Live from Bldg 25
Woo hoo! The TAP Beta training started today and we have about 60 customers and partners in town for this event, most of whom are in our TAP or ISV programs. I think they are interested in the presentations, judging by the number of questions our presenters are getting.
I'm having that internal PM conflict of wanting to stay on schedule but wanting people to get their questions answered. Since our customers don't get a lot of opportunities to ask their questions directly, I'm definitely veering towards letting people ask questions. I can juggle the schedule a bit to make sure all the content gets covered.
The most challenging thing for me has been sorting out issues with the demo system and AV. Speech Server is a complicated beast for demos - you need to have sound working, and hooked into the room speakers. For phone demos, the phone needs to be able to take input from the speaker's mic, so that you can hear the phone responses over the speakers. We have some super-fancy device called a Gentner (sp?) that makes this all work, but it's very touchy. It suddenly stopped working today (unfortunately we found out during a demo) and we had to scramble to get it fixed. But Microsoft AV came to the rescue and fixed it. So hopefully it'll be fine for tomorrow as well.
I was looking for a demo app I could use to test out whether we could do IVR demos. Then I realized I had a perfect example I could use - the Microsoft operator. When you dial the main Microsoft number (425-882-8080) you get our in-house autoattendant, which is a Speech Server application. So that worked as a perfect test of our AV system!
So, if you're here at the training this week, what do you think?
