Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Doing a Live Meeting Presentations - Lessons Learned

I did a Live Meeting Presentation for the PASS DBA SIG today on my lunch break, and what I had initially thought would be a easy online presentation rapidly fell apart.  Despite having practiced and tested the Live Meeting settings with the meeting coordinator, there were issues that prevented the attendees from joining onto the Live Meeting.  Had this been the only issue, the result would have simply been a minor delay as the meeting coordinator was able to login and get everyone connected to the meeting. 

However, despite testing and running through the presentation ahead of time, ensuring that my demonstrations worked and were ready, I had issues with SSMS consistently crashing, and none of my SQL Agent Task demonstrations working as expected.  The root cause which I have figured out two hours later was the installation of a new IPS agent on all of our machines at work, including laptops which get plugged into the corporate domain.  This was installed in the background while I was working this morning.  I guess that will teach me to plug into the network a bit more often with my laptop in the future.

Hopefully everyone who attended got something out of the meeting.  It didn't quite go as I had expected at all, but I was able to cover the content.  A copy of all the code and the database I use will be available on the PASS site as well as on the MSDN Code Project SQL Examples site that we use on the forums in the coming days.  I'll post links to both when they have been put up.

If you attended the event, and have any feedback, please feel free to contact me by email and let me know your thoughts.  I am always open to criticism, as it will only help me improve in the future.

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