You're invited to attend a trade show next month and you won't have to worry about travel, flights, hotel or registration fees. In fact, you won't even have to leave your office.

It's all part of Cahners Business Information's first virtual conference and tradeshow, Oct. 17-18. It's called the SupplyChainLinkExpo, a two-day online event that you can attend by simply logging on to your computer. The conference and tradeshow is sponsored by the Cahners Supply Chain/OEM Group. Industrial Distribution is a magazine in the supply chain group and we're proud to be part of this exciting event.

The SupplyChainLinkExpo will be organized into five pavilions representing all aspects of the supply chain: design, plan, source, make, and move. Each pavilion will be divided into product "aisles." You can browse an entire pavilion or use the Expo's search application to go directly to a specific aisle. The Expo will also feature an industry mall, a bulletin board, a shopping cart for collecting product information, and a broad range of exciting conference events.

As part of the Source Pavilion, Industrial Distribution will sponsor a keynote presentation as well as a roundtable discussion on a major distribution study conducted by the magazine.

The keynote speaker will be Steve Epner, president of BSW Consulting, one of the country's best-known speakers on technology. Steve has spoken at a number of industry seminars, conventions, and conferences and he will focus on "e-business in the distribution channel."

ID will also be sponsoring a roundtable in which panelists will talk about industry trends that emerged from ID's 55 th Annual Survey of Distributor Operations . I will be one of the panelists, along with Mark Dancer, a principal of Frank Lynn & Associates and Bill McCleave of W.R. McCleave & Associates. Victoria Fraza, managing editor of ID, will be the moderator.

You can register for this two-day show by logging on to supplychainlinkexpo.com. And if you can't attend the presentations or show on those dates, the show will be archived for 90 days so you can log on at a later date. Hope to see you online.