I just finished the draft schedule for SQLSaturday #151 in Orlando and wanted to write some notes about the process. It wasn’t horrible, but it could have been easier!

• The scheduler doesn’t seem to display any time slot before 8am, a challenge when I wanted an early bird time slot starting at 7:30. I think we need to be able to see perhaps as early as 6 am.
• The drag and drop scheduler is still finicky, but still more concise than the “new scheduler”. Way back when we bought a schedule control and its always been finicky, I think time time spend some money (developer and/or control) to fix this.
• I’d like an easy way to see all speakers that are not on the schedule
• And an easy way to see speakers that have more than one session on the schedule
• Remove the display of timeslots from the schedule page, just takes up room
• Ability to see requests from speakers about preference for morning/afternoon (which means we need a way for them to enter those)
• Better support for showing lunch and breaks, right now we have to enter it for each track.
• Sort the session list next to the schedule by speaker

For those that haven’t seen it, here is the “old” scheduler with the scheduling in progress.