TechReady 2
Wow, it’s already been almost a month since my previous blog entry. Time flies when I’m busy and having fun! I took a much needed vacation over Christmas, but when I got back to work after New Year’s, I found myself completely buried with queued up tasks for TechReady2, the 2nd of our semi-annual technical field training conferences, being held this week in Seattle. Aside from reviewing as many SharePoint related session slidedecks as I could (since I’m the TR2 "content owner" for SharePoint related sessions), I also had to prepare to co-present the Office “12” SharePoint Servers Overview session with Jon Kauffman, a Group Program Manager in the Office Servers product group. Jon would present the slides, and I would drive the demo. Since Jon was one of my interviewers when I pursued my current job last September, I was very anxious for the opportunity to work with him. I was also a little nervous because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to spend as much time as I would like to prepare for the session. (I was pre-occupied with finalizing the logistics for a couple of key events that I was hosting -- the SharePoint Insiders Tech*Summit on Monday and the Field Champions Dinner Reception for Office Servers, Collaboration, and Real-Time Communications on Tuesday -- miraculously, with help from a few other people, both events went off quick successfully.)
Anyway, Tuesday (Jan 10th) was the big day -- our session was scheduled to start at 12:45PM, and by 12:30, the room had about 500 people! Jon, Andrew Datars (a Program Manager), and I were testing and scripting various aspects of the demo until about 12:35, and for the next 10 minutes, I felt like I was about to take a final exam back in college because I had spent the previous day and a half cramming my brain with all the key features that I would show off and talk through. :-)
At 12:46, Jon kicked off the session. There were about 700 people in the audience now! After spending 15 minutes or so to provide a quick overview of SharePoint’s roadmap and feature areas, Jon turned the podium over to me for the first of 7 demos. And immediately, my first mistake – I forgot how to activate Live Meeting (yikes!), which we (like most/all TR2 sessions) were using to enable the rest of the field folks to view our session remotely in real-time. No time to fuss around with it, so I went straight into my demo of the SharePoint’s Platform Services and got my first applause when I showed the new Recycle Bin. On turning the podium back to Jon, my heart was warmed by another round of applause from the audience. Jon and I did this back and forth 6 more times, and we played off each other quite well considering that we didn’t even go through a full rehearsal. The two-way synchronization of tasks in SharePoint and Outlook 12 in my Collaboration demo really wow’d the audience. The Business Data Search demo was also very well received. Towards the end, Jon was pressed for time (we only had 75 minutes to present/demo what normally takes at least 90 minutes), and I struggled a little bit with my (Enterprise) Content Management and Business Intelligence demos, where my “talk through” wasn’t as tightly aligned with my “click through” as in earlier demos. Overall, I felt that we struck the right balance of what the audience expected to hear/see and the amount of time we had.
Later that night, Dave Marcus (the IW Track Owner for TR2) sent us the session feedback survey results. I was relieved and pleasantly surprised to see a score of 4.39 (out of 5) for the question: Were the demonstration(s) effective? Our overall score was also 4.39, which was quite high relative to other sessions. And I just loved the following verbatim comments (some good, some bad – my comments in brackets):
- “awesome product and very interactive speakers - this will sell like wildfire with my customer” [Good to know that others thought Jon and I played off each other so well.]
- “content was perfect and excellently demonstrated. This completely hit the mark. VERY exciting stuff”
- “Good energy and information provided. Good to learn these guys have shoved tons of work which addresses my customers scenarios.” [“Good energy” – considering that I only had a few hours of sleep the night before, I wonder what kind of energy I would exude if I had a full night’s sleep? :-)]
- “this will definitely help with current & future customer solutions”
- “Great energy and passion. They really worked to make the product better for our customers.” [Wow, another comment about energy – I love it!]
- “Great to see all the new things and what has been achieved and the enthusiasm of the presenters. Demos on the border of being too confusing for me at times.” [Yup, I agree that the demos started to get a bit scattered towards the end.]
- “I was not very impressed with the speakers, the content and topic was great however they were not able to bring across ther messages strong enough and excite the crowd in the session. i think they could have prepared the demo's better as i got the feeling they didnt know if they were coming or going.” [This is very fair feedback. Jon and I blasted through a lot of content and demos, which could have been overwhelming to people who didn’t have much previous knowledge of SharePoint. And my talking points for the demos would have been more concise and fluid if only I had more time to rehearse and fine tune beforehand. The good news is that I will present the bulk of this session at upcoming EBCs and conferences, and I will definitely do a much better job with the demos.]
- “The demos were good, but could have been a little more comprehensive and smooth.” [Jon and I agreed afterwards that we could’ve cut 5-6 minutes from the slides and done more demos.]
- “Very good session. Great presenters, effective demos and great content. Well done gentlemen.” [Most of the other feedback comments were like this, so it was very gratifying to know that we had succeeded in pleasing the vast majority of the audience.]
