Lotusphere 2007 Review part 2
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I gave two sessions at Lotusphere which were, AD213 - Integrating Presence Awareness Using IBM Lotus Sametime Toolkits and BP404 - Virtual Approaches to Development using VMware. Both sessions had good attendance, and for the second year running the VMWare session overflowed. I was very clear this year in the first few minutes that the VMWare session was not a session on ESX server, but more how VMWare Workstation could be used by an individual or team to help with testing and developing Lotus applications, as a few people we're clear about that from the feedback last year.
I have already seen the evaluation forms for the AD213 session and the feedback was good, apart from one person who felt the presentation didn't match up with the session description. I'm not sure what they mean here exactly, the abstract says the following:
I showed awareness in Word, Excel, web pages and different places in Notes, I showed the code behind them, I explained which toolkits were used, so I'm not sure how I had that confusion for this one person.
I did take a slightly different approach during this presentation, which was to get the audience involved a bit more. I like to think my presentation style is pretty engaging anyway, but I wanted to take it a step further. As many people who have seen me present Sametime know, I believe that Sametime Places is the most over looked and powerful feature in the product, although it is not directly accessible by end users. for developers is a great thing. Sometimes it can be hard to explain places to a crowd of people with a slide or two, so this time I took the physical approach and pulled up five volunteers from the audience, and then using those members demonstrated how Sametime places worked. I think it worked pretty well, if it didn't I sure had a lot of fun putting one of the audience members outside the room and closing the door on them and watching another member stand on the stage and wave their hands back and forth.
I could have easily changed this presentation into a sales pitch for the ways in which Instant had built awareness into Outlook and Office etc. in the past, but I didn't I tried to give people information they could use in the future and very few references if any were made to Instant products, I think people appreciated that.
The VMware session went much smoother than last year, primarily because the box I did my demonstration on was about 10 times faster. I actually took my flight simulator box to Lotusphere so I could demonstrate all the different capabilities of VMWare in a snappy manner. I most concerning moment, was the Apple guy who came up to me after the session to explain that Apple would view very dimly seeing Mac OSx running within VMware. I quickly explained that what he actually saw was a bitmap of the tiger osx desktop running within VMware cough cough. Stephan Wissel who I finally met in person, has a review of that session. For those wondering, I sadly didn't have time to plug use Flight Simulator on the big screen.
I have posted the slides for both sessions (bottom of the page) and I'm working on the packaging for the code samples from AD213, I hope to have the code up by the end of today, but more likely tomorrow.
If you were in one of my sessions, please let me know what your thought good or bad, it's the only way I will know if things need changing in the future.
I gave two sessions at Lotusphere which were, AD213 - Integrating Presence Awareness Using IBM Lotus Sametime Toolkits and BP404 - Virtual Approaches to Development using VMware. Both sessions had good attendance, and for the second year running the VMWare session overflowed. I was very clear this year in the first few minutes that the VMWare session was not a session on ESX server, but more how VMWare Workstation could be used by an individual or team to help with testing and developing Lotus applications, as a few people we're clear about that from the feedback last year.
I have already seen the evaluation forms for the AD213 session and the feedback was good, apart from one person who felt the presentation didn't match up with the session description. I'm not sure what they mean here exactly, the abstract says the following:
Learn how Sametime presence awareness can be embedded and used within various applications and other innovative locales for exposing awareness and presence information. In this session, you’ll be shown numerous examples that demonstrate how you can enhance your applications with Lotus Sametime to provide innovative and valuable real time access to employees and customers.
I showed awareness in Word, Excel, web pages and different places in Notes, I showed the code behind them, I explained which toolkits were used, so I'm not sure how I had that confusion for this one person.
I did take a slightly different approach during this presentation, which was to get the audience involved a bit more. I like to think my presentation style is pretty engaging anyway, but I wanted to take it a step further. As many people who have seen me present Sametime know, I believe that Sametime Places is the most over looked and powerful feature in the product, although it is not directly accessible by end users. for developers is a great thing. Sometimes it can be hard to explain places to a crowd of people with a slide or two, so this time I took the physical approach and pulled up five volunteers from the audience, and then using those members demonstrated how Sametime places worked. I think it worked pretty well, if it didn't I sure had a lot of fun putting one of the audience members outside the room and closing the door on them and watching another member stand on the stage and wave their hands back and forth.
I could have easily changed this presentation into a sales pitch for the ways in which Instant had built awareness into Outlook and Office etc. in the past, but I didn't I tried to give people information they could use in the future and very few references if any were made to Instant products, I think people appreciated that.
The VMware session went much smoother than last year, primarily because the box I did my demonstration on was about 10 times faster. I actually took my flight simulator box to Lotusphere so I could demonstrate all the different capabilities of VMWare in a snappy manner. I most concerning moment, was the Apple guy who came up to me after the session to explain that Apple would view very dimly seeing Mac OSx running within VMware. I quickly explained that what he actually saw was a bitmap of the tiger osx desktop running within VMware cough cough. Stephan Wissel who I finally met in person, has a review of that session. For those wondering, I sadly didn't have time to plug use Flight Simulator on the big screen.
I have posted the slides for both sessions (bottom of the page) and I'm working on the packaging for the code samples from AD213, I hope to have the code up by the end of today, but more likely tomorrow.
If you were in one of my sessions, please let me know what your thought good or bad, it's the only way I will know if things need changing in the future.
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