As a Tableau user, you may have recently received in your inbox an invitation from Tableau to attend Tableau Conference on Tour London 2017 which will take place in East London June 5-7. You may be wondering if you should attend, if it’s worth the cost of the ticket and the time off work. I could give you the marketing spiel to try and convince you that you should attend. I will, however, share my personal experience when I was on the customer side and attended in 2015 and 2016.
Before we go into the details, the overall format each year is very straightforward. Monday is for exams during the day, with an evening reception and registration open, handy for avoiding queues in the morning. Tuesday opens typically with a Tableau keynote and a glimpse into new developments, followed by breakout sessions, customer sessions and sessions by Tableau consultants. There is a party Tuesday night and Wednesday is similar with sessions preceding a keynote session. Sadly, there is no party on Wednesday.
TCOT 2015: My First Year
I was new to Tableau, my company at the time had just purchased a core Server license, which was still under wraps and I had yet to start creating any dashboards. The work being carried out was just around the backend at this stage, but I went along nonetheless.
I hardly knew anyone and tried to attend as many sessions as possible. I picked intermediate sessions and was incredibly tired in the afternoon of the first day, missing the last session. I thought in order to justify the cost of the ticket, I had to sit in as many sessions as possible. I later learned that’s not always the best idea.
On the second day, I attended a few sessions, but I also managed to have time to network and meet a few people, including my new colleague Kirsty. I needed some help in training and if I had not taken the time to take a break from the sessions, I would not have met or collaborated with InterWorks for almost two years after that. It was also the catalyst for me to start using Tableau to create visualisations outside of work and join the Tableau community.
TCOT 2016: I'm Experienced Now
Older and wiser, this year I picked my sessions carefully. I mainly focused on the hands-on sessions. Again, I made sure that I had time to speak to everyone I wanted. It was also good that I knew a lot more people in the Tableau community, which meant lots of interesting conversations. I learned about EXASOL and took part in a panel for the Data+Women initiative.
It’s incredible how much you can get out of Tableau and partner attendees. My highlight was sharing a coffee with Francois Ajenstat on Wednesday morning and talking about new developments in the Tableau products.
Regarding the sessions, most of them are recorded and you can always catch up later. If I had two rules those would be:
- If there’s a session by Bethany Lions, attend that.
- If you are not enjoying the session, walk out and move to another or go and chat to Tableau doctors or the partner teams in the expo hall. After all, partners spend their days helping clients like you, and we are bound to know the answer to the question you may have. Don’t waste your time in sessions that you are not enjoying.
I’m really looking forward to speaking to as many clients as possible this year. If you see me, just grab me and say hello. Tableau knows how to put on an event and they are always customer focused. You are bound to have a great time, learn a lot and come out of TCOT invigorated to start applying all that you learned straight away.
I hope to see you in London June 5-7