Tag Archives: spc

SPC11: Porchetta, Pirouettes and a Whole Lot of Demos

[Jumpshot via the lovely and talented Marcy Kellar]

Unless you’re a vegetarian, teetotaler or Luddite, you’ll find nothing (too)incendiary here, folks! If I had to encapsulate our team’s SPC11experience in three words, they’d be: demos, sessions and networking. Since that is boring and vague, I’m going to break it down by numbers, instead.

24: Terabytes in Yahoo’s cube (from Kamal Hathi’s session “Vision and Strategy of BI”)

50,000: Organizations that signed up for Office365 within two weeks of its launch. So, 2.5% of what Call of Duty Elite got.

324: OfficeWriter Export to Word and Export to Excel demos shown. We were surprised to see that the demand for Word template generation was much higher than that for Excel, as outside the SharePoint world, that proportion is inversed.

Continue reading SPC11: Porchetta, Pirouettes and a Whole Lot of Demos

Angels at the Gate: Tech Conferences and the Booth Babe Strategy

[Disclaimer: This is not my SPC11 recap. That is forthcoming, but in the meantime, please check out our video recaps]

There are three types of people you’ll meet at a software conference: attendees, vendors and booth babes.  The attendees are there to pick up new skills, network and score swag. The vendors are there to convince decision-makers to make the right decision. The booth babes are there to reel in the decision makers. You could make the argument that the booth babes are also vendors, but as temporary hires with little-to-no knowledge of the product, the only things they are vending are themselves.

I have two main cases against the booth babe strategy. The first, understandably, is from a feminist standpoint. The use of women as bait is objectifying and creates, to many attendees, a gender-based binary: you are a man or you are a booth babe. (It also, by the way, paints the attendees as slobbering cretins who can be manipulated through their basest instincts.) However, the feminist case against booth babes is, unfortunately, too general to be compelling. Sorry lady, you say, sex sells. Which brings me to my second, fiduciary case:  does it? And, more to the point: does it sell software? Continue reading Angels at the Gate: Tech Conferences and the Booth Babe Strategy

SoftArtisans and OfficeWriter at SPC11

[Image via Seeing Stars]
The big day is almost here! The normally child-clogged streets of Anaheim’s Downtown Disney district are filling up with performance polo-clad techies, my hootsuite is filling up with #SPC11-related tweets and my liver is already filled with anxiety. From Monday, October 3rd through Thursday, October 6th, David (@davidwihl), Chris (@chrisrbaldwin), Ben (@bcjonesey) and I (@softartisans, @officewriter) will be repping OfficeWriter and our brand spanking new SharePoint Solutions Gallery at booth 630. (If you can’t read numbers, just look for the guy in the Mohawk.) If you or anyone you know has a need for generating publishable Word and Excel reports based on SharePoint data and integrating them into your business workflows, we’d love to talk to you. We’re also bowing to the swag gods and giving away a BlackBerry Playbook. To put your name in the hat, just stop by the booth.   Continue reading SoftArtisans and OfficeWriter at SPC11

SPC11 Tweeting Guide: How to Use Twitter to Become Rich, Attractive and Popular

[Image via  Renegade HR]

  1. Do you currently own or have you ever owned a twitter account? If yes:
  2.  Do you use it more than once a month? If yes:
  3. Do you use it as a therapist? If yes, you might want to tone it down a bit.  No one likes a whiner! If no:
  4. Do you use it because you read/heard/saw on The Today Show/Tosh 2.0 that it offers a lot of networking opportunities? If yes:
  5. Do you think you’ve taken advantage of these networking opportunities? If yes, why are you still reading this article? Tweet my headline and get back to networking! If no: read on.

So here’s the deal, would-be networkers: SPC is a huge conference stuffed with “influencers” and “inventors” and “evangelizers” and other people of import. Unless you snag a front row seat at one of their sessions or have a honing pigeon ability that tends to kick in da club, you may not be able to meet these poobahs in real life. But you can meet, shoot the breeze, swap Qwickster jokes and photos of the grandkids, divulge industry secrets etc… with them on Twitter.

“But howwwww do I do that no one likes me sad face going to cry into my spplatypus now,” you say? Here are the steps: Continue reading SPC11 Tweeting Guide: How to Use Twitter to Become Rich, Attractive and Popular