Three years ago, in a distant galaxy (called Texas) I was privileged to attend the first cPanel Conference. Attendance was mostly based on curiosity of how a company with a very technical demographic employee base would pull together an event. To our surprise the event was well worth while. Now fast forward to 2008 and you are able to see that their experience has paid off with tighter organization, sessions based on feedback, and a group of cPanel employees committed to pulling of an educational event for their customer base. This year also introduced a few new welcome surprises including Microsoft Sponsorship, Ask cPanel Anything Session, and a jam session designed for tone deaf participants.

I heard quite a few times from the event that “The Swiss Army Knife” - Eric Gregory put much of the event together. The man behind the scenes is responsible for the accommodation of exhibitors, attendees, and the execution of the event. With the evolution of cPanel as a company over the course of the last 3-4 years and now with a few successful events under their belt, the comfort level and execution of events seems effortless from the entire team. The most noticeable part of the event happen prior to even arriving with emails, communications, and instructions all sent in advance.

The most enjoyable part of the event is the attendee base changes from year to year. As companies grow and employees shift focus a new set of faces show up at cPanel making it even more interesting and a good reason to attend.

The sessions were well received by the FastServers.Net server engineers (and I won’t spoil GK’s upcoming post), but the anticipated cPanel for Windows was one of the hot sessions I attended. It appears to be a real product and lead by a team that has a handle on producing a great competitive Microsoft Windows Control Panel and yes it looks very similar to the current Linux based cPanel/WHM.

The auxiliary highlights of the event includes the great hospitality of the entire cPanel staff, reunion of friends, and the introduction to a new group of people that I have never met before. Interlacing the events included a relaxed social environment that was followed up by some hardcore technical sessions that appeal to target audience: cPanel support engineers.

Greg Kuiper will have a nice blog post with his outtake on the event this upcoming week, but if you want a sneak preview check out some photos posted by TheWhir - http://www.flickr.com/photos/thewhir/.