Workplace 2.5 Launch
by Volker Weber
I am sitting in the second row at the Workplace 2.5 launch in Frankfurt. Alistair Rennie is speaking. There are exactly 51 people in the room. Two technicians, two organizers, seven IBM speakers. 50% of the remaining 40 people are IBMers and there are five more outside of the room.
The demos we are seeing are canned presentations. The presenter does click here and there, and it is supposed to look like he is showing the real thing. He is a good at faking it. But this is a smoke and mirrors show. How disappointing. If you get to see the whole thing as well, watch for the online presence of people changing with the clicks. They all change at exactly the same time.
I talked to Alistair at lunch time. What a brilliant guy. I like him.
Comments
I don't believe that - its supposed to be live Gold code for goodness sake, and yet it is clearly too unstable/slow/unwieldy (take your pick) for good people like Alastair to demo properly...
Oh dear...
I asked him why they are doing a canned presentations. He says it's logistics. They need to scale this up to a couple of hundred venues. That would have been a whole lot of hardware. No, you cannot run this from VMware on a Lenovo Thinkpad. ;-)
He also said, that the presentations in 2 weeks at the DNUG/IBM Symposium will be live.
I can believe the logistics argument, there’s a lot involved in a typical WP set-up.
WP2.5. is slow, at least the first time you load a page up whilst it compiles. Thereafter the whole thing is pretty snappy, and the only thing I managed to crash was Activity Explorer (which runs in the managed client, and that piece is still in beta anyway).
Thats ridiculous! We hold our Workplace 2.5 Launch yesterday in Berlin - and of course we showed the live code. We have WSE 2.0 and WCS 2.5 up and running on our servers to demo the solutions. There is no need to install it on your StinkPad as long as you have LAN Access as a presenter. The only reason might be the slow performance - as we had it temporarily in our presentation. But this is another issue with that product - and its an honest way to show the product to the public.
We did our Workplace 2.5 Launch last week in Munich and also showed the live thing. We had 1 server with us on location and each JSP has been loaded once before the event. Performance was no problem in our presentation. I think this kind of logistics should also be possible for IBM.
I wonder what the 5 IBMers outside the room were for. Knock you out if you leave early? ;-)
Live, always live. Logistics works for the first few days (or a launch) as a reason but there are many ways to go live without a laptop running the thing. VNC if you need to show the server (I did that in Cannes last week, to my servers in Kansas, and folks really appreciated it), and live access via browser. If you have a high end server at home, performance is going to be better anyway and you don't have to make the aging excuse that your "poor laptop" is underpowered.
