Ask and ye shall receive...

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:26:00 GMT

Last year at TechEd, I had the sweetest setup. My (at the time) new Gateway M275 TabletPC stuffed with every beta available (XP SP2 beta, Office 2003 beta, OneNote SP1 beta, InfoPath beta, etc.) was begging to be the envy of all conference attendees. I spent hours setting up OneNote, so I had a tab for every day, and a page for every time slot, listing all the sessions I would like to attend at that time (location, link to slide deck if available).

This all worked out wonderfully once the conference network recovered from the hack attacks, and I was able to get a hotel room in the same time zone as the San Diego Conference Center.

Each day had an associated tab across the top of the notebook. Flight and hotel information were located on pages in the General Info tab. Things I had to remember for registration were stored on a page under the Sunday tab. Along one side were the individual pages pertaining to the particular time slots, listing those sessions in which I had interest. Session cancelled? Here, at hand, were a list of other possibilities.

The page named Friday Options would have the schedule for all of Friday, whereas the timeslot pages would list in more detail, the sessions available for that time. I would also link to local copies of the powerpoints, where available, so I could take notes directly on the slides. I know, ink on slides is not searchable, whereas ink in OneNote is searchable. Maybe I should have inserted the slides as images.

All of this sure looks nice, but it was a pain to create, and, you guessed it, the schedule continued to change throughout the week. The general structure of the day remained the same, but the session details weren't fixed in stone. Some aspects of the schedule weren't known until after arriving at the conference (Birds of a Feather,) while other sessions were changed to meet demand.

This year, a significant portion of the schedule in the second half of the week is dedicated to providing the most popular sessions again, so others can attend who had conflicts earlier.

For somebody who sets up the schedule ahead of time, and paints a nice pretty schedule is doomed to the worst of all techie fates. A data set that is out of synch, and skewing fast.

My goal this year: Get a majority of this thing set up automatically, and provide for synchronization.

How do I go about this? The OneNote Managed API makes it a bit easier for me to autogenerate OneNote notebooks. The Provider Model Design Pattern and Specification makes it easier for me to customize this code and use it for other tasty projects I have in mind for the Business School (autogenerate notebooks for classes based upon assignment items from the online syllabus.) Using the Custom Calendar Providers for Outlook 2003 (make any datasource look like a Sharepoint events list, so Outlook will suck it up natively) to stuff otherwise recalcitrant blobs of data into a sweet and cuddly Outlook Calendar view.

“Think it will work? It'll take a miracle.” - Valerie, Miracle Max (the Princess Bride)

All I would need in order for this to be possible would be an RSS feed of the TechEd 2005 schedule.

So naturally, I clicked the Contact Us link at the bottom of the attendee scheduler, and asked:

At some point, will an RSS feed (or any other parseable data stream) of the scheduled sessions at TechEd in Orlando be available, so we can be appraised of the changes to the schedule? I would like to write a tool that dumps the session schedule to OneNote, and an RSS feed of the schedule would be most helpful.

The next day, they responded:

Hello Rob,

Thank you for contacting Support.

We are planning just such a feed, and anticipate it will be live by mid-May.

Super! Even if none of my nefarious automation plans get off the ground, I'll still be able to use Newsgator to organize my sessions, see updates in comparative real time. Wowsers, Cheif. I'm willing to dive in and start coding now. We'll see if I'm successful. BTW: I also suggested they include slide decks as hyperlinks or enclosures into the feed. It will be nice to preload the tablet with slide decks of likely sessions in a less haphazard fashion.

robrohr.org : PONGen, tablet

Ask and ye shall receive...