Doing it for real
I was in a bit of a quandary when I was asked to do a Unified Communications session at Tech Ed Sydney. Do I take 7 VM’s, a shuttle with 12Gb memory, worry about all of the software, hardware and images? Take a RoundTable device, build Exchange, OCS. OC, Live meeting?
Or do I just show how we really use the system internally? Easy option of course. But really really scary if our real live system doesn’t perform as expected, or the network goes down, or my laptop power fails etc etc etc…
So when I actually demoed Office communicator on stage I noticed Andrew and Viral were on line so I called them up on IM and switched to Live meeting and round table using the icon in communicator.
Andrew was dressed in a dinner jacket, holding a clock up to the webcam (at 0540hrs). Viral was asleep at the keyboard with his underwear hanging on the clothes drier in the lounge. it got a big laugh. Kevin had stayed up to midnight to say hi to everyone – but he wasn’t in his pyjamas…
So there’s me, walking round the stage demoing the functionality of RoundTable and the fact that it follows you as you travel around the room, there’s Andrew and Viral, showing how daylight is breaking in the UK and they’re not actually hiding here in Australia pretending, and there’s Kevin, yawning in the mid west of the US at midnight waiting for me to finish my demo so he can get to bed. Real life scenario, real people, no smoke and mirrors either. No virtual machines. a really compelling thing to see them working together – and it all worked as it should. As it does here at Microsoft.
It’s a shame I didn’t think to do a screen capture of the event, which would have been really cool. But the sight of Viral’s smalls hanging on the line behind him totally threw me and I forgot :-)
Viral – that was FAR TOO much information for me…!
But thanks to all of my demo chaps who really made for an authentic demo. I owe you all lots and lots of beer…
