker, but I mentioned the ones that I felt gave something I could appreciate. Sadly I’m bed-ridden today and won’t make the second day of the conference, but I did see the speakers I was in particular looking forward to.

I’ll definitely be making the effort to attend next year as well.