Israel was AWESOME!
We presented on IIS6 and IIS7 in Israel on Monday and it was fantastic, the customers there are amazing. All the events have been great but this is definitely the highlight of our tour. Sady, in the excitement, I left my camera at the event so pictures won't come until next week, but just take my word for it - it was truly a gratifying experience to connect with so many enthusiastic customers.
Right away, we knew the event was special. We had over 200 attendees and had to present in the Musical Arts center nearby. They ask questions right from the start, before we even kicked off. Chris started the day with the IIS Authentication and got hammered with questions ranging from Kerberos delegation to ASP.NET impersonation. Then he presented on Enterprise management and couldn't finish the whole talk because he got questions on every script he showed off. We really had no breaks because between talks we answered questions from a crowd of attendees up on the stage.
There is nothing wrong with this though, we love questions. It shows the audience cares and that our presentations are truly stimulating. At the end of Enterprise management, there was a break for lunch. Alexis was prepared and grabbed food before the talk ended but I had to wade through it to try to get Chris something to munch on while he answered more questions straight through lunch.
As a Product Manager, I am typically not acting as our PSS rep at events but even I had to answer the technical questions. Sitting in IIS talks all day for three weeks has sharpened my technical competency. One customer wanted to redirect to a unique ASP.NET pages containing dynamic content based off of information pulled from the URI. So I recommended he build a custom module for ASP.NET using the IHTTP Interface to implement this. I suppose an ISAPI filter could also work here.
After lunch (aka Q&A with food), Alexis presented on Log Parser. This is our fourth stop on this part of the tour so demos are all running smoothly. She had a lot of great questions. They asked about the log parser's file size capacity, how to parser several files at once and how to log to a UNC share. This tour has shown to us that log parser is a very popular topic. Few customers seem to be using it but all customer are very interested and see the value. If you can understand your logs, you can understand a great deal about what is going on with your Web server. This can decrease troubleshooting and down time.
Chris presented on Debug Diagnostics next. As you can imagine, this talk had an especially large number of questions as everyone wants to know why they have problems and if Debug Diag can diagnose them. We finished the day with IIS7 which was very well received. If I have any complaints at all about this event, it would be that it was very difficult to stay on schedule with all the questions. Next time we will have to shorten the talks to account for this.
In general, our time in Israel was just too short. We were staying in a very nice hotel on the beach in Herzilya. The food was a blend of mediteranean and middle eastern and all together delicious (with the exception of the salted Herring). Most of all, the people are amazing in Israel, so friendly, open and eager to meet you and learn more about your background. We actually went to dinner with an attendee and his friend the night after the talk. The ultimate example of the hospitality of the Israelis during our visit was the customer who asked to get his picture taken with us at the end of the day. (I promise when my camera arrives that I will repost this entry with that picture.) We have gone to Madrid and left already but I won't post an entry until people get a chance to read this one. So be patient :)
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