I live by the words of Yoda: “Do or do not. There is no try.”. Overall that means that if I have a goal, I will continue to pursue it until I have achieved it. But some things in life are harder to achieve than others. Last year I worked my ass off to become VCDX and since this year I am doing something I really like at my employer ITQ. Part of working in Technical Marketing is presenting at (community) events. 3 years ago for the first time at the ITQ Technical Update Sessions, and since this week I know that I am going to do something that I have dreamed of for a very long time: present a breakout session at VMworld!

The road in becoming a better presenter

As said, 3 years ago I presented at an event for the very first time and since then I knew that it was something I wanted to do a lot more. I invested heavily in working on my presentation skills by presenting a lot and listening to peers for feedback (a lot). Because one thing I noticed, was that when I’m on stage, it might seem to go pretty well. But when looking back the recorded session, there were always things to improve (and there still are). One advise that I would like to give you guys, is to always be critical to yourself. Because your not standing there for yourself, but for your audience.

Another thing I did was to watch other presenters I admire like Joe Baguley, Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, but most of all… Barack Obama. Those guys all have their own style of presenting and I took little pieces of those presenters and developed my own style. I am continuously working on improving that style, but for now it suits me. I also attended a presentation course by Andrew Taylor about presenting by inspiring people. And of course some essential course ware. My personal favourites are Made to Stick and The TED Method.

Choose a topic and Take the stage

In the first year I presented a couple of times, but constantly on a different topic. In that case it’s quite hard to really get to know your story and constantly improve your deck, presentation and adopt to the audience. Since last year I choose a specific topic to focus on and developed a presentation including deck for my primary focus: present at European VMUGs. VMUGs are great. They are organized by great people and share one goal: share as much knowledge as possible around VMware products. So they attract the same type of audience as VMworld does. This year and last year I have been presenting at the Dutch VMUG Usercon, the German VMUG, the Belgium VMUG and my personal favourite, the North Western UK VMUG in Manchester. And as the VMUG’s passed by, my deck and presentation evolved and got better. All towards where I am now..

You’ve got mail!

So this week I got an email. And I got quite excited when reading it. The one dream I had since my first VMware conference, was to be part of VMworld as a presenter. I like to believe that by hard work you can achieve anything, but of course sometimes you need to be a little lucky. So without any further ado I would like to present you guys with something I am really proud of. My first breakout session at a VMworld conference:

If you guys plan to attend VMworld Barcelona, I hope you could make to my session as we are going to present some awesome stuff around Horizon and Workspace ONE.

In this session, we will demonstrate how you can integrate VMware Horizon with VMware Workspace ONE to deliver virtual desktops and apps via a digital workspace. We will cover the technical components needed and how they plug together to deliver a simple and secure way for users to access their applications. We will cover the specific configuration information and design considerations to enable fast access and single sign-on to Horizon 7 virtual desktops and published applications from Workspace ONE. Finally, you will see how users can access VMware Horizon resources from Workspace ONE as we demo the user experience and key features.

On top of that, I will be part of a group discussion around EUC products as well. Last year at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, we (the VMware EUC Champions group) had our own group discussion session. Which was really awesome. Last year’s top take away was “Friends don’t let friends use writeable volumes”. A lot has changed since then and we may have changed our opinion on the subject. Visit our session if you would like to know!

A great session where you ask everything you ever wanted to know about VMware’s EUC products.

Boost your end-user computing (EUC) knowledge by attending this panel discussion. Five experts in the area of EUC will be on hand to give you their latest tips and tricks and answer your questions about EUC deployments. Bring your notepads and your toughest questions!