The Infopath presentation to the .Net Architects User Group Rocked!

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Last night was lots of fun.

I delivered a 2 hour InfoPath presentation to the Israeli .Net Architects user group. This was my first time in front of this particular UG, and they are a pretty sharp bunch who were very interactive with questions and comments throughout the presentation. There were about 50-60 people in all, which was a great turnout considering the topic; InfoPath isn't very well known in Israel.

My previous Infopath presentations and training sessions were usually developer oriented so I added quite a bit of new content for this session.  The audience feedback shows that they really enjoyed it and especially liked the new materials. For whoever is interested, the TOC was as follows:

  • Introduction:  (1 hour)
    • Development, Part 1 (no code, just exploring the designer + connectivity capabilities)
    • Development, Part 2 (breaking out VS.NET and playing with the OM)
    • Deployment  + XSN Internals
  • The Real World : Common Scenarios (1 hour)
    • Add-Hoc Data Gathering - Walkthrough of a solution
    • Improving an Existing Business Process - Walkthrough of a solution
    • Line Of Business using InfoPath - Walkthrough of a solution

During the second hour we reviewed several common real-world scenarios, characterized the required investments and components involved in each solution, and got a feel for the user experience (and InfoPath's contribution to it). This was the best part of the presentation, and it would have been even better if I had an extra hour to go into more detail and answer the many questions which popped up during the walkthroughs. As it is, I hope that the architects got a good feel for the power and flexibility which an InfoPath/SharePoint/BizTalk solution provides.

I still need to clean up the slides before putting them up on the user group site. I'm flying back to New York tonight so I'll have 10 hours of 'quality time' with my laptop. Yay.

After the lecture we headed off to the blogger's dinner, which will be the topic of another post...

And since I am on vacation after all, here is the inevitable standard "random vacation picture":

My parents' cat "Happy"