The week before the last one, it happened to me – like it happened to thousand of other travelers all across the globe: I got stranded. Luckily for me I should have been flying out from home rather than flying home and being “stuck” home is much easier to handle :-)

At least for me. I was actually to fly to Croatia to keynote a huge customer event and hold a session on Cloud Security in addition – and I was still at home. Therefore we decided to do something which we always talk about but rarely really implement: I did the keynote on LiveMeeting – we used the Cloud.

It was an interesting experience. In the past I only did LiveMeetings with customers, therefore more a 1:many meeting, only once before I did a large audience. What did I/we learn?

• For non-English literate people, it is harder to follow the presentation on slides and video compared to me being on stage.
• I am not seeing the audience, so I am talking to the camera. Something the people working in TV probably are used to – I am not. The audience basically could have left the room without me noticing it…
• In large audiences you need somebody running the event and moderating questions on site.
• It worked really, really well and the customers where fairly impressed by this.

To me, there is the question why we do not do that more often. Instead of flying in to a country in the afternoon of a given day, have a customer meeting in the morning and flying back home in the afternoon, I could have breakfast with the family in the morning, having the customer meeting in my home office and have lunch with the kids, when they come from school. Saved a lot of money, saved a lot of energy and CO2…

Often it is just a matter of wanting to do it. As soon as we do not find a date where we can physically meet, we do it on LiveMeeting and realize – for a lot of cases, it just works.

Therefore let’s save money and energy and leverage technology much, much more!

Roger