re:Invent Sessions Table tips

Reserved seating open on October 15, at 10am PT

Sessions fill up very fast, so it's essential to plan ahead and start to reserve your choices right at 10am to have the best shot at getting what you want.

Hopefully you already know about the Cloud Pegboard session catalog as a more streamlined way to mine for sessions. We've been adding small but important features almost daily, so I want to make sure that you know about them, so that you can get the most benefit.

Show/Hide Schedule Info button

The main table view does not show repeat sessions. This saves you from having to look at about 1000 extraneous entries. If you want to see the number of repeats for a session or the schedule and venue info for the primary session, then click on the "Show/Hide Schedule Info" button at the top of the screen.

Wishlist creation

Assuming that you've checked off a bunch of sessions for your wishlist, you can check the "Wishlist" box at the top of the screen to see just your wishlist items.

View full abstract

You can click on any row to get a dialog box that shows the title, full abstract, and a list of the primary and all repeat sessions along with the schedule and venue information for each. The Title link in the summary table opens the AWS summary page for the session (which also contains the full abstract, but does not show repeats).

View repeats and their schedules/venues

To see the list of repeats for a session, click on the summary row in the table to open the above-described dialog box.

Add sessions to your calendar

Once you've opened a sessions dialog box and can see the list of sessions, you can click on the calendar icon to download an iCalendar (.ics) format file so that you can add the session to your calendar. Don't forget that the time on your calendar will appear different if you are not in the same time zone as Las Vegas. When you arrive in Vegas and change your calendar's time zone, then everything will be at the local Las Vegas time.

Wishlist CSV export for planning

In the Export menu, you can select "Save WISHLIST as CSV" to save all of your wishlist sessions to a CSV format file that can be opened in Excel or another spreadsheet program. Note that the export includes all of repeats for each of your wishlist items so that you have all options while scheduling. When you open in a spreadsheet program, sorting by start date/time makes it easy to see conflicts and build your schedule. Note that you still want to keep some options for each time slot since you will not get into all of your first choices.

Wishlist export for Google Calendar

In the Export menu, you can select "Save WISHLIST for Google Calendar". Similarly, this will download a CSV file that has all wishlist items expanded to include all repeat sessions for your selections. The format of this file is such that you can directly import it into Google Calendar. From there you can manage and design your schedule, or once you know what it is, you can use this approach to make sure that the sessions are on your calendar (instead of just in the re:Invent mobile app). Here are instructions for importing into Google Calendar. I recommend that you create a separate calendar for managing your re:Invent sessions, or at least until you have registered and have a smaller list.

Rule for back-to-back scheduling

New for 2019, AWS is enforcing a rule that there must be a 1-hour gap between session reservations if they are in different venues.

Keeping up with additions during re:Invent

Many sessions are added dynamically during re:Invent, especially those related to newly announced services. We are still considering how to best make this information available to you in a timely fashion. One option is an hourly email update for any changes in the previous hour. Please let us know if you have thoughts for what would be ideal for you. Our goal has been to make Cloud Pegboard users be the best prepared to get the most out of re:Invent, and your input will help.

Please share!

Please let everyone that might be going to re:Invent (inside your org or via your social media circles) know about our Cloud Pegboard re:Invent session planning capabilities so that more people can get the benefit of what we think is a vastly improved re:Invent planning experience.