Presenting at TechReady

One of Microsoft's marketing events is something called TechReady.  It's an internal event for marketing to go around and learn about the various solutions that the company has.  This year, there is going to be a joint effort between Exchange Hosted Services (ie, my department) and Forefront, another one of our offerings.  We're both anti-spam products and our overall spam processing is slowly converging.

Straight from the website:

Session Objectives

  • Learn about Microsoft’s anti-spam offerings and how to present them to customers
  • Understand how Microsoft’s anti-spam solutions compare to competitors’ solutions

Now, you may be wondering why I would even bother to bring this up.  After all, I fight spam, I'm not in marketing (unless you consider this blog marketing, but I don't because I don't make any money off of it...).  The reason I bring this topic up is because I get to be a presenter at TechReady!

I can't wait to do it, actually.  I like making presentations, I have quite a bit of experience doing it in the past, though never for Microsoft.  This is my big chance.  For you see, for many, many years I have been a part-time magician.  Here's a link to my latest end-of-year clip video for 2007.  Anyhow, I was thinking of performing a trick; I would open up the presentation by talking about the problem of spam.  I would take a nice white envelope to denote good mail, and then a whole bunch of black envelopes to denote spam.  Next, I would put them through some sort of thing representing a filter and after passing the messages through, the spam would be gone but the good mail remains. 

I think that would be a fun visual to illustrate the way a spam filter is supposed to work.