TOVMUG at the Hockey Hall of Fame

Today I was fortunate enough to present at the Toronto VMUG. That’s two talks that I’ve given at the TO VMUG this year – not bad considering I only started ‘participating’ in the vCommunity earlier this year!

As always, I see these opportunities not only as a way to give back to the community but also as a way to practice and develop my own skills. I am constantly trying to improve my public speaking – I have found that the key for me is to be able to turn my presentations into a conversation (admittedly it is a one-sided conversation). It still takes me a bit of time to ‘slip into’ that mode, but I’m definitely getting better at it.

The talk I gave is an intro to Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. I had originally come up with the topic earlier this year when approached by VMUG to present at an online event. I scrapped the idea then because I didn’t think I could do a good job in the 10-minute slot. I then resurrected the idea for VMWorld Las Vegas and did a vBrownBag Tech Talk on it. Once again, I felt like 10 minutes was a little short, but I was able to fit a foundation into that time slot.

Last month Mike Preston asked if I could present at a community session for their upcoming VMUG and suggested this talk. I thought I would give it a go as there were a lot of areas that I wanted to expand upon. Hopefully, it all went over well – it seemed to go OK from my end : )

When putting together the content, my intent was never to create an end-all / be-all source. It was supposed to be the first step to getting wheels in motion. As IT professionals, a lot of us have likely seen disaster recovery and business continuity plans. But, how many of us have actually put one together from scratch? Probably not nearly as many. Even if you have, it is always worth reviewing as there could be gaps in it that have gone unnoticed.

That’s what I was trying to focus on: if you had to start from net-zero, or if you were tasked with reviewing your existing plan from the ground up, what would you do? I’d like to think that I was able to lay out the basics to get folks started on their way to developing a strategy.

The talk was recorded, and considering that there were no microphones or special lighting, the quality came out better than I would have expected. You can find a copy on YouTube here.

It was also pretty cool that the meeting was held at the Hockey Hall Of Fame. I am an ex-Montrealer, and therefore a Canadiens fan. Despite living in the Toronto area for 15+ years now, I have never made my way down there. So, not only did I get to present and attend a VMUG, I finally got to cross this visit off of my to-do list.