I have the priviledge to work at 5 or 6 trade shows a year as a Desktop guy. Some people hate "booth duty" but I don't mind it at all. I did two with our partner Bell this January (Toronto and Montreal), and one with our partner xwave for Aliant in Halifax, N.B., I spent almost a full day at the SIA Technology Show in New York, one for the Province of Ontario and then most recently I worked a Sun booth at Canada's GTEC Show. This is the annual technology show for the Federal Government of Canada and it is busiest show I have been at in Canada.

To put this in perspective, we had a tiny booth (10 x 9 ft), but at any one time there could have been as many as 7 of us working 'in' the booth (well, 'in' is maybe a bit strong). Sure we had Sun Rays to show off, a rack of StorageTek gear and Identity management stuff to show off (as you can see in the image). But the big draw was the Sun name. I know I was there to talk about Sun Rays, and Sun's Secure Global Desktop (Tarantella), but people wanted to know about all kinds of things...
I got questions about:

• StarOffice
• OpenOffice.org
• Galaxy Servers (X4100 in particular)
• Open Source
• Google*
• How to join the iForce Partner Program
• The difference between Backups and Archiving
• Why Sun seems to encourage Blogging
• The Microsoft partnership
• The move by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to OpenDocument format
• Open Solaris

That's Sun's extraordinary Shawn Cohoon in the Black Sun shirt

I have to tell you it was really cool to be asked about our company, on so many levels. Of course I managed to get in pitches for the most secure desktop out there with just about every body, but still... it was really cool to get into dialogues about Sun.

*The Google announcement was a bit of a trip, because we watched the press event in California on a Sun Ray 170 in real time at the GTEC show 3,000 miles away. People came by and watched as if we were watching TV, and we sort of were. The opportunity to watch the event unfold in real time, and see it over the network is what Sun Rays are all about - the network delivering services to the desktop. One woman (Dept. of Agriculture I think) asked what we were showing in our booth and at that particular time I said 'history', because we were. I explained briefly what we were watching and she stood there and watched with the rest with us. There was quite a gang assembled by the time it was done.

Pretty gratifying. Who says booth duty is always dull?