Having said that, this week I’m pleased to have begun working for a great company, LPS Integration.  I’ve worked with the engineers at LPS for a few years now, and joining their rockstar team is both exciting and humbling.

I’ll continue to blog as I have before, but just to be clear, I’ll be doing so as Mike Stanley, Some Nerd, not Mike Stanley, Official Voice of His New Employer.

Have a great 2013 – I’m certainly going to!

I’ve had the pleasure to work at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville full-time for 17 years, and even longer if you count my time as a student worker.  Along the way I met my wife-to-be, earned a couple of bachelors degrees (Latin and English Creative Writing), and found myself, quite by accident, beginning a career in IT and working with some truly wonderful people.

I started writing a long (even for me) tale describing my professional history at UT, but rather than publish that, I’m just going to say thank you to all of the fine coworkers and management I’ve worked with for the last 17 years.  

So why am I leaving a place I love after so long?  My wife and I had our first child this year and we’re going to be moving back to my hometown of Nashville so my boy can grow up with his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins nearby.  I’ve accepted a position with an awesome company back home.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with so many great people at the university, and I will miss them.

I’ll save you a bit of reading if you’re only interested in my final opinion – remote/online training isn’t my cup of tea at all.  I imagine there are times when it would be better than nothing, but not by much, at least not for me.  Now for the why.

No personal interaction with the instructor or fellow classmates

And by none, I mean zero.  No eye contact.  No facial expressions.  No body language.  Just you and a screen filled with (in this case anyway) the WebEx app showing a slide deck and a chat window.  Disembodied voices filling the room.  Thankfully I did this class at home, because during the same week my wife remotely attended a couple of training classes, but oddly enough at a New Horizon learning center, where she got to sit in a room with other people, each with headsets on and attending various remote classes.  No way I’d ever do that – then the disembodied voices would literally be in my head.

I’ve been dubious of this class delivery format for a while.  In fact, I rebuffed numerous attempts by a local training provider to consider attending Citrix classes this way.  But several of my coworkers have attended training this way during the past year, and they all said the experience was good.  One, however, laughed when he finished telling me that, yes, he was satisfied with the format.  He told me that I would hate it because, in his words, I’m “too much of a people person.”  And he’s right.  I’m an extrovert, and I enjoy training classes because I get to meet a variety of people who work in my field, and usually at least someone with more experience than me.  I feared that a remote/online class would eliminate all of the social aspects of the class – lunches with one or more fellow students and/or the instructor, conversations about our respective data centers, major systems we run, war stories of failed upgrades, etc.  And I was absolutely right.  This week the only people for whom that was possible were the two students who were sitting in the training facility with the instructor in Colorado.

What did those of us, nine in all, attending the class remotely, get, as far as personal interactions go?  We introduced ourselves over our various crummy phone/VOIP connections at the beginning of the first day, after which we all promptly forgot what everyone else had said – or at least I did.  I remember there was one woman in the class, mainly because her audio connection was pretty bad, and I remember my lab partner’s name, Mohamed, and that’s about it.

The technology for doing this is surprisingly mediocre

I attend a lot of webinars, and have given a presentation over one, and aside from the problem of people not remembering (or caring) to mute themselves, I’ve been reasonably happy with the experience.  Nearly all of those webinars have been delivered via GoToMeeting, which makes sense considering how much of my professional life has focused on implementing Citrix products for the last few years.  So I’ve grown accustomed to clicking the GoToMeeting link, having it do its thing on my Mac, and listening and often speaking via my Logitech headset.  In fact, after trying to sit through an hour-long webinar a few years back using some random crummy headset I had at work, I ordered the same Logitech headset my wife and I use at home for raiding in World of Warcraft.  I knew there was always, or almost always, an option to dial into the conference, but why would I?

So I was surprised this past Monday when I clicked through to the WebEx session for the class and didn’t hear any audio.  Luckily I signed in 15 minutes early so I had time to ask in the chat window if dialing into the conference was the only option.  Indeed it was, which presented me with a moment of panic, as I checked my AT&T usage for the month and saw that I only had 140 of my 550 minutes left for the month, with 8 days left in the billing cycle.  Yes, my wife and I have the puniest minutes plan for our iPhones because a) we don’t make that many phone calls and b) those we do are usually to each other.  I guess that’s one thing I won’t have to worry about when I switch us over to Verizon and get unlimited minutes, but last Monday I needed an alternative.  Thankfully, I was signed into my Gmail account and I saw the little chat window with the phone icon above it and said to myself, “I wonder if Google is still doing free VOIP calls over Google Talk in the US?”  Yes, Google is.  So that problem was solved, although I discovered the hard way during lunch that Google cuts off calls after about 2.5 hours.

Which leads me to another annoyance.  We weren’t actually dialing into a WebEx conference, but rather to a separate bridge provided by the training company.  Boy did that bridge stink.  Every single time anyone connected or disconnected, the bridge loudly announced to everyone, “Someone is entering/leaving the conference” followed by the person’s name if they provided it during the prompt when the person dialed in.  I stopped providing my name after the first day, but several of my classmates dutifully provided it every day.  So for the entire week, and throughout each day, class was interrupted numerous times by these obnoxious announcements.  Was there a way to silence them?  Beats me.  My instructor wondered aloud if he could do something about it, but said he’d have to check with the training provider and for all I know he was told no.

So the audio stunk.  But the screen & application sharing wasn’t exactly trouble-free either.  There were plenty of times when the instructor couldn’t show us something he was doing on his laptop, and several times when the breakout rooms didn’t function properly.

Maybe I’m being unfair to the class format or to WebEx, and I’ll readily admit this is just my opinion and I’ve only gone through this one time, but I just didn’t expect for there to be this many glitches.  I’d give the audio side of this class an F and the screen-sharing side a B-.

The instructor was pretty good

I’ll give the guy credit – he did his best to make lemonade with all the various lemons he found himself working with in this format.  He had a lot of energy, was very friendly, and caught on several times as a couple of us tried to express some smidgeon of personality via emoticons in the chat interface.  I wish I’d been in the same room with him, because I think he would have been a good guy to have lunch with or to talk about aspects of the class that we didn’t spend a ton of time on.  He tried to make the remote students feel included, and he did a pretty decent job of monitoring the chat for questions.  Not a perfect job, as he was standing in front of a couple of real live students in Colorado, but a decent job.  Having delivered a webinar myself, I understand it is much more difficult to maintain two-way communication with multiple people who are only just voices on the line.

I will say that this instructor didn’t seem to fit my idea of the perfect instructor – that being a consultant or engineer who works with the technology on a regular basis in a variety of production environments and moonlights as an instructor.  He seemed to be a professional instructor, but he knew his stuff and he did a good job not only of covering the very basic material in the beginning of the class, but of handling student questions about the material or its implications outside of the classroom or lab.

One thing the instructor couldn’t overcome was the inherent limitations of not being in the same room with his students.  Problems with labs that could have been solved with a quick glance at a student’s screen took much longer to deal with when the person having the issue was a remote student.  Even getting the instructor’s attention to ask for help with an issue was inefficient, and typically required either waiting for him to stop talking, or interrupting him to try to get the issue addressed without waiting for him to notice a question in the chat window.

Final Thoughts

So would I take a class in this format again?  Only if it was my only option.  Saving travel expenses was good for my employer.  Avoiding a week away from home was good for me and my family.  But this was, without a doubt, the least satisfying training experience I’ve had.  While I know personal preference and my own extroverted personality contributed to my dissatisfaction, I also know the format itself and the imperfect technology supporting it were to blame as well.  I also know that my wife, who is very much an introvert, also found her remote classes to be dissatisfying, for many of the same reasons I did.

I also admit to having a bit of an attention span problem.  I like to multitask, and while I typically limit that to glancing at my iPhone every now and then during an in-person class, I was much more easily distracted this week.  Having a real live person standing in front of me and real live students sitting around me just makes it easier to stay focused on the class, if for no other reason than simple courtesy.  Sitting in my house alone, with the class running on my iMac and my MacBook Pro sitting right next to it, meant I payed less attention to the class and more attention to work email and Twitter.  I’m sure my employer appreciated me responding to email quickly and remotely tackling a few fires that popped up, but each of those came at the expense of paying closer attention to the class.

Before I would take another remote/online class, I would investigate available self-paced options.  I don’t believe that was an option here, as part of my goal was to finally get my VCP certification.  But next time around, if attending a class in-person isn’t an option, I would prefer a self-paced alternative, either one provided by the vendor or a company like TrainSignal.  I’m working through a Cisco UCS course from TrainSignal right now, and I plan to write a post about it soon, as well as a comparison between in-person, remote/online, and self-paced courses.

But first, let me mention that, for many years, I had just as many negative experiences with vendor engineers as with their salespeople, both on the pre and post sales side.  My favorite example was an “engineer” from a VAR who argued with me during an install of a product his company resold that FQDN’s (something I had to explain to him) weren’t necessary when using their product, then wanted to call support when I proved to him they were, rather than just accept our large university environment was a bit more complex than what he was used to.  Every experience we had with that VAR over the next few years reinforced that initial impression – that their engineers were skilled primarily in clicking next and calling the vendor support number when they ran into problems.  Was every VAR or vendor engineer I worked with that bad?  No.  But none of them were good enough to balance out the really bad ones.

A Pair of Great Engineers

All of that changed when I began working on my Citrix XenDesktop project.  I never encountered an actual Citrix SE during that process, primarily because LPS Integration brought their Citrix Team Lead, Patrick Coble, to the table.  I remember thinking after the first meeting we had with Patrick, “damn, this dude might be better than me.”  That probably makes me sound arrogant, but it was the first time in a very long time that I’d met someone who knew more than I did, not about some product or technology I didn’t work with, but about something I’d worked with for years.  Patrick attended several meetings with my team and larger groups, whiteboarding everything from the design of the various Citrix systems to the server hardware and storage.  He’s also the guy who introduced us to the possibility of using Cisco UCS.  Through it all, Patrick demonstrated the casual comfort that only comes from being awesome at what you do.  Don’t misunderstand – he’s not humble, but people who operate at this level never are, nor should they be.  What sets Patrick apart from many technically excellent engineers I’ve encountered, though, is that while he can play his role in “stump the chump” with the best of them, once all the “alpha nerd”  stuff is settled, he treats his technical counterparts on the customer side with respect.  You’d think it would be obvious to anyone working in an SE or similar role that getting into a nerd chest-thumping contest with the people who are thinking of buying your products would be dumb, but you’d be wrong.

Another excellent SE I’ve gotten to work with over the last year is Joey Jackson from NetApp.  Joey had instant credibility with our team because, before moving to NetApp, he worked for a large public university.  Maybe that sounds shallow, but you’d be surprised how many vendor folks we deal with who sell to the higher education market and don’t understand it.  Not having to explain concepts like, “our faculty have tenure – we can’t make them use this just because we say so, we have to show them how it benefits them” is huge.  Joey not only demonstrated time and again he knew NetApp storage and how we might use it, but could reference specific projects and use cases he’d tackled when he was a customer and administrator himself.  Joey’s laid back, polite, and confident enough with his own skill that, on the rare occasion when I might have asked him a question he didn’t know the answer to, he had no trouble admitting that but saying he’d get me an answer.  Another thing you’d think would be obvious, since nobody can be expected to know everything, but I can’t tell you how many SE’s I’ve spoken with who obviously don’t know something, but insist on doing a bad job of pretending they do.

A Wildcard from the Twitterverse

I first encountered Joe Onisick via Twitter about a year and a half ago, when we were first looking into the integrated stack / converged infrastructure options.  He was one of the bloggers I followed on Twitter, and I believe he saw a tweet I sent asking for opinions on the topic.  He reached out to me and offered to discuss it over the phone with me.  We had a great chat about it, and he detailed the pros and cons of the various options.  I didn’t know much about Joe besides the fact that he ran a blog I admired and that he was generous enough with his time to spend almost an hour talking to a stranger about technology.  I later learned that he works for World Wide Technology, and that not only gave me a favorable first impression of WWT, it drove home the point that all of these interactions we have with people over Twitter, on the blogs, at conferences – they all can reflect back on the companies we work for.  In Joe’s case especially, his generosity with his time with no expectation of making a sale or anything, reflected well on WWT.  By the way, Joe wrote an excellent post titled The Art of Pre-Sales – and it’s definitely worth a read.

And that’s really the point, isn’t it?

All three of these guys know a ton about technology, and just knowing a lot would probably be enough to make them decent at their jobs.  What makes them awesome at their jobs is more than just what they know, it’s how they communicate it to others.  It’s how they listen.  It’s how they explain things and design solutions that meet the needs of the business.  Even more than that, it’s how they act, the passion they have for technology, and how they represent the company they’re working for and the products they’re selling.

These guys are pros, and they’re the standard to which I hold SE’s to now.  Which SE’s do you know or work with that you would say that about, and for what companies do they work?

I’ve worked in IT for more than 15 years, and for the first twelve years, I didn’t interact with a single vendor salesperson who gave me a reason to think of IT sales as being significantly different from used car sales.  Whether it was hardware or software, the sales professionals I encountered left me with a singularly low opinion of sales.  This is the story of how that began to change a few years ago, when I began work on my Citrix XenDesktop project.

I don’t recall if I reached out to Citrix or if they reached out to me, but I’m thinking it was the latter, because I had registered for and attended a webinar on the XenDesktop implementation of Scottsdale Community College, MySCC. I think I received an email a week or so after that, and that led to an initial meeting.  I wasn’t hopeful about that meeting, because to that point, my experience with the “sales guy” who worked for our then Citrix reseller was pretty abysmal.  I’d send him emails and he might respond in three or four days, or it might be two weeks, with never a word of apology for the delay, and usually without really addressing the question or topic in a satisfactory manner.

Surprise – it doesn’t have to suck

But that meeting went well.  I met Patrick Beauchene from Citrix and Tim Sharp from LPS Integration.  Both these guys would begin to change my opinion of salespeople right away, and would swing my attitude towards ever possibly participating in the sales process professionally 180 degrees.  I’ll tell you more about them in a bit, but I also wanted to mention the third member of my own personal sales triumvirate.

After working with Patrick and Tim for a year or more to try to get my Citrix project off the ground, it dovetailed with a parallel effort to buy a bunch of storage and dramatically grow our virtualization cluster.  During that year I’d attended meeting after meeting with backup vendors, storage vendors, server vendors, you name it vendors.  And you know what?  While my perspective on sales had shifted to a more positive place thanks to Patrick and Tim, I encountered many stereotypically bad sales people during that time.

Until I attended my first meeting with Roger Wright from NetApp, that is.  After fearing Patrick and Tim must have been some dynamic duo of an exception that proved the rule that I would never have a positive experience with sales, Roger arrived and made it clear that I’d just had a run of bad luck.  I’ve since dealt quite a bit with all three of these sales professionals, and while I think they couldn’t be less alike in some ways, each of them is a very good at what he does.  I’ve worked for more than 15 years in IT in higher education, and I’d like to point out what sets these guys apart from the dozens of other salespeople I’ve dealt with.  I won’t go into their professional backgrounds – that’s what LinkedIn is for, right?  I’m just going to give you my opinion of what makes them awesome at what they do.

Three Ambassadors of Awesome

Patrick Beauchene is slick, and that worried me at first because I’ve met plenty of slick but horrible salespeople.  I’ve gotten to know Patrick fairly well, though, and his slickness isn’t a put-on – it’s part of his character.  He’s the cool guy you knew in high school or college, and he’s good at sales in part because he’s likable and fun.  But that’s not enough, and if that’s all Patrick had going for him, he wouldn’t have impressed me.  He’s also a nerd.  Maybe not a hard-core geek like me and my peers, but he is just about the opposite of the sales guy who can’t operate without his sales engineer to do the talking.  Could I beat Patrick at a game of Stump the Chump?  Sure I could, but I could beat most SE’s at that game too – I live and breathe what I do in IT.  But Patrick holds his own and he gets the technology he’s selling, and that makes him very good.  What takes him beyond that is that he has a vision for where Citrix’s technology can be applied, and this is more than what you’d expect of a good nerd sales guy who has sat through a corporate ra-ra seminar or two.  He shared an idea for a project with me recently that rocked me back on my heels, and being the classically trained (really, my first degree was in Latin) geek that I am, I like to sit around thinking up big ideas for fun.  Patrick’s not just pushing product to make a quota – he thinks about where it goes and how it gets used, and how it can be used.

Tim Sharp is a good old boy, and I’m from the South, so from me that’s a compliment.  He’s a good guy, an honest guy.  It was Tim more than anyone who challenged my misconception about salespeople that went something like this: If a salesman is talking, he’s lying.  He shattered that misconception.  Tim’s a straight shooter, even if shooting straight hurts his chances of making a deal, and I respect that.  Tim’s also something I’d never encountered in the IT sales world before – an advocate for his customers.  Our Citrix reseller/partner is LPS Integration, and our experience with them has been very good, and through them, our experience with Citrix has been very good.  Tim plays a huge role in that relationship – he kept it alive during times when my project was temporarily killed, he helped strengthen it when we hit snags in funding and stakeholder buy-in along the way, and he keeps it going strong now, after the sale.  He says one simple thing, and he’s never failed to deliver on it – “Tell me what you need, Mike, and I’ll take care of it.”

Roger Wright is extremely professional, and you can tell he’s spent a lot of time selling to big companies and large government agencies or institutions.  He also possesses a calmness in stressful situations that has impressed me on more than one occasion.  I like to think of Roger as my IT librarian; he may not have the answer to the questions I ask, in fact as a salesperson he typically doesn’t.  What Roger does, though, is find the person who does have the answer, and he facilitates my communication with them so that I can get the information I need.  I can’t overstate the value of that role, and Roger is the best at it.  He’s also amazing, almost doggedly persistent at followup, not just with me to make sure I have what I need, but with others inside NetApp if I need something from them.

What does all this mean?

Each of these guys – Patrick, Tim, and Roger, are great sales professionals.  They’ve changed how I view sales as a process and people who work in sales.  Hell, they’ve helped me consider the possibility of a career change involving sales – something that would have had me roaring with laughter a few years ago.  They’ve also demonstrated that, with the help of some outstanding Sales Engineers and others whom I will write about soon, when it comes to dealing with good companies, everybody supports the sales effort.

You may be lucky enough to have worked with plenty of pros like them – if you are, good for you.  You may be where I am now – knowing there are good sales pros out there but believing they’re not the norm.  If you’re unlucky enough to be where I was a few years ago – thinking every salesperson out there is alike – only interested in dumping their product on you and running – there’s hope.  Start asking around.  Get on Twitter or LinkedIn and read what real people are saying about their experiences with companies and their sales professionals.  Find the good ones and work with them.

That sort of thing happened just yesterday so I wanted to take a couple of minutes to highlight a big win that XenApp, the Citrix Streaming Profiler, and streamed apps in general helped me achieve for our team.  Since I took the time to document it for later internal use anyway, I’m also going to publish a version of the primer here.  I’m sure most experienced XenApp admins won’t need this, but having been the guy searching the web for a little how-to help before, I’m also hoping somebody might find it useful.

I work at a large public university.  We have a lot of Mac users on campus, and the number increases every year.  Heck, I’m one of them.  We also run really huge systems for things like grades, registration, degree auditing, and payroll.  It may come as a surprise to you, but many of these large systems and applications don’t make a huge effort to be “Mac friendly” client-wise.  One of our first big wins with the rollout of our new system was publishing Internet Explorer so faculty using Macs could run a web application that required an ActiveX plugin, which meant it required IE.

Yesterday I was made aware of an issue involving another system, its Java-based web client, and Macs.  As both “the Citrix guy” and one of our main Mac guys, these problems naturally gravitate to me, and I’m happy to work on problems like this because they a) increase the utility and value of my Citrix systems and b) help out my fellow Mac users.  In a nutshell, something was going wonky on this system, rendering the text output on Macs, but only on Macs, too tiny to be read comfortably.  So the manager of our HelpDesk came to me and asked if we could use the published copy of IE to solve this issue.  The answer at that moment was no, as we were publishing a vanilla copy of IE and we don’t have a JRE baked into the PVS image it runs on.  But the answer quickly became yes.  I knew it was possible to profile plugins and stream them down to be used with a local (or published) copy of IE, and I even did it once or twice during our POC, but hadn’t had any reason to do so in production.  Another wrinkle was this particular web app needed a specific older version of the JRE, but that’s the sort of thing app streaming is made for.

To make a long story short, I jumped on my virtual server I use for profiling apps, fired up the Streaming Profiler, profiled the specific version of the JRE needed, and saved it to our App Hub.  From there, I published it, tested it on my Mac as both me and a couple of different test normal users, and then did a quick demo for our HelpDesk manager.  She was impressed, and we had a solution to offer our Mac users in case the font size wonkiness couldn’t be resolved in some other manner.

Was it amazing?  Not really.  Was it something only a veteran Citrix admin could do, and that only after hours of research and planning and painstaking work?  Not at all – it was practically a textbook example of a problem designed to be solved by application streaming.  But whether it was an easy problem to solve or a hard problem to solve, the important part is we solved the problem and helped out our users.  I’d call that a win any day.

That’s the end of the “Saves the Day” post.  Unless you need a primer or refresher, I’d suggest you stop reading now, because everything after this section is going to be kinda boring – just screenshots and instructions.

How to profile JRE (or some other IE plug-in) with the Citrix Streaming Profiler

3.  Select Advanced Install and click Next.

4.  Select Install IE Plugins, Web applications, or online updates (Microsoft Internet Explorer only) and click Next.

5.  Click the Launch Microsoft Internet Explorer button.

6.  Browse to the provided URL for downloading the specific version of the JRE, click to accept the license agreement, and click on the Windows x86 Offline (32-bit) download.  Do not save the file.

7.  Choose to run the installer, not save it.  This is necessary because the Streaming Profiler has to see the JRE installer running in the same context as the Internet Explorer process it launched.

8.  Walk through the JRE installer accepting the defaults.

9.  Once the JRE is installed, test it by opening the web app that requires Java.  You should be prompted to approve the running of the JRE.  Do so.

10.  Success!  Close any Java and IE windows that are open

11.  Click Next.

12.  Make sure Finish installations is checked and click Next.

13.  There are no applications that need to be run at this point, so click Next.

14.  Internet Explorer was run during the installation, and is the only application to publish, so click Next, then Finish.

15.  Save the JRE Profile to the App Hub.  If you click Browse, you will see the folder you last saved a profiles app to.  Select it and click Save.

16.  Once the save is completed you will see the full size of the JRE profile in the right-hand pane.

18.  This will be an Application, Accessed from a server (this is for Mac users, remember?), and it will be Streamed to server.  Click Next.

20.  Here’s a screenshot of the JRE running via Internet Explorer on my Mac.

It’s kinda funny how my perspective on these classes has changed over the last year or so.  I helped manage a smaller XenApp, or rather Presentation Server (4.0, then 4.5) system for about eight years, when it was transferred to our Labs Support group because we had a lot of experience making all sorts of applications work in multi-user environments.  We ordered new hardware and migrated to a system we built from scratch, and, in the absence of any training or prior experience, proceeded to learn the hard way by making a bunch of mistakes.  But we kept that system up and running, almost in spite of itself, and it became the foundation on which we planned our much larger system that we’re deploying today.

After eight years of that and a couple of years of building one POC after another, not only of XenDesktop & XenApp, but competing products from other vendors, I looked forward to attending official Citrix training.  I walked into those classes with high hopes and they were mostly met.  My instructors were good, mostly consultants moonlighting as trainers, which was just fine with me, as I still remembered how pathetic the MCSE training classes became after I worked on my NT4 MCSE by taking classes from a moonlighting Compaq Tier 3 engineer.  You can read two posts about my NetScaler class here and here.  Whereas I felt like my XenApp and XenDesktop classes mainly served to fine-tune things I’d been figuring out on my own, and the NetScaler class definitely pounded me with tons of new information and skills I hadn’t had an opportunity to develop before, I think I expected this XenApp Advanced class to push me as much as the NetScaler class did.

But it didn’t, and in hindsight, it really couldn’t.  I’ve had my hands in the guts of Presentation Server and XenApp for a long time, so there wasn’t much in the Advanced class that was new to me.  There was, though, a great deal of troubleshooting and optimization material and discussion, and that was useful.  The courseware was decent and the labs, when they weren’t painfully slow or even kinda broken, which seems to be the norm for remote, hosted training labs, weren’t bad.  What was more valuable, though, and the reason I would attend this sort of class for XenApp vNext, was the classroom discussions with my fellow students and with our instructor.  Just chatting with the other students and comparing notes about our respective environments was enlightening.  The same was true for the instructor, especially because he runs his own consulting firm and deals with all kinds of different environments running every combination of Citrix product.

One other neat thing about the class is that one of the other students was Mark Schill, president of the Atlanta PowerShell User Group and Atlanta Citrix User Group.  He’s also one of the co-authors of Windows PowerShell 2.0 Bible.  Having Mark in class was pretty neat, especially since he was quick to point out, “you can do that in PowerShell.”  Finding the time to learn PowerShell has been on my to-do list for a while, so I bought Mark’s book, had him sign it, and am now working through a video training series by Don Jones.  So even if I didn’t walk away from the XenApp Advanced class having learned a ton of new XenApp material, I definitely walked away with a renewed interest in learning PowerShell.

Overall I’d say the class and the road trip were a great experience.  My coworker had only been with us about 6 months at that point, so it was nice to get to spend a week doing the “Nerds Away from Home” bonding thing, which mainly involved trying a bunch of local restaurants; one of which was an Irish pub called Mac McGee that was so amazing we had dinner there three nights in a row.  I’ll be doing a post about Mac McGee on my food blog soon.

My breakout session on Wednesday, June 13 was the reason I attended Cisco Live, and certainly the reason I was invited to attend by Citrix. I have to say that, while I wondered whether I would like co-presenting with someone from Citrix before flying out to San Diego, I am very grateful that I had Sean Connelly (@XenDesktopArmy) to share the session with me. I’m confident today that I could carry a session on my own, but being able to sit there in the room and observe the attendees while Sean was speaking helped calm my nerves a bit, and also helped give me some insight into the the nerd level of the room and what they were hoping to learn during the session.

Sean and I arrived about fifteen minutes before our session, giving us plenty of time to receive a quick how-to on the mic and clicker. I always try to arrive early to any session I’m attending, mainly so I can get a good seat, preferably near a power outlet, so I’ll admit to a bit of anxiety as the start time of our session, 4PM, drew near. You see, nobody showed up really early. Turns out that wasn’t big deal, as plenty of people showed up a little early, on time, or even a few minutes late. But for those several minutes between really early and a little early … yeah, I was nervous. And you know what? For the last session of the day, especially the last session before the gigantic Customer Appreciation Event of Awesomeness, not having a packed room ten minutes before go-time was just fine. People showed up and, like every other session I attended, were reasonably polite about getting seated if they came in after Sean started speaking.

I hope it isn’t rude of me to admit that I stopped paying a ton of attention to what Sean was saying after the first couple of minutes. I did that for two reasons: 1) I’d seen, heard, and even given a mini version of the Citrix product talk he was giving a number of times, but mostly it was 2) once I realized how much more polished and calm he was than I felt I would be, I decided to pay more attention to the audience. I’d say our audience was a pretty mixed group of people. I recall speaking to a couple of guys from Blue Cross / Blue Shield of Tennessee briefly after the session, so healthcare was represented. I know at least one local government IT guy was there, and I know several other state, federal, and local IT people pre-registered. I also recall someone from Toyota pre-registering, but I believe she attended my talk at the NetApp booth and got one of my business cards and said she’d be in touch, as her office was looking to go down the same road we have.

Sean talked for a while, then passed the baton, or in this case the wired lapel mic and clicker over to me. I fumbled to get the mic properly attached, checked the time, and figured I’d need to gloss over a couple of slides to make sure I left time for Q&A. We’d already confirmed with the conference staff outside that we were the last session, so we could run long if we needed to, but I wanted to make sure that if we did shoot past 5PM, it would be because I was answering questions from the audience, not trying to wrap up my remarks.

During my talk I tried to give an overview of several main points or concepts, some of which I’ve gone into in much greater detail here on the blog. They were:

• The Problem we were trying to solve
• Some details on our environment
• The choice of XenDesktop
• The choice of Cisco UCS, which also meant FlexPod
• Project Milestones (we’re not done yet)
• Wins & Challenges
• Mistakes I’ve made
• What we’ve done right
• Future plans

I thought about including my slides from both sessions in this post, but I’m not sure what value they’d offer in a vacuum, since they really are just memory queues for me more than anything else. Given the positive real-time feedback I receive while discussing some of the mistakes I’ve made, though, I am definitely going to do a post just on those.

Overall, I’d say the talk went well. It took me a couple of minutes, but I found what I think of as a rhythm and settled into it. I walk into any talk like this with two goals in mind – tell it like it is, and don’t be boring. I think I succeeded on both fronts. A couple of people left at 5PM, but nearly everyone else stayed until there weren’t anymore questions, about 5:15. Considering there were major prize drawings going on at 5:30 in the World of Solutions area, I was pleased that people stayed as long as they did. I received some very kind feedback immediately after the session, so I walked away knowing I’d done a good job.

An awesome conversation the next day

I was going through line for lunch on Thursday and someone behind me said “hi” and thanked me for my session. That was a huge surprise, especially considering how many people were at Cisco Live (17,000), not to mention how many lines there were for food, and that I was actually kinda late to lunch that day. I’m sure someone who didn’t major in Latin and Creative Writing could do the math to figure out how unlikely it was that someone who had attended my session the day before would randomly bump into me, but I’m so glad he did. I’m horrible with names, so I don’t recall his name, and while I’m pretty sure I know who he was based on the list of people who pre-registered for my session, I’ll just refer to him as my local government networking pal.

We sat down and ate lunch together and just talked for what might have been a couple of hours. I know we had to rush to make it to the Mythbusters closing keynote. I mentioned in my earlier recap post that this one conversation made the trip worth it for me, and it really did. He had some followup questions about XenDesktop and the various delivery models it has that make it trump VMware View, about licensing on the Citrix side, on the Microsoft side, and even the application side. I was able to give him a much more detailed overview of our environment, and answer a lot of the type of “what about this” questions that only come up once you’re sitting down and having an actual conversation with one or a few people. We talked about how crazy expensive VMware vSphere is, especially in my environment (higher ed) compared to Hyper-V, but how even with the enormous price difference (a difference I double-checked with our Microsoft rep that I’m not allowed to divulge, which I think is *crazy* but it’s their NDA, not mine), in our environment, vSphere was really the only serious choice from the beginning for the hypervisor, and why. I got to nerd out about Cisco UCS and NetApp storage. I got to go into more detail about one of the major mistakes (future post, I promise) I made during the planning and beginning phases of my project.

But this wasn’t just a one-way conversation. I got to pick his brain about Cisco Live and its ongoing value, as he was a multi-year veteran attendee. That topic alone, once I conveyed it to the manager of our Network Services team, produced a commitment to send a few of my networking buddies to Cisco Live 2013. I received some good advice about trying to forge opportunities to direct my career path a bit more towards the Cisco / networking world from a guy whose job is mainly networking-related. I heard about how his locale is looking to work more cooperatively with local school districts, something I’ve seen and heard from a buddy at church who works for a local school district.

I wish I’d taken notes, or at least found the time to write this post sooner, because a lot of the details of our conversation have slipped away from my sleep-deprived new dad brain. What I know for sure was that conversation just about perfectly exemplifies why I agreed to fly across the country and give the talk in the first place – to help someone who may be today exactly where I was a couple years ago. I think I did some of that in my NetApp booth session, and I felt like I did even more of it during my main breakout session. But I know I did it during that awesome one-on-one conversation. That’s why I began this blog too, and why I’m going to keep writing it.

The Future

So will I do this again? Heck yeah. I’m looking forward to it already.

The months leading up to Cisco Live

I’ve given various presentations about the XenDesktop system we’re building at work over the last couple of years, to groups within my IT organization, all the way up the management chain, and to stakeholders around campus.  So talking about my project and the system are something I’m comfortable with and enjoy.  I even got a preview of what it would be like to deliver my presentation to a group of total strangers at Cisco Live back in March, when I worked with Citrix’s Trevor Mansell.  That webinar was actually a pretty strange experience for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I was running on very little sleep since we’d brought our first baby home from the hospital for the first time the week before.  What was even more strange was giving the presentation, working through my slide deck, with no visual or really even auditory queues as to how well I was doing, or how interested the audience was.  Still, there was a lively Q&A session after I wrapped up and I got some positive feedback from the webinar, so I figured the in-person talks I’d be giving at Cisco Live would be even better.

A few weeks out from the conference, a few of my coworkers asked me if I were nervous about speaking, and I told them I really wasn’t.  I’d be discussing familiar material about which I am quite passionate, and I felt pretty sure everything would be fine.  The very next day I attended a conference call for speakers at Cisco Live that turned out to be primarily targeted at Cisco employees, but was still fairly useful for me.  I learned about some of the tools for speakers on the Cisco Live site, something I hadn’t spent much time on before that day as someone from Citrix had registered me for the conference, and I had been working through my Citrix co-presenter, Sean Connelly, to provide my slides to Cisco.  One of the handy speaker-related links on the Cisco Live site was a list of all of the people who had pre-registered for my site.  I could see the number, either 54 or 58, and with great excitement I clicked on the link to show me the list of names, titles, and company affiliation of the pre-registrants.

That was a mistake.  My methodology for preparing to speak has always involved making sure I know my material very well; not to the point of memorizing a script, but preparing my slides to serve more as highlights and reminders for me, to make sure I touch on the topics I’m covering.  I don’t obsess about my material because I’m confident I know it better than anybody else.  As far as thinking about the audience to whom I will be presenting, I normally just think in broad terms; are they fellow IT Pros, technical managers, non-technical executives, faculty, general end-users?  But I don’t really think too much about the individuals, because everybody is different, and I figure the extent to which I interact with the audience on an individual level will come once they start asking questions, and flow from there.  My mistake in looking at this list of people who pre-registered to attend my session was two-fold.  First, it really drove home that a specific number of people had looked over the sessions and made a choice to come spend some of their valuable time listening to me.  I’ve been on the audience side of picking a bad session to attend, and somehow knowing how many people could be attending made me anxious and worried that I might end up being that guy – the one someone would remember as giving the talk they regretted attending.  Second, seeing exactly who these folks were, and especially their job titles and companies, made me realize just how varied the audience would be, and made me worry that I might not be able to speak to everyone in the manner and on the level that they needed to get the most out of my talk.

I worried about that for about a week, then managed to put it out of my head by realizing I’ve talked about this system to every kind of potential audience already, and if I had to adjust the nerd level a bit on the fly, I was OK with that.

Arriving in San Diego

I arrived at Cisco Live on Monday, June 11.  I forgot Speaker Registration ended at 6:30 that day, and that, combined with my poor map-reading skills contributed to me missing out on seeing the Speakers’ Lounge until Tuesday.  I walked around the Citrix and NetApp booths Monday afternoon but specifically avoided introducing myself, mainly to see if I could get a sense of the booths and spot some of the people I’d only communicated with over email, Twitter, and the phone.  That didn’t work out so well, as one of the first people I encountered at the NetApp booth scanned my badge and she turned out to be someone I’d exchanged several emails with and had an interview with later in the week.

I had a brief bout of speaker anxiety Tuesday morning after I stopped by the Speakers’ Lounge and picked up my badge with the speaker ribbon.  I attended my first session of the day and it was in a fairly large ballroom, definitely larger than any room I’d spoken in before.  Luckily, after the session ended, I found the room my breakout session would be in and it was a decent bit smaller.

My NetApp Booth Session

From where I stood, on this platform just a few inches off the ground, I thought my session at the NetApp booth went just fine.  Having sat in the audience section for many booth presentations, I can now say that the noise from surrounding booths and the distraction of hundreds of people walking by and talking just feet away from the session is harder to deal with as a speaker than it is as a listener, but it isn’t terrible.  My booth audience was polite and attentive, and a few of them asked very good questions.  The only negative experience I had with speaking at the NetApp booth, and I think this would have been the case in just about any booth I saw at Cisco Live or any conference, was the physical arrangement of the audience, the screen, and the speaker.  Part of that is likely my own inexperience speaking in different venues, and by that I mean I’m used to having a laptop or my iPad in front of me so I can glance down at it to make sure I’ve hit all the points I wanted to before advancing to the next slide.  Given the limited size of the stage at these booths, having a second screen for me to look at wasn’t possible.  The other physical issue was that the audience was simply very close to me, and by close I mean close enough that I could have reached out and tapped someone on the first row on the head without moving off my little platform.  I’m sure that’s a factor of the limited amount of space vendors have to work with in the booths, and I’m also sure I could get used to it, but during my first experience with it, I kept feeling like I was invading the personal space of the folks in my first row, and I also felt weird trying to make eye contact with them, as they were sitting on teeny tiny little stool thingies, and I was a few inches off the floor.  So it was a bit awkward, but overall a very positive experience.  I definitely think I’ll be less thrown by it next time.

Speakers’ Lounge

I met my co-presenter, Sean Connelly (@XenDesktopArmy) from Citrix at the Speakers’ Lounge about an hour before our presentation.  I was very impressed with the Speakers’ Lounge, especially since I don’t even recall the last conference I presented at, SIGGUCS Fall 2005, even having one.  Next time I’ll make more use of the sodas and water, as I would imagine I’ll be just as tired and dehydrated in Orlando as I was in San Diego.

Speaking of the Speakers’ Lounge, I have to say that Cisco really did an awesome job of making sure people coming to speak at Cisco Live got the support they needed.  Like I mentioned above, the conference call I attended as a speaker before the conference seemed to be geared more towards Cisco employees, as there was talk of a specific Cisco dress code, as well as discussion of Meet the Engineer and other Cisco-focused events.  But even so, there was a lot of back and forth communication encouraged before the conference, and plenty of support on-site if a speaker needed to update his/her slides, etc.

Part II – Coming soon

In my next post I’ll cover my main breakout session, how I think it went, and also an awesome conversation I had at lunch the next day with an attendee of my breakout session.