If you have not been to Autodesk University or have not been in many years like myself, it’s kinda like going on a cruise. The hotel (Venetian), is massive, there is lots of food and the there is always something to do. You definitely need comfortable shoes or gel inserts (I got mine the first day).
Tuesday started out with breakfast for the AUGI volunteers at 6:30. There were about 35 folks in that with lots of food and mingling. As I was leaving breakfast, I met and chatted with Curt Moreno from “kungfudrafter.com“. We had some similar thoughts on management and user issues, and I look forward to chatting with him more. After breakfast came the keynote address in a massive theater that seemed like it held all of the nearly 8,000 attendees. During the address, various speakers talked about the present day and future of our changing world and the technologies and people that are making it happen. There were some leading edge innovators introduced with one of the most interesting to me being a company called Techshop out of California.
A concept that was and has been a common theme through the AU event and in many of the sessions is “The Cloud”. My first session was an innovation forum called “The Promise of the Cloud”, which discussed the Autodesk Cloud and how it can be used. Cloud computing is not a new concept, but is just recently gaining a lot of press and exposure. I’m still getting my head wrapped around the various benefits, but it does seem to be the future of computing and storage.
The couple remaining sessions were on MEP 2012 and then a break in my room. I wrapped the day up at the evening expo and a “Birds of a Feather” session that discussed AutoCAD WS and it’s collaboration power. The discussion was led by Kal Houhou from the SMITHGROUP, based in Washington DC. Kal was very passionate about WS and Revit MEP. From the quick demo he presented, I got a quick feel for the power of what WS can do as a real time collaboration tool for multiple offices of field and office personnel. I will be doing an entire session on IPads and BIM in construction tomorrow.
