I got my evaluation forms back from InfoTec today. It's always interesting to hear what people have to say in a situation like that. Expectations vary a lot at InfoTec and I never know what to expect.
When I presented at InfoTec in 1999, I gave a talk on Data Warehousing. I talked about multidimensional data, star schemas and so on. What I ran into was a room full of end-users who couldn't care less about the how or the why. All they wanted to talk about were the really slick front-end analysis tools business analysts could use to analyze the data once it was in a cube. That wasn't what my talk was about nor something I knew all that much about. I ended up showing them a little bit about using Pivot tables in Excel and generally bombed.
This year's talk on SharePoint went a lot better. I think I got the right crowd for what I was presenting. I think it was too basic for some of the people in the room, but the talk was titled “Introduction to SharePoint” so only one person said the content was “light”. To be fair, I ran about 15-20 minutes shorter than planned, but I had run over by 30-60 minutes in practice so I thought I had it about right. I could have blabbed on all day.
One comment I got was a hit to my presentaion style. Anyone who has seen me present before knows that I typically walk around in front of the screen pointing at things and gesturing more than I need to. (This can be fun to watch since I weight 430 pounds!) It's how I work off the nervous energy that comes with presenting. This time I sat behind a table with my laptop and didn't get up at all. One person wrote “STAND UP STEVE!” This wasn't planned on my part. The reason for it was that I sprained my knee just before the presentation while I was at plaNet's booth in the exhibition hall. I could barely stand, let alone walk around. (Maybe I'm not cut out to be an 'exhibition'ist?)
Aside from a sprained knee, I think it went pretty well.