Jürgen Welz
jwelz at hotmail.com
Thu Mar 4 13:12:01 CST 2004
My last presentation fell completely apart. I attended a provinical construction association annual banquet to accept an industry award for innovation for an application I had written for a former employer, now client, Gracom Masonry. The client gave me a typical 'secured' laptop (paranoid parent company security) a few days in advance to prepare a short demo. The plan was to demonstrate a typical cycle of the steps to enter a new bid request to takeoff to estimate to tender to award to management and some of the reporting capability. The client flew me to the city a day early so I could drop in one of their local offices and ensure all was well. I checked the banquet facility and the projector was running an identical make and model laptop when I dropped in. In fact, they had set up a rear projection system capable of running 1600 * 1200 resolution from the VGA connector complete with switch boxes to hookup multiple concurrent VGA connectors. I even had dial up access to the terminal server in case anything went south on the laptop. When it came down to the evening, it turned out there were video driver issues on the laptop that ONLY AFFECTED THE VGA OUT!!! The laptop would output to the external VGA port until the login screen closed so it was not a hardware issue. Typical company security prevents a means of transferring files to another machine (disabled USB and no floppy or CD Writer). Parent company called in an MSCE tech at the 11th hour to the presentation site but it was not possible to resolve the issues nor to migrate any of the functionality to another machine in the time remaining. I had done several training sessions in the past using their laptops in addition to some presentations at a local Access user group using the company laptops so I never bothered to check the VGA out against a monitor in a timely fashion. Next time I bring my own laptop as a spare, a backup Power Point demo on CD and a plan on how to present should the projector fail. The result was that a fabulous marketing opportunity turned to dust as I was reduced to telling a hall full of people about all the wonderful things the application could do when my plan was a quick and carefully planned demo/script of how fast and easy it was to get a job done. A technology award for an outfit that can't use technology? Ciao Jürgen Welz Edmonton, Alberta jwelz at hotmail.com > >LOL. Been there myself, several times. My biggest 'presentation' issue, >is >due to the situation I am in. I am half of an IT department, and the rest >of the company is relatively clueless when it comes to computers. So when >I >am presenting a new 'project', I will almost always get a 'This should be >easy, but how do I do.....'. What they ask for is usually WAY beyond the >scope of the project, but to them, it's just another magic button. > >Gotta love it! > >Drew _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/bcomm&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.msn.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket%3den-ca