2015 KSCOPE - Party, Party, Party

Kscope has some great off piste networking. As well as the community service on Saturday, (and my Real Deep Dive), there was a great welcome event Sunday, community events on the Monday, buses to Hollywood Tuesday and the White party at Nikki Beach Wednesday, and the whole event finished with a full room at the wrap-up session.

Pete Sharman, Me and a local Florida Resident

Dancers for Conference Main Session

Ready for the White Party including Glass

In fact even the Board Introductions are a Party!

I had such a wonderful time with so many wonderful friends - I am blessed

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2015 KSCOPE - Gamification from UX IoT

I have spoken before of where I have found gamification to drive behaviours not originally intended, or where the things measured are not really what matters, but the Kscope gamification this year was excellent.

The AppsLab part of the UX Team in Development, created their Scavenger Hunt for Kscope. The idea was to show use cases for IoT, and they used a number of methods to give points whilst driving positive behaviour at the conference. Taking part in off-piste activities, attending keynotes, submitting feedback, being part of the community.

People really loved it, the numbers at Chi Gung went up, people at least looked at doing other things and I even attended an APEX session!

I signed up early, and for about 5 minutes was top of the list, but there was 50 points for solving a rubix cube and that is far too technical for me!

Jeremy Ashley who leads UX and Noel Portugal from Apps Lab had a session where they talked about how they had built the app, and what they have learnt.

I think I helped there, Noel said 'If I could use it, anyone could' which is a bit like Cary Millsap once saying he thought of me as 'the lowest common denominator' but they are probably right.

Anyway I had a number of issues, the app needed you to tweet. You could tweet from within the app and it wouldn't work for me, nothing appeared in my twitter stream. So I tried using the app I normally use, Hootsuite and every time I tweeted a photo I got a message from the team saying:

After a fair bit of detective work we discovered that the problem with Hootsuite is it doesn't show a photo, it creates a link, it needs to be either the app itself or from Twitter.

The original problem, wasn't a problem, I assumed that because I registered as @debralilley, then that is where my tweets would originate from; no; it took my twitter app configuration and used that. If I had a single identity, that would be ok, but I use Twitter on my smartphone for work as @certuscloud, so I had been tweeting, but as them. Luckily this happened over night in the UK and I was able to delete them.

This was two things not developed for, normally the UX team would validate their work with user labs, as they do for cloud apps, but they were up against time here. Guess I was the onsite validator, and they will be fixed for the next iteration, which I hope will be UKOUG 2015 in December. 

To see the winners are read about what went into it, read their own blog.

Oh and I think I finished 9th (scores no longer online) based on this tweet:

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2015 KSCOPE - Passion in Action

In the last post I mentioned I accidentally attended the APEX kick off session. How I got there was because I was kicking off the Kscope Scavenger Hunt and you got points for attending one of the kick offs. I was busy working for the day job and intended to stay for just a few minutes, but the speaker caught my attention and I stayed till the end.

The speak, Joel Kallman, spoke with Passion, that is passion with a capital 'P'. Product Managers are meant to be passionate, they are evangelists for their technologies. I often talk about my passion for what I do and if just a tiny fraction of what Joel portrayed comes over, I will be happy.

His presentation was about the 'idea' that APEX cannot be used for an enterprise grade application. And he told about how from the moment he heard it, it worked towards collecting the imperial facts to prove it wrong.

I've said it many times, I believe people don't use APEX because they struggle to believe a 'no cost' option has value. Well Joel has launched his #LetsWreckThisTogether twitter campaign to get the message across and he is winning.

All of his talk resonated with me, and in my own strategy for PaaS4SaaS I use APEX for use cases that don't affect many users. I need to use ADF where there is an end user need not because APEX won't do it, but because I need the same UX as in Cloud and that is from ADF.

What really hit home was when Joel talked about how sales now want to know all about APEX, they still don't sell it, but it allows them to demo PaaS, and they want to sell that.

I'm not the only fan of Joel, Kscope gave hime their Oracle Contributor Award, well deserved:

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2015 KSCOPE - Sessions I attended

I go to Kscope to learn, I spent time planning the sessions I wanted to go to, but actually spent more time speaking to product managers, on how to expand what we are doing at work, and I cover this in the PaaS4SaaS Kscope entry.

I did attend the APEX kick off, but more on that in the next blog.

ODTUG covers 5 main areas, EPM (everything from Essbase to Financial Close), Database Development, APEX, BI, ADF & MAF. I guess I am part of the last area, I defiantly love ADF, this is the technology that gives Cloud Apps their rich user experience, and I attended a few sessions in this track, and it is where I gave my session.

I also attended an Hyperion Session from Sarah Zumbrum where she and a co speaker talked about how they use Essabse for personal projects. She for her Triathlon training and Bruan Bain talked about Fantasy Football. They were great use cases that everyone could relate to and really showed the power of the cube.

I also went to the YCC session on how they use BI to help them improve ODTUG. Crystal did a great job and I hope there are some take aways for UKOUG.

I also attended the UX sessions, which I cover in another blog, so the only stream I didn't attend was Database Development and I wish I had, sounds like the Tom Kyte and Steven Feurerstein YesSQL sessions were excellent.

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2015 KSCOPE - Community Service

One of the lovely things about Kscope is Community Service. People turn up early to take part in an arranged good dead for the local community. In the past I have painted schools, built PC desks, weeded sand dunes, cleared weeds in a community park and this year we were helping under privileged children with STEM projects.

Kscope made a fantastic video of the event which tells you all about it. (post later when made available).

ODTUG have a great reputation for helping their members. Last year everyone had been helping Mike Riley as he recovered from illness and this year it was all about help Chet Justice, who's autistic daughter loves 'TaDas' and many were recorded for her, including this one from our Real Deep Dive.

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2015 KSCOPE - Keeping Fit

Bit of an oxymoron me and keeping fit, but Kscope has many opportunities, starting with daily Chi Gung from Kent Graziano.

I have been going to Chi Gung at Kscope and OOW for the last 3 - 4 years but am useless. I can either do the exercise, or do the breathing but not both!

I started Chi Gung as I thought it would help my breathing for diving, but for Chi Gung I am meant to breath through my nose which doesn't work when diving and then you are meant to keep your tongue behind your teeth, that would actually make me spit out my regulator.

So it fails on all levels but I do enjoy it, and it is a great way to get energised at the start of the day.

Talking of Diving, the one sport I am addicted to - I arranged a special Kscope Real Deep Dive this year, hired a boat and took out 25 delegates plus Carol Dacko who came just to dive, out from Fort Lauderdale with Sea Experience. 

We had a mix up with the details and only got one dive and a second snorkel attempt, but everyone had a great day and I loved it.

I manage another two dives with Carol on Sunday and then 2 more with Holger Friedrich after the conference. Really mixing business and pleasure!

Oh, there was also a 5km and I was intending to walk it like I did at OOW, but I had to give my own presentation at 8.30 and no way would I have finished and showered before then :( 

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2015 KSCOPE - A wonderful Event

I love ODTUG and especially their conference Kscope. I'm not putting it above UKOUG but I have the time to enjoy Kscope, and it's where I go to learn.

Each year Kscope goes to a different venue and this year it was Hollywood, Florida, lovely place in June.

I can't go through everything I got upto, but here are a few highlights:

• Keeping Fit (LoL)
• Community Service
• Sessions I attended
• Passion in Action
• Gamification from UX IoT
• Party, Party, Party
• The ACE Program and WIT
• The Day Job (still loving it)
• Always on duty - UKOUG
• PaaS4SaaS and what's next

So you can see we all had a great time at Kscope and if you don't believe me watch their wrap up video.

I can't wait till #kscope16 next year when it is in Chicago, and yet again I left so jealous that the UK doesn't have the rich choice of conference venues available elsewhere. We may not have the choice of venues but the UKOUG agenda will be great, keep an eye out for details.