Having completed four flights and 30 hours of travel to return home to Brisbane Australia, and now a couple of days of rest, I felt it was time to put pen to paper and share some of the activities we were involved in at the 2016 S1000D User Forum.
The turn-out was I believe better than most expected, with approximately 230 people attending Seville, including the head count from the vendors. Having only attended the conferences in the US in the past, for me the delegates were a nice mix of old and new faces, with some of those new faces being younger attendees getting up to speed on the specifications.
The layout for the Vendor stands was well presented and we immediately had people waiting to talk to our team as we setup the stand at 1pm on the Monday. At 5:30pm we had the chance to pack-up and get ready for the Cocktail Party poolside. The pool deck had a spectacular view of the sun setting in the background to begin our first night of networking!
Tuesday morning kicked-off at 9am sharp with César RAMOS officially opening the User Forum, and obtaining briefings from the three S1000D parent organizations AIA, ATA and ASD. The S1000D Council delivered the highly anticipated briefing regarding the public release of S1000D Version 4.2, scheduled for release 31 December 2016. Reeta Nye, our Senior S1000D Consultant, will release a detailed blog early next week about what changes and features you should expect in the upcoming version v4.2.
Our Wednesday morning started with people waiting to talk to us in the Vendor Hall at 8:30am. Later that morning, I went off to do my presentation on “Author anywhere and deliver everywhere with OneStrand AIR”. The presentation was well received and people were glad that we put the effort into performing a live demonstration of accessing the hosted AIR platform in New York via the hotel Wireless connection. Given the distance from Spain (the hotel) to New York (hosted AIR CSDB), the live demonstration worked seamlessly and provided the attendee’s a good perspective on how our hosted solution can benefit their overall requirements.
Reeta performed back to back demonstrations all day Wednesday, although she somehow managed to eat a quick lunch, only to stop again at 5:45pm so that we could perform scheduled demonstrations from 6pm to 8pm. Despite having a jammed packed schedule on Wednesday, thankfully Reeta did not lose her voice, which is something that seems to be a regular occurrence for at least one of us! The most talked about presentation at the event was from James Griffie from Delta Airlines, discussing “Adoption Anguish: Delta Air Lines Entry into S1000D Maintenance Documentation”. This topic covered the issues associated with taking delivery of content from the air frame manufacturers. We will cover more on this topic later next week.
Thursday was a very interesting day for the delegates, with the whole day dedicated to introducing all of the “S” Series Specifications, what they include and how far along they are in the development cycle. Some specifications such as “S2000M – Material Management” have been around a long time and others such as “S5000F – In-Service Data Feedback” is so new that v1.0 has officially released as of 23 September 2016, just a few days before the Seville User Forum.
The OneStrand Team looks forward to sharing our experiences further with you over the next week, but do not to hesitate to call or email the team if you have any specific questions regarding what we learned at the S1000D User Forum.
We look forward to seeing everyone at the 2017 ATA e-Business Forum and S1000D User Forum in Amsterdam.
Tammy Halter