Life rarely happens on script

My ability to think on my feet was put to the test when the Webex server went down 15 minutes into the process discovery webinar that I was presenting for TIBCO. I was merrily clicking along through my slides as I talked, not realizing that no one could see what I was talking about; the slides were pretty sparse and there were only 6 of them with any real content, so not a great loss, but I might have worded things differently if I had know that I was flying blind.

The best part was the Q&A: since we had no text Q&A capabilities, we had to do live phone Q&A, where the operator queued people up and let them ask their questions live on the phone one at a time. I actually liked that since it made me think on my feet, but the down side was that we weren’t able to triage the questions ahead of time to make sure that they were relevant to the webinar content and the audience. We only had one off-topic question (about TIBCO’s product, which was not covered at all in my session), and the rest were spot on. The last one was on standards, and I went off into a bit of a soliloquy about BPMN, XPDL and BPEL that probably had the attendee regretting that he asked the question, but the feedback has been pretty good so far.

TIBCO is rushing the recorded version of the webinar to get it out this afternoon for you to listen (and watch) a replay and download the slide deck. There are two more webinars that I’m doing in this series, Process Modeling on July 11th and Process Design on August 8th; I’ll be sure to offer up a suitable sacrifice to the Webex gods before then.

2 thoughts on “Life rarely happens on script”

  1. Hi Sandy,
    This is Austin from Yugma (www.yugma.com).
    Our web conferencing and collaboration service sounds like it would be a good fit with your presentation needs. For example, our real-time chat feature would have easily allowed viewers to type questions to you, which you could then screen and answer through our free teleconferencing connection. We are completely focused on being extremely easy, inexpensive, and cross-platform compatible. In addition to having excellent service for Windows users, we’ve been getting great reviews for our ease of use and support for Mac users. We also recently launched support for Linux (8 versions supported). CNet recently recognized Yugma by selecting us as a finalist this year in its Webware 100 Awards.

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    I encourage you to try our service out. We currently offer 15 days of trial Premium Service, and our basic version is FREE forever. It allows you to invite up to 10 attendees, anytime. Add in a whiteboard and free teleconferencing… the features and price are hard to beat! You’ll find that our Premium Service prices compare very favorably to similar software.
    I hope you like what we’ve put together and that it can help you, your viewers and your readers. If you have any comments or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Just email us at [email protected]. Thanks!

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    Austin Sponsel
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    Yugma Marketing Team
    http://www.yugma.com

  2. Austin, thanks for the info about your presentation service, but you need to be talking to TIBCO, not to me — I’m just the speaker, I don’t decide on the platform.

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