Once again this year I will have the opportunity to present a session at Tech Days 2010 in Montreal. Microsoft allowing IT people from different regions to present at one of their event is a nice thing. It is a great experience with some challenge but that’s what makes it exciting. Last year was the first time I was presenting to an audience and believe me the stress level was high. It was a good challenge and I even if it wasn’t my best presentation(your first one can’t be) I couldn’t pass on the chance of doing it again.
This time however I will be better prepared to deliver my session. There are several steps in preparing to give a presentation in front of a large, tech savvy audience. The most important thing to remember(and it helps to lower your stress) is that people in the room are there to learn and gain knowledge on your subject, and you are in front because the organizer(Microsoft in this case) believe you know your stuff. Another important step in getting ready: Rehearsal! If you commit yourself to do a presentation or conference, you must put as much time as possible rehearsing and do it in front of people, even if they don’t have a clue what you are talking about.
Also if you don’t feel nervous even 5 minutes before it starts, when the lights turns on you, your stress level is going to go up for sure. If you master your subject and are well prepared it will go down after the first few minutes when you see that people are listening to you. However if you want keep their attention you must be dynamic and have some short stories related to your subject to catch back their concentration. If you don’t have enough stories or examples, they will start thinking about other things and that’s what you must avoid. Oh, after doing a presentation ask for critics from people you know who attended it and keep an open mind. You will make mistakes and to improve your skills you must build on those and any suggestion you get.
This year I will be presenting the following session on a subject you really like (and that is another keep point, you MUST be passionate about what you talk), Hyper-V:
Hyper-V and System Center are the ideal combination for your environment. Come learn best practices and lessons learned from hundreds of real-world implementations where Hyper-V R2 and the System Center suite of products (Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, Configuration Manager 2007 R2, Operations Manager 2007 R2, Data Protection Manager 2007) successfully complement one another. You will learn how and when Live Migrations are used in various scenarios compared to built-in failover technologies like Exchange Server 2010 DAGs or SQL mirroring, how Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 supplements Hyper-V implementations, how automation on Operations Manager assist in 24x7x365 datacenter scenarios, and how Configuration Manager helps with compliance-level consistency in security and management.
A special tanks to Rick Claus from Microsoft who gave me the chance for my first presentation and has help me to become a better presenter.
#TechDays_CA, #TechDays
