Last week ReadWriteEnterprise editor Alex Williams and I attended Salesforce.com's annual user conference Dreamforce. And we've got more coming up, like Lotusphere and SAPPHIRE NOW.

For journalists, these events are great because we get to cover new announcements and talk to both vendors and users. But I'm curious how users actually find these types of events. Do you find them helpful? If not, why not? Why do you go to user conferences?