Greetings from N’Awlins

A couple folks have made the point that one shouldn’t evaluate a conference immediately after it ends, because the true impact of the event can only be measured days, weeks, or months later. But I’ve got some time to kill before I have to get a cab to the airport, and chances are I’ll never get around to writing anything when I get back home.

Anyway, we’ve just wrapped up the awkwardly but accurately named Small Business IT Disaster Planning for Risks and Crisis Recovery conference, a.k.a. the SBSMigration.com IT Pro Conference 2007. The two day meeting was heavy on content, heavy on networking, heavy on fun, and refreshingly light on sales pitches.

Day One presented a series of case studies about disaster preparedness and recovery from a variety of perspectives, including that of a New Orleans veterinarian whose practice has survived fire, flood, and a few other calamities. (As it happens, he owes his survival as much to good luck as to good planning, but we shouldn’t let the lack of a good moral get in the way of a compelling narrative.) We discussed myriad ways that a small business IT consultant can mitigate the chance of a complete meltdown, including both improvements to his client’s systems and processes (disaster planning documents, data backup and other forms of redundancy) and to his own practice (vacation and emergency coverage, complete system documentation, liability insurance, etc.). Personally, I would have preferred the speakers to go into a bit more detail on some of these topics. For example, I already knew that having offsite backup storage is important. But we did not have time to get into the nitty-gritty techniques of things like media rotation and storage, backup for archive vs. backup for disaster recovery, pros and cons of various media options, guidelines for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of different approaches, and so on. Most attendees, however, responded that they got a lot of value from the discussions. And the conference organizers have promised follow-up materials on line.

Day Two was a bit more in depth technically. We heard from some folks on the Microsoft Small Business Server team about how today’s and tomorrow’s SBS technology can help businesses with data protection and recovery. Later we reviewed some of the specific things one must do to properly safeguard and recover data from a typical SBS installation. I found these sessions extremely valuable and wished we had another day to go into even more detail.

Of course, what really drew me to the conference in the first place and what would have made the whole thing worth it even if the panel discussions had been about cross-stitch and macrame rather than disaster recovery were the other people involved. These conferences are like the G-8 Summit of small business IT consulting. I solidified or formed new relationships with some of the world’s most competent and influential people from my industry. I wish I had had the chance to talk to every one of the 160 or so conferees. But for now, I’ll just give a shout out to a few of my peeps: Amy, Amy, Bob, Bob, Brian, Cal, Chad, Chris, Chris, Dana, Dave, Erick, Eriq, Ian, Jeff, John, Karl, Kevin, Les, Mark, Nancy, Roger, Susan, Vlad, Wayne: it was great to see / meet you. To all the others I was able to connect with and have omitted here, forgive me: I’m working on about 4 hours sleep here.

It’s check-out time. Beantown, I’m comin’ home.