As mentioned in our previous post, we will be running a series of articles covering Intuit's QuickBooks Connect event in October. Since we've posted a couple of general pieces already, we wanted to give a quick recap, update and overview of the event as it stands today, as the lead in for the series that will start in earnest next week. (This may be more for me than anyone because I have been a little confused about the flow of the event until I recently took the time to go page by page on the QuickBooks Connect site so that I could write this article!).
In a nutshell, the event is targeting 4 stakeholder groups - Accountants, Entreprenuers, Small Businesses and Developers. If you go to the site you will see icons for each of the groups, with educational content for each listed under the appropriate icon.
Monday October 20 -- For accounting professionals, this is the day you can get prepared for your ProAdvisor and Advanced ProAdvisor certification or take Deep Dive Training for QuickBooks Desktop. Concurrently developers will be participating in a "Hackathon" in which they will get in-depth training on the QuickBooks API along with free consulting as they design, code and test their applications. The Hackathon actually runs overnight and into Tuesday (I guess Intuit knows that most accounting professionals need their sleep when it's not busy season!)
Tuesday October 21 - Developers , Small Businesses and Accounting Professionals are the benefactors of Tuesday's training as well. Accounting Professionals can choose between 3 sessions at 8 am, 3 sessions at 10am, 4 sessions at 2pm and and 3 sessions at 4pm. This is also the day (at 2pm) when the QBO Certification Exam Prep will be held. Developers finish up the Hackathon at 2:00 and the small business Demandforce customers have the opportunity to become Certified Advanced users between 1 and 5pm.
Attendees also should plan to be at the Preview night and Welcome Reception from 5:30 - 8:30.
Wednesday October 22 - There is literally something for everyone on this main conference day. Breakout sessions begin at 10:45 following the key note. The Accountant track features concurrent tracks at 10:45 and 1:45. The Small Business and Entrepreneur's can choose from concurrent sessions at 10:45, 11:40, 1:45 and 2:40. Developers don't have quite as many options to choose from, but they do have classes at 10:45, 11:40, 1:45 and 2:40.
In addition to these breakouts, attendees have the opportunity to visit the exhibit hall throughout the day and hear from high profile key note speakers at 9 (Bill Rancic, Charles Best, Debbie Sterling, Tristan Walker and Brad Smith) and 4:15 (Scott Cook, Arianna Huffington, Kevin Cleary, Marc Andressen) and attend the Night Market Party from 6:30 - 10:00.
Thursday October 23 - The event wraps up Thursday morning with a session for everyone titled "Design for Delight: How to Innovate the Intuit Way". The "deliverable" for this session is that attendees will be able to:
- Get closer to customers
- Apply Intuit's Design for Delight principles to solve problems
- Quickly run experiments to test ideas and accelerate innovation
We will be kicking off our own "deeper dive" into the accountant tracks with speaker interviews and session overviews beginning next week, so bookmark or set up your RSS feed on our Training Center so that you don't miss a single update.