Speaker of the Month: May 2015

I finally got out to some community events last month and got to see a bunch of great speakers. Not that you don’t see great speakers at paid events, you do. It’s just that they’re usually professional speakers and I want to encourage others when I can.

The Speaker of the Month for May 2015 is John Sterrett (b|t) and his presentation Automate Your Daily Checklist With PBM and CMS at SQL Saturday Boston.

The very first thing that impressed me about this presentation was how John entered the room and immediately started interacting with the attendees. You see a lot of speakers hiding behind the lectern, fiddling with cables, nervously sipping water. Not John. He was chatting as he set up, immediately getting control of the room. It’s a great way to start. Then, it was a very informative lecture. He showed how to use Policy Based Management and the Central Management Server together to create really meaningful monitoring and double checks on the servers. It’s a technique I’ve used, so I really enjoyed seeing it presented. Plus, I learned a few things. For example, I hadn’t realized you can run the Best Practices Analyzer from PBM. His slides were clear and informative. A little too much documentation for my taste, but I know some people love that type of deck, so I’m not going to ding people for it. His demos were very clear and illustrative of the points he was making. John handled questions well and liberally and carefully used Zoomit to make everything clear. It was a fantastic presentation that was very well delivered.

A couple of things I wasn’t entirely crazy about. John kept checking the slides on the projected screen. Come to find out, it was because he couldn’t see them on his laptop. OK, I forgive that. While he was pretty good at repeating the questions, a few times he forgot. It’s so easy to do when you’re speaking (guilty). Also, John didn’t have a necessary dongle for connecting his machine. Never assume you’ll have VGA/HDMI because one of them will always be wrong. But that’s it.

John’s presentation manner is a lot like talking to him. He’s real calm, looks you right in the eye, listens carefully to questions and then gives direct answers. It was a real pleasure to watch. I suggest checking out his sessions when he presents next.