This week, I had fun (don't tell my bosses, but I get paid for this) facilitating a series of hands-on workshops for clients and prospects. They are jointly sponsored by Microsoft and partners like my firm, and are designed to give attendees a hands-on experience with the latest wave of Microsoft technologies.
They were once called the Customer Immersion Experience (this Catholic-school boy can't help but to arch an eyebrow at THAT baptism metaphor), and are now called the MEC, or Microsoft Experience Center. There are multiple editions and versions of the MEC, but this one features the newest version of Office, Office 365.
I have attended and delivered many of these sessions, and find them useful to our clients for a variety of reasons:
1. They are business-oriented. The content is directed toward business users, not developers or IT professionals. These are people who apply technology to solve business problems, not whose job it is to manage IT. The content is more oriented toward business productivity than platform optimization.
2. They are experiential. Attendees get assigned a role in a "day in the life" script that shows how Microsoft technologies are used on a day-to-day basis by knowledge workers. There is also enough slack built into the sessions' schedule to allow attendees to play, experiment, and explore scenarios that are of particular relevance to them. In so doing, attendees learn not only about how Microsoft technologies enable them to work differently, they can also learn about the limitations of these solutions as well.
3. They are hands-on. Microsoft ships ten laptops (pretty kickass Lenovo Yoga touch-enabled convertible tablets) and ten headsets for integrated voice and video communications, and we build time into the day for experimentation, learning and play with new apps, capabilities, and devices. This also includes showing how other devices like Surface tablets and other mobile devices like iPads use the technologies we're using.
4. They are turnkey. The original edition of CIE/MEC required that customers come to a Microsoft Technology Center to attend a MEC session. In generation 2, the Mobile MEC, Microsoft had to ship computers and voice endpoints along with powerful servers capable of running virtual instances of all the required server technologies: a domain controller, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, etc. In the same way that computing pioneers look at ENIAC, then their smartphones, and shake their head, I do the same now that the server-side work can all be provisioned and run in Microsoft's cloud. We can provision and manage full-featured environments (with data populated) in about 24 hours for the new Office 365 MEC, without shipping servers around.
All in all, if you're considering making an investment in Microsoft technologies or seeking better return on what you already own, the hands-on workshops and MEC scenarios are a great way to see how your knowledge workers can improve their productivity and save money via the latest Microsoft has to offer.
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