Well after  whirlwind 3 days SIGUCCS is wrapped up. The conference was a whole lot better for me than I ever imagined an in town conference would be.

Tuesday had more presentations, some good some rather lackluster. For me, the hardest part of Tuesday was that I had stayed up Monday at the conference. But that was fun nonetheless. The most intriguing presentation was one on this hosted FAQ/knowledge base from intelliresponse.com that York University is using called Supergeek. Intriguing to me, because it gives a clear way to solve many of the problems in IT, all without having to have someone call.

I also saw some amazing communications presentations at the poster presentaton. My favorite, largely because it was completely off the wall and fun, was from Texas A&M. Things like “The answers to all my bank security questions are on facebook” and other inventive things peppered flyers and table tents that they had on display. I was really impressed. The second place in my mind was the display from U of Chicago over their website. Talking to these folks, they consolodated over 100 separate IT websites for the one, which includes a Service Catalog. I know, not anything out of the ordinary for folks, but we’ve been struggling with it.

Now, I’ve said earlier that the highlight of the conference though wasn’t the presenatations though. It was definitely the people, and some of these same people that I went to presentations or looked at posters with were the ones I stood around with for hours talking about work sure, but also about life. For those of you that know me, I was big into Scouting when I was younger, and still am active as an adult now. Somehow it came out as we were standing around debating wether to do the poor man’s karaoke on Monday night, that many of the other folks I was often around were also big scouts (or guides for our Canadian friends). To me this was a weird connection for me, but one that made me realize there was a connection beyond colleague with these folks. (ok sappiness off).

The Gala event was quite fun. Private dinner at the Arch. Who does that? We saw the movie Lewis and Clark, had some amazing Route 66 inspired BBQ and cobbler, and went up in the Arch. There are probably going to be some pictures from the top of the Arch that will never see the light of day, or will be on a calendar. The whole thing didn’t feel like a conference, it felt like a party with friends. Which made the whole thing of actually having sessions on Wednesday rather odd.

But we did, and they were good sessions too. I saw a presentation on iTunesU implementation at Ithaca. Another thing we have been struggling for years to do it seems. And another on how the helpdesk, though essential, is usually left out of the planning and implementation of changes from the guys at U of Illinois.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever make it back to SIGUCCS (I’d really like to, especially if some of these other folk return), but I hope we can leverage some of what we saw and did here. Some of my colleagues, both at SLU and Webster are talking about perhaps some sort of regional collaboration group for higher Ed IT. Maybe we could learn from each other locally too. Its maybe a next step. And maybe something that I “cannot not do”.