Nov 18 2008
Webinar is Done, Whew!
Earlier today I delivered my GBN Conference presentation to an audience over the web. It was… interesting. 🙂 I have done web presentations before but never to an audience of this size. I didn’t have time to count, but it seemed like there were well over 100 attendees that stayed through to the very end. I hope they (or you, if you were online) found the time to be worthwhile.
It was certainly different for me. Presenting to a live audience is not stressful to me at all anymore. I have enough experience that it just doesn’t bother me. Whether I am delivering a training class to an audience of ten, or a conference presentation to an audience of hundreds, it doesn’t make me nervous at all. But today on the call was a different story. I was quite nervous! I had all sorts of worries. What if my Internet connection goes down? What if my dog barks, or my doorbell rings? (I was doing the presentation from home to avoid the background noise from being in an office.) None of those things happened, which is good.
What I didn’t realize until going through the presentation was how much I “feed” off of and react to the audience during a live presentation. When I am delivering live content I get a feel for whether people are interested in what I have to say. As long as their eyes are open and facing forward, and heads nod in appropriate places, I figure things are going okay.
On a webinar, that wasn’t possible.
I logged in to the webinar website as the presenter from my laptop. I also logged in as an attendee from my desktop. By doing that, I was able to monitor exactly what everyone else was seeing. I think that helped because it was easy to make sure I didn’t get ahead of the screen refresh. I also tried to keep an eye on the chat room and watch for questions. When I could, I tried to incorporate answers from chat questions into my talk. I think that process went okay, but I know that I would do a better job next time.
In any case, if you’ve joined the GBN you’ll soon be able to review the webinar online and judge for yourself. I don’t have an estimated time for publication, but as soon as I find out that the session is available I will be sure to post it here.
Congrats, Dave! I was one of the attendants, and it was a great presentation.
Paulo, thank you for your support and comments.
If anyone has suggestions on how to improve – either for me personally, or for GBN as the host – please let me know.
Hi Dave. I was really looking forward that presentation. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend. I’m glad GBN will put the webinar online. Thanks!
Congrats Dave.
The presentation was really great. Looking forward to more presentations from you.
Good work Dave. I attended and you adequately answered my previous blog questions regarding the Timeslice consturction. Many thanks, and I’m looking forward to the next presentation.
Dave, Thanks for the presentation and I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me about my concerns about the product direction of Business Views. I will still be very much interested in speaking with you about 2009 GBN initiatives. Please contact me at your convenience.
thanks
Bryan
Dave – I just got the chance to go through the presentation and it was simply great! In the example you showed for the time slice issue, since there are multiple underlying queries that are submitted for the measures across different time slices (contexts), Crystal reports would not allow such queries due to the inability to work with multiple SQL statements. So your solution only works for now on WebI reports? Thanks!
Farhan, welcome. 🙂 The setting “JOIN_BY_SQL” was added to the universe for just this purpose; making the database do the work. In that case Crystal will use this technique absolutely fine.
Hi Dave,
Could you please let me know where can I find this webinar (Updated URL link).
Thanks in advance.
-DEEPU
I actually have no idea where the content ended up. This webinar was a live presentation of one of the presentations that you can download here on my blog so the content is certainly available, just not in the webinar format.