by Esther Barthel, CTP, Lead Mentor Women In Tech &

Theresa Miller, CTP, Lead Mentor Women In Tech

Today was destined to be an exciting adventure with quite the agenda of things to do. The list was endless starting with the keynote this morning, blog posts to write, the Women In Technology Luncheon, helping put out a fire with an issue back at the office, sessions, Geek Speak planning and finally endless invitations to events in the evening. There’s a lot of information to process on these days, so I’m hoping my brain can keep up with all the excitement.

The keynote was great, in fact I feel it was even more exciting than the day before. I am especially excited about the development of Workspace Hub. Between this device and the Octoblu, Internet of Things backend the way we will automate our work lives in the future will have endless possibilities.The open architecture of Octoblu offers so many possibilities that it will be up to us to create new ways to do our work and be supported by IT in the best ways possible. I am looking forward to be part of the creativity that is sparked with Octoblu.

After the keynote, we both hosted tables at the Women in Technology Luncheon. It was wonderful to collaborate with other women at the conference. Learn more about their trials and tribulations, while creating new friendships over a nice lunch. I enjoyed the event and look forward to attending again next year. It was great to meet not only a lot of new women working in IT, but this year we also had men accepting the open invitation and join the luncheon. Even Mark Templeton dropped by and shared some thoughts with us.

From there it was time to resolve an issue back at the office causing an outage. Fortunately, from start to finish that was resolved in less than an hour. Next up some blogging and by the time all the work was done there wasn’t any time for sessions, so next up hair and makeup for Geek Speak Live! We are doing this extra special with Geek costumes and all. Going to be a lot of fun!

With all the great networking activitities on the Synergy agenda it is a challenge to attend those really great sessions that are out there. I especially like the Geek Speak track. Not just because they are presented by the Citrix Technology Specialists (CTPs), but because they are focused on the user experience and technical implementations of the products. Filled with useful tips and a trick or two. Between the WIT luncheon and all the preparations for Geek Speak Tonight I was able to attend a session and see some Citrix Lifecycle Management in action. For a product that doesn’t have a GA status just yet, it sure looks very promising. I look forward to having my own testdrive and share my experiences.

And then it was time to dribble around a bit nervously as Geek Speak Tonight was almost there! Even though I sign up very enthusiastically to a lot of public speaking events, I always have some nerves to battle and prepare myself to step out of my comfort zone. With a geeky theme it sure was fun to pick out a costume that would be a good representation of my geekiness. And dressing up as a minion after putting the little guys into my presentations only seemed fair to them 😉

Being part of the CTP program we know how much time, effort and enthusiasm was put into the preparations and I felt bad the demo gods were not rooting for us tonight. Nevertheless, I do think it was fun to see Mark Templeton going off script once more and joining Chris Matthieu on stage for some Geek excitement about all the fun stuff you can do with Octoblu. But I have to be honest …. the Octoband does need some work!

And for those that were able to stick till the end (I know a lot of parties already started before Geek Speak Tonight finished) I was excited about the GeekOvations. It really showed how we geeks love to share our tools, scripts and innovations with the community. So congratulations to Sacha Thomet for presenting and sharing his Citrix PVS healthcheck script with us.

And with Geek Speak Tonight the official program for the second day of Synergy ended, it gives us some time to catch up with the other CTPs, vendors, partners and attendees out there.