2009 July | tech•ed backstage

Archive for July, 2009

Resolving a hunch – wifi performance @ GCCEC

Date: 2009.07.22 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 7

Previously you will recall we talked about the methodology we used to diagnose why the RF utilisation at GCCEC was so stratospherically high in relation to the actual wifi network utilisation and number of associated clients. In the last moments of that day on site we did observe a few anomalies with regards to real-world network performance. Given that the wireless infrastructure is state of the art and was one of the first “enterprise” deployments of 802.11n in Australia 12 months ago – this was odd and definitely warranted further investigation before the event even if to find there wasn’t a problem at all.

We left Brisbane bright and early on Thursday the 16th of July to spend a day with the guys from GCCEC to get to the bottom of this latest issue.

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Is it that time already…

Date: 2009.07.20 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2009, planning, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

I can’t believe we are just 4 weeks today from the first step we will take onsite at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre. I know this because its Friday night as I write this, my first backstage blog entry after some mind bending few day working on event technology runsheets.This is a great reason to stop runsheets.

Maybe I should step back a bit, back to November last year. Or further back.

So, this is my 10th Tech Ed as Technology Project Manager. Honestly I have the coolest job on the project (Kleefie always said he did). My role is to work across the business owners, sponsors, venue and technical guys where anything technology is involved. Pulling a truck load of bits together into some type of plan. That is under the watchful eye of Jorke as the technology lead for the project and David Connors as the Engineering lead.

We have a structured 5 phases approach to the delivery of large scale event technology. Long before you get to know about the good stuff like mini notebooks (possibly the coolest take away ever. So much so it has other Tech Ed events around the world wishing they had the idea first), we conduct a feasibility phase. Various Microsofties, the event agency team and the Engineering team comes together to look at how the project could work be at the proposed venue. We don’t work with a load of detail at that stage, but we look for the obvious pitfalls around timing, location, connectivity etc. This phase brings with it long brainstorming sessions and usually lots of research tasks. That in turn means I and a swag of others spend ages writing reports on the if, but, and may etc. All necessary stages for the business guys to make the big decisions. Once the decision is done setting dates, locations etc in stone we start the longer road of understanding what the business folks need the technology to deliver.

So, no Jorke I’m not going to be the International Man of Mystery and neither are the rest of the team. Stay tuned and over the next few weeks we will share more of what’s going on.

- DavidH
What is CCX and why should you care?

Date: 2009.07.17 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 0

Early on in the history of wifi Cisco created some proprietary extensions called CCX (Cisco Compatible Extensions). These are now an open standard that a lot of network card manufacturers implement. If you’re bringing your own laptop to the event you should make sure you have CCX-4 compliant drivers, here’s why …

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Diagnosing and resolving extremely high RF utilisation

Date: 2009.07.15 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 8

What’s wrong with these pictures?

Per AP TX/RX figures with channel utilisation across the ground floor of GCCEC

Number of Client Associations across the ground floor of GCCEC

I was given logon access to the WCS console at GCCEC at the start of May this year. Shortly (10 minutes) later I started e-mailing “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!” messages to the venue and the tech•ed technology team.

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site visit for tech•ed AND APC

Date: 2009.07.14 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2009, food, tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 6

This year we are lucky enough to be using the GCCEC for two large Microsoft events, that are a week apart; the Australian Partner Conference (APC) and tech•ed and as you can guess this gives us a huge amount of efficiency on how we run the event with benefits in shared infrastructure and environments. We’ll have a huge breakdown later in this blogs life talking about how we utilise this shared environment and assign the costs, but that’s not for this post. Read the rest of this entry »
Making wireless work

Date: 2009.07.13 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 4

If you’re interested in tech•ed and have been reading the blogosphere you’ll know that every paying delegate is scoring an awesome HP Mini 2140 as a freebie! This is fantastic news for delegates and a real headache for the propeller heads behind tech•ed. We now know that we’re going to have 2500 laptops, plus delegate’s bringing their own laptops, plus wifi-enabled mobile phones, plus Microsoft staff, speakers, crew, and all of the leechers holiday-makers in Gold Coast apartments across the road to cater for as wireless users.
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Tech•Ed09 Netbooks

Date: 2009.07.13 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 10

So it is pretty well known that for this year Tech•Ed that paying delegates will receive a HP Mini-note 2140 for everyone to experience the Windows 7 Experience. Big shout out to Nick Hodge for his hard work in getting this over the line. But as we’re over the legal and compliance fun, its down to ensuring we give the best experience to every single person that receives a mini-note.

As you can well imagine there are many factors we need to consider when we’re expecting ~2500 machines to be delivered to end users in 5 days… And this will be a main theme of quite a few posts on this blog as it presents quite a few unique challenges.
- Wireless Network planning – a LOT of work is been done to mitigate risks around this
- Help Desk – Providing support around these machines including DOA’s
- Power and Charging – Ensuring these machines will be charged up enough at hand out and there are enough power points around the venue.
- Handing Out to Delegates – People flow!
- Imaging – how to get the image onto the machines, luckily we have Jeffa helping us here as the “Build Czar”
This is a start to the planning we’ve made, let us know what you want to hear about. To start with, the question everyone wants to hear about.. WIRELESS!

- jorke
TECH•ED backstage

Date: 2009.07.12 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 5

Welcome to the start of tech•ed Backstage. This blog is designed to give the world the view of what goes on in the background of running the tech•ed Australia 2009 conference from all the people the work in the Technology team and those that we interact with in developing the production.

We’re going to give the warts and all view of what’s involved in doing this focusing around the pragmatic approach of logistic and planning for this event and those related such as:
- Products and technology used for the event
- How the logistical planning is done
- How to you build a network for such and event and all the prep work.
- Tons of other information in mind numbing detail!
Plus of course lots of statistics and prediction that all go into delivering this kind of technology for the event.

So first of all some introductions for the core delivery team;

Jorke Odolphi – Microsoft – Infrastructure Architecture Evangelist / tech•ed Technology Guy – responsible for the delivery of the infrastructure technology and ensuring and enabling that Microsoft has the best technology on show.

Other duties include attending long meetings and staying awake, breaking down barriers in delivery, helping the business understand the logistics and food/wine tasting.

(source: flickr.com/photos/heroeshappen)

Codify – International Men of Mystery – These guys actually DO the delivery of all the core infrastructure to tech•ed such as network connectivity, Wireless Networks, building machines for speaker rooms and connecting everyone to the internet. Simply put if you’re going to be putting anything on the network at tech•ed these guys are involved in some form. As a result they’re slaves to the network for the event!

To protect their identity (and they’re camera shy) the picture on the right is an artists rendition.. (source wikipedia.org)

Jomablue – International Men of Mystery – again another group of camera shy individuals. These guys are the core of the logistics for the event. When any piece of technology is placed in a location in the event these are the guys bumping it in, plugging it in and making sure the the power is right and in fact everything is right.

To protect their identity (and they’re camera shy) the picture on the left is an artists rendition.. (source wikipedia.org)

Of course we’re only scraping the surface of what we all do, and we can’t forget all the other people we interact with such as the tech•ed core team, Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre staff and if course all the awesome staging staff. We’ll be hearing from all those people leading up to the event, so sit back take it in and tell us what you’d love to hear from the bluelit parts of teched.

- jorke