Last week, I was in Boston for BZ Media’s SPTechCon Boston event. It was a great opportunity to see and spend time with many of my friends in the SharePoint community, do a book signing with John Ferringer and Idera, and take in a few sessions.
Although I wasn’t technically a presenter at the conference, I did deliver a “lightning talk” on the first day of the conference. Lightning talks are five minute presentations that are typically given by sponsors and designed to expose audiences (who are usually chowing-down on food) to the sponsors’ services, products, etc.
I was given Idera’s slot to speak, and I was also given the latitude to basically do whatever I wanted … so, I decided to have some fun with it!
The Lightning Talk Itself
The five minute presentation that appears below is titled Backup/Restore Knowledge Nuggets: What’s True, What’s Not? If you weren’t at SPTechCon and can spare a few minutes, I think you’ll find the presentation to be both amusing and informative.
Follow the link and try it out! You’ll find that the play button allows you to step through the presentation from start to finish pretty easily.
Prezi has a very slick mechanism for embedding actual presentations directly into a website, but that isn’t an option here on my blog. WordPress.com hosts my blog, and they strip out anything with <object> tags. I tried to embed the presentation directly, but it got me nowhere :-(
Wait, What’s Prezi?
I recently became hooked on Prezi (the product + service that drove both the lightning talk and the link that I included above) when I saw Peter Serzo use it to deliver his service application session at SharePoint Saturday Columbus. Prior to Prezi, I did everything with PowerPoint. Once I saw Prezi in action and got some additional details from Peter, though, I knew that I’d be using Prezi before long.
I don’t see Prezi as a replacement for PowerPoint, but I do see it as a nice complement. PowerPoint is great for presenting sequential sets of data and information, and it excels in situations where a linear delivery is desirable.
Prezi, on the other hand, is fantastic for talks and presentation where jumping around happens a lot – such as you might do when trying to tie several points back to a central theme or concept. Prezi isn’t nearly as full-featured as PowerPoint, but I find that it can be more visually engaging and simply “fun.”
Wrapping It Up
The lightning talk at SPTechCon was the perfect arena for a test run with Prezi, and I think the presentation went wonderfully… and was a whole lot of fun to deliver, as well. I certainly see myself using Prezi more in the future. SharePoint Saturday Dallas is coming up in just a couple of weeks …
If you take the time to watch the presentation, I’d really love to hear your feedback!
Additional Reading and References
- Company: BZ Media LLC
- Book: SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide
- Blog: John Ferringer’s MyCentralAdmin
- Company: Idera
- Presentation: Backup/Restore Knowledge Nuggets: What’s True, What’s Not?
- Product: Prezi
- Twitter: Peter Serzo (@pserzo)
- Event: SharePoint Saturday Columbus
- Event: SharePoint Saturday Dallas
I really enjoyed your lightning presentation on Prezi! It was an entertaining way to start the day, and I learned a bit too. Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback, John — I appreciate it! Prezi’s definitely cool. In fact, it’s so cool that “they” may take it away from me … :-)
I didn’t know what to expect from the entire conference, however, I did soak up a lot of knowledge and networked with a large number of industry experts that will help as we begin planning our implementations. I definetly was impressed with the Prezi presentation that you gave. “Nuggets” of knowledge with just the right amount of entertainment added in. I am going to try and utilize Prezi for my next presentation. Great job!
Thank you for the feedback, Andrew! I had a lot of fun putting the presentation together, and Prezi was indeed neat to work with. I tried to keep things entertaining (as much as I could) to keep the audience interested. I’m thankful that Idera gave me the latitude to basically do what I wanted. A straightforward “here’s how the product works” would allow me to show the Idera SharePoint backup application, but my guess is the audience would have probably tuned-out. Just a guess :-)
Like you, this was also my first SPTechCon. I found some good content, but I did find a lot of networking opportunities, as well. I run into a lot of the same folks while presenting at SharePoint Saturday events, and the conference gave me a chance to get caught up with old friends and make some new ones.
Once again, I appreciate the feedback!
Prezi is interesting , is is indeed a fun to use. At least a new way to give a catchy presentation. Keep it up.
Thanks for sharing.
zee
walisystems.com