The Domino Chick

Seasons

Monday, April 5th, 2004

Baseball season starts today! I know our friends outside the U.S. (and many here in the States) couldn't care less, but I'm very excited. I live less than a mile from Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and this year I think I'm going to take advantage of a coworker's season tickets and go catch a few games in the good seats.

Another season that's starting up (for me, at least) is conference season. I'm speaking at the View's Admin2004 conference in May, which I just realized is less than 6 weeks away! Then there's the Lotus Advisor Live conference in June, which I'll be attending, but not as a speaker. I'm also attending two conferences in July that aren't Domino-related - a comic book convention and a Star Trek convention - but those are almost too geeky to mention.

I mention these for two reasons - shameless self-promotion and to ask for feedback. I'm finishing up the final versions of my slide sets for my talks at the View conference. In the past, I've heard various feedback from attendees about whether they like to see live demos in the session. I'm doing four sessions this time around - Domino Clustering, Mail Monitoring, Running Domino on Linux, and Transitioning Your Skills to WebSphere. Last year, I did two clustering sessions and one mail monitoring session, but I didn't include demos for a couple of reasons. The clustering sessions would have been difficult because I couldn't guarantee a working secure internet connection back to my office, and I didn't want to bring two servers with me (unlike my friend Rob, who brought two (or was it three?) servers along with him for his QuickPlace sessions). Instead of demos, I included lots of screenshots and additonal notes in the slides.

This year, I'm planning to definitely do demos for the Running Domino on Linux session - I've got my laptop dual-booting Windoze and RedHat Linux, and switching back and forth from the laptop with the slides to the laptop running the Domino server will be simple enough. I'm again presented with a challenge for the clustering and WebSphere sessions, though, so I'm thinking that I may just include screenshots for those sessions and only do demos for the aforementioned Linux session and maybe the mail monitoring session, because I can run a Domino server locally on my laptop and I won't have to worry about any potential connectivity issues.

My question, then, is this: do you prefer sessions with live demos to ones without? If there aren't demos, are you satisfied if the session content and additional materials provided give you lots of screenshots and clear information, with tips you can apply immediately to your servers? And thirdly, if I get a lot of feedback requesting live demos, will you all talk Rob into shipping me some servers? ;-)

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 08:18:21 AM