Customer Engineering Conference notes
I attended the 2007 CEC as a pavilion staffer in support of OpenSolaris documentation and my department, Information Products Group (IPG). CEC was attended by about 4,000 other folks between October 7-10.
It was my first time at this conference and I spent all of it talking with sales, professional services, engineers, and partners about documentation and Solaris. The Las Vegas location meant that it was very sunny and warm, but none of us actually went out into it. That is, most folks I met didn't leave the hotel for the first 48 hours. Vegas is just like that, so sunny on the inside, there is no reason to go out.
My first day was full of registration details, orientation, and preparing for the pavilion floor evening event. They provided buffet dinner in the pavilion Sunday night, so that night was the best attendance in the pavilion by far. The pavilion was setup for demonstration pods and was a gathering place between conference sessions to check out new technologies and offerings.
The IPG pod was staffed by myself, Dwayne Wolff, and Ken Harper. We had a multi-media kiosk with new videos, screencasts, and documentation hubs to showcase. This kiosk was also compressed to fit on USB, so we had lots of folks download it for later use. I had the OpenSolaris Starter Kit running on my laptop and a copy of the English OpenSolaris student guide.
The highlight of visitors to our pod was Radia Perlman, best known for the creation of the Spanning-Tree algorithm that is used in all network bridges and switches. She is just so inspirational and having never met her before I was very excited. She is very personable, kind, and easy-going. She talked with us for a long while, indulged my request for pictures, and told us funny stories about how she became a Sun Fellow. It was a delight!
Customers and partners I met who are using Solaris 10 08/07 were very excited to see someone from documentation. In my very short two years in this job and just a handful of conferences, I've never had folks so excited to meet me. Reason: DOCS DVD. For Solaris 10 08/07 there is available a DVD ISO for download that includes 400+ PDF documents covering stem-to-stern S10U4 and every other Sun software product you can run with S10U4. Customers are so thrilled with this Doc DVD, they lit up when I introduced myself as a pubs person and then went on to tell me how tickled and surprised they were to have that ISO available and how much we deserve more kudos in tech. pubs for all the awesome documentation we provide for Sun products. They were gushing unsolicited.
I talked with data center system administrators about the Solaris installer. Overall, the feedback was good, fdisk is still a sore spot, and some default ports are not recognized by one particular NIC on a newer box. The video of the new installer was a great way to facilitate this conversation, we had it running on the big monitor while we talked and at each new frame, the sysadmin would describe the particulars of his most recent DC experience.
I work on OSOL all day every day, so being surrounded by customer engineers who serve a huge percentage of Sun customers running Solaris 9 and earlier releases was a new perspective for me. It might have hurt my overall 'sense of urgency' somewhat because I realize the gigantic number of customers who still haven't touched even Solaris 10 yet. Heck, I ran S9 U5 untouched for better part of 5 years on my SPARC box and was clam-happy, so I understand why folks don't move to new environments rapidly. But, this is where hardware really comes into play and why Sun is unique company to have strong portfolios on both sides. New hardware platforms disrupt, and software that aims to disrupt must keep up with those new platforms. More on that topic in a coming entry...
In general, at these conferences, I ask one opening question that leads down many roads: Do you run Solaris? Sometimes this leads to the starter kit, sometimes to a discussion of SPARC/x86, sometimes a long-winded explanation of an installation attempt that failed or an application that only runs on another browser. We talk about porting, Caimen, LiveCDs and eventually office product suites. At CEC, I heard more complaints about calendaring and diagrams than ever before. These are the pain points for engineers who support our blue-shift customers: calendar tools must be equivalent to outlook and graphics tools must import to-from Visio and be readable in Visio. I asked about the Thunderbird calendar plug-in and was told it is too hard to setup. I asked about StarOffice and was told they need to provide Visio format. These are the same guys who don't particularly like OpenSolaris because they can't find a way to sell into it, but I still think the pain points are probably valid barriers to their use of Solaris on x86.
What I also learned was that our customer engineers need training and getting started information about Solaris 10. They could use a cookbook for learning Solaris 10. Maybe a top 10 topics would include: default shell, SMF tips, zones basics, ZFS basics, soffice suite, thunderbird & calendar, firefox, networking & FireEngine, FMA, and DTrace?
