office 2010–community launch event–bangalore-experience
******Update - Posted the links to pictures of the event ******
Last weekend i.e. Jul 3, I was asked to present my session at Office 2010 Community Launch Event in Bangalore. This was in association with www.BDotNet.in. BDotNet is one of the largest and active .NET User Group in India. I was happy that i got one more chance. Thanks to Pavanaja/Kashi/Vic for this opportunity.
I was happy to present at Bangalore because Bangalore is a bigger ground when it comes to Technology. Bangalore is the Silicon Valley of India. So i readily agreed thinking that this will be the real test of my nerves. Also another point was – the Bangalore event was held at the Microsoft campus. So i thought this is a chance to say that i visited MS campus.
On the day of the event i was actually late by 10 minutes. Vic and Kashi of BDotNet were already present at the hall. When i entered i was told that the first speaker Mr. Arun Kumar who was supposed to take up a session on SharePoint 2010 was not able to present his session as he was hospitalized. And Pavanaja was on his way – he was in the campus trying to find parking at that time. Since he was to handle the second session, he thought he will have his slot at 3. So at this moment i saw about 15 community members who had come to the event. I must say at this point that i was expecting a bigger crowd. Well it was a fine Saturday here in Bangalore. So thought that not all are Geeks like some of us : ).
Vic and Kashi asked me if i could fill the gap by showing some things. The only thing i could have done is to show Office 2010 to the audience. But Pavanaja had a 1 hour slot completely dedicated to that. He was to talk about new things that are available in Office 2010 from an end user perspective. So i had to be careful not to spill the beans. So i thought i just show them some of the following concepts:
- All Office 2010 application now have a cool Splash Screen added. Prior to Office 2010 – if the loading of an application lets say Word/Excel/etc took time to load you didnt have a visual cue for the same. Now you will see a splash screen which looks like below:
(Source : http://blogs.technet.com/b/office2010/archive/2009/12/11/office-2010-visuals-and-branding.aspx)
- Back Stage View – This is the new concept that all Office applications have. The big button on the top left hand corner that was seen in Office 2007 is gone. Instead it is replaced by the “File” tab. The back stage view is used to perform action outside of the document and not within the document i.e. you can do actions like “Save”, “Save As”, “Set Permissions” etc… I hope you got the idea. Following is the screen shot of the back stage view:
So i took about 20 minutes going through the above features. Explained them the different things available in back stage view and did some hand on demo on the back stage view.
When i was done with the brief intro of Office 2010, Kashi/Vic asked me if i could start my session. My session was programmed to be held next to Pavanajas session – because – his session would have explained what is Office 2010. Then i will pitch in with how as an end users can customize things in office. But since Pavanaja had not yet arrived at the hall i went ahead with the show.
I had revamped my whole slide decks from those used for Mysore. I changed only the UI and had kept the content as is. I used the template known as “Duarte”. If you have Office 2010 – then you must watch the presentation template titled “Duarte”. Excellent concepts of how to do a stunning presentations. So i picked this one up and re did the whole slide deck. Put in some of the cool new transitions and animations available in 2010.
My session as a whole went on well. I could see many people nodding there heads for some of the points i made. I could also interact with them once they started to feel comfortable. I did get some questions and i was confident enough to give them a convincing answer. Somebody tweeted saying my slide deck and transition were very good (Hash tag for the event was #myoffice2010). Now that’s really a booster for you to carry on the show. When you put in effort and you get at least one appreciation means a lot. I have uploaded the slide decks used in my previous blog post. So check that out and let me know your comments.
All in all i could say that this experience was very good for me. I am gaining confidence in each session i am giving. I am looking forward to many more of these talks. It was nice to meet Kashi and Vic from this event. Also met couple of twitter friends like Raj (@Raj2s), Shyam (@brandbull), Ninaada (@Ninaada). Nice meeting you all guys.
Another news from my side will be - If all goes well, i will be getting a chance to speak at a much more bigger podium than my first 2 sessions. Will have more on this in days to come.
****Here is the links to the photos of the event:
BDotNet.in link
Dr. U. B. Pavanajas photos of the event
Till then, Happy coding. Code with passion.