The OneStrand Team apologizes for not writing earlier about the exciting activity that took place at the 2017 ATA e-Business and S1000D User Forum. With such a long distance to travel to get to the conference, the team took some time off for a summer holiday in Europe while we were on that side of the world!
Now that we are all back on deck and into the swing of things, we knew it was time to put pen to paper (or keyboard to HTML page) and share our feedback.
The Vendor Hall and Networking Area was beautiful and dare we state, the best setup we have experienced in the last 10 years! Our Vendor stand started setup at 1pm and by 3:30pm, people were waiting to talk to us as we finalized the setup. The Welcome Reception was held in the vendor area, which made our first night of networking easy as we did not have to relocate, allowing us to socialize with our industry friends until well past the 8pm closing time on the first evening.
Tuesday morning kicked-off at 7:30am sharp with a delicious breakfast in the Vendor hall area, followed by an 8:30am briefing from the three S1000D parent organizations AIA, ATA and ASD. This was followed by the highly anticipated Keynote Speaker, Jack Shaw, discussing how Airline digital transformation is at the intersection of emerging technologies. This was definitely a great start to a successful event!
There were a few sessions around data conversion; obviously, each session was taken from a different start point and lessons learnt based on the required version of S1000D. Interestingly, Naveh Greenberg from Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), who normally speaks on the topic of data conversion, chose to talk about Quality instead and it was a popular session as quality sometimes seems to be the forgotten subject during these events. Naveh did touch upon some great points as depicted and we would recommend a review of his slides that were provided to everyone after the conference.
The Gala Reception on Tuesday night was at Amsterdam’s historic St. Olof’s Chapel. Our team loved the fact that you could only gain access to the oldest Chapel via the underground corridor inside the NH Collection Barbizon Palace Hotel. An awesome adventure and a wonderful evening of networking with old and new friends over great food and drinks!
Our Wednesday morning started with another delicious breakfast at 8am in the Vendor Hall before sessions commenced at 9am. Later that morning, Tammy presented our topic on ONE View, ONE Team with the OneStrand TDM Portal. The presentation was well received and people appreciated that once again we put the effort into performing a live demonstration of our portal and hosted AIR platform via the hotel Wireless connection. The recording of Tammy’s session will go live next Monday.
As happens every year, Reeta performed back-to-back demonstrations starting on Monday and finishing after the conference ended on Wednesday, so that she could join the OneStrand Rocket war. Yes these little hot rockets were extremely popular, so popular that even the USA TSA confiscated some of our friends on the way back in through US Customs, but please know we have since replaced his Rockets.
Some of the key takeaways our team brought back with us as we begin to prepare for next year was on the topics of Affordability, End Users and IETP Delivery Platforms. In addressing all topics as we approach next year’s 2018 conference in New Orleans on September 10th through 13th (as announced), it would be good to see some end users of S1000D systems present to let us know firsthand what challenges they face daily. We believe their feedback is critical to improving our product, instead of receiving the information through the Program Management viewpoint.
The OneStrand Team looks forward to sharing our TDM Portal presentation with you next week. In the meantime, do not to hesitate to call or email us if you have any specific questions regarding what we learned at the ATA e-Business and S1000D User Forum this year in Amsterdam.
We look forward to seeing everyone at the 2018 S1000D User Forum in New Orleans.
Tammy, Melissa and Reeta