Yesterday I gave my first public group presentation to the Madison .Net Users Group on SharePoint 2010. Even though I was working on the demos up until the time I left my house for the meeting, I still managed to do ok. The speaker evaluation ratings were mostly 4 or 5’s, but I would have had to been pretty bad to get anything lower.
I did get one comment, and that was that I let my voice trail off, and I remember doing this. I tend to think out loud, so that’s probably what this was. However, for a presentation, talking to one’s self looks kind of goofy, and would be even worse if I was mic’d up. So I need to work on this and make sure that I am either speaking to the group, or not at all.
What Worked
- Writing out everything I wanted to say, word for word on the notes, which I know that you are not supposed to do (read from notes). This ended up working because I was able to recall most of what I wrote down without looking at the notes. I think that I will continue to try to write out what I want to say as a one more way of practicing for the presentation.
- Overall length of the presentation was good
- Demo to Slide mix was ok for this topic even though it was slide heavy. There was a lot of information to convey, and I felt that the audience was mostly new to SharePoint that they would appreciate a solid foundation
- Demo’s worked out pretty well. I may want to consider adding more code comments to help explain things, as well as help me remember talking points
What Didn’t Work (or what do I need to do next time)
- Number one on my list is don’t procrastinate. I need to allow myself enough time to run thru the presentation at least once.
- Create some index cards that contain key information that I want to make sure I cover. This would have been useful on a couple of the slides were there was a lot of information to cover.
- Make sure if you need to read something, that it’s readable in low light situations
- Don’t re-use step by step hands on lab notes with pictures. Demo notes should be on a single page, unless you need to copy code.
Client Object Model
There were a couple of questions on the Client Object model, and I wasn’t able to answer them as well as I wanted to. So I did a little research and came up with a key points.
The Client Object Model provides a subset of the server object model functionally, which is exposed via a WCF web service. This is intended as a replacement for custom wrappers around the asmx web services that have been available in the past. The client object model is unified across JaveScript, .Net CLR, and the SilverLight CRL, so if you learn it for one platform, you can re-use that knowledge on the other supported platforms.
The object model was designed in a way to encourage efficient network utilization thru the use of batching. As a developer, you add a series of commands to the context, invoke the cotnext’s ExecuteQuery method, and receive a set of batch results back from the service in JSON. Most of the details are handled for you by the object model, so it’s not like you have to worry about parsing JSON.
Links
Here are all of the links I used for my demo. And as an added bonus, I have included links to all of the SharePoint 2010 videos from PDC 2009. I only wish I would have had the time to watch them all before giving my presentation.
My Power Point Presentation
SharePoint Foundation (Server) 2010
Extra Stuff needed to Install SharePoint 2010 Beta
SharePoint 2007 – WSS 3.0 (Some of these resources still apply to 2010)
SharePoint PDC Videos