My session went pretty well yesterday, but unfortunately I had quite a few demo issues. The session before mine went late, which made me pressed for time to get things plugged up and ready to go. The first problem was that they didn’t have my presentation pre-loaded on the presentation computer. So I spent a few minutes looking for it, and then finally gave up, plugged in my USB key to the back of the machine and just loaded it. Problem 1 solved, but it got my nerves in a bit of a tizzy so I didn’t quite start with the bang I wanted to.

The A/V guy thought I was ready to go as soon as the presentation was up and so started everything, but I didn’t get a chance to double check that my demo laptop was working properly and that the demos were going to be displayed correctly. Big mistake. When it came time to do my demos, I couldn’t get any signal from the laptop to the displays. I fiddled with it for what seemed like an eternity, but in the end made the executive decision to just continue on so I could make it through the core content. One problem with doing demos from Vista machines is that I can never freaking find the right place to look to change settings. It’s very frustrating, and when you’re nervous or anxious, it just makes matters worse. For the demos I just did my best to explain the points in the demos verbally, but of course that was a very poor substitute.

To add insult to injury, I offered to show the demos on my laptop after the talk for those that were interested. However, there were a number of questions, and due to the wait and inactivity, Virtual PC stopped cooperating and I couldn’t get anything to display on the demo box. <sigh>

For those of you who were at my session, please accept my sincere apologies for the lack of demos. I had a much better, more cohesive presentation planned. Hopefully the extended Q&A was useful. Judging from the number of great questions and business cards I got for follow up info, people still got something out of the session.

I will be at the Mix Chat and attending various sessions throughout the rest of the conference. If you want to chat with me, catch up with me at the conference, or send me an email to set up some time to talk while we’re here.

I was very serious when I said that I’d like to start conversations with everybody about their SharePoint experiences. We very much want to understand where you perceive the problems to be so that we can address them. Believe it or not, it’s not always as obvious to us as it is to you what we should do. So we very much value your feedback!