Microsoft The Big Picture Experience: Not thrilled, but still good

Posted Sunday, November 27, 2011 at 11:28 am by Jack Cola

On Wednesday 23rd November, I attended Microsoft’s The Big Picture Experience, and to honestly say, I expected more from the event. For those who are not aware of the expo, it was essentially to showcase Microsoft’s latest and greatest technology in action that was targeted towards the home, improving business productivity, customer experience, and data analytics.

This was my first time to a tech-related expo so I didn’t really know what to expect, and being Microsoft, I expected a whole lot more than what it actually was. I spent the entire day there and I thought the place would be packed with so many people that you wouldn’t be able to get your hands on anything, but I was incredibly surprised that I could walk around without bumping into anyone.

The customer to staff ratio felt like 3 customers to one staff member. Although they were very helpful, full of information and friendly, I was only approached by one person to give a demonstration of their stand. Just because I’m not wearing a suit and tie, and I don’t look like a business man, it doesn’t mean you can ignore me. The only way I was given a demonstration was to listen in on someone else’s.

It Was Only A Sales Pitch That I Didn’t Buy

The main tools that were predominantly promoted at the expo was SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 with Web Apps/Office 365 and Lync. Since I just finished a project working on SharePoint and Dynamics CRM, I’ve had a lot of hands on, technical experience with the tools. I sat down with one of the staff members to give me a demonstration, just to see Microsoft’s perspective of SharePoint. She gave me a run through of how easy it is to use in an organisation, the benefits it has, and how easy it is to edit documents online. When I got to the demonstration of Office 365, she said a number of times that when editing documents online, and in Microsoft Word 2011, the formatting stays the same. However, every time I have used the consumer version of Office 365, Web Apps (Office.com) with SkyDrive, I’ve never been able to have the formatting while editing online and offline the exact same.

Here is a screenshot of my Maths assignment I did in high school displayed in Microsoft Word 2007.

Here is how it appears in Office Web Apps on Sky Drive after a normal file upload.

Ah yes, I can see editing documents online keep the exact same formatting. The response to this I got was “I’m not sure why this happens”.

My next question to her was about my experience with Data Loss using Office Web Apps. In a nutshell, I lost an entire PowerPoint Presentation using Office Web Apps. Her response, “I’m not sure about that either, why don’t I get my colleague to help you out. Oh there he is, getting a coffee. You can talk to him about your problems as he works on the consumer side of things”. Nevertheless, he wanted his coffee, did a wave and never came to us. Unless he was ordering a coffee for another prospective attendee, I actually found that quite rude of him not to come over.

I also asked another technical question about SharePoint, and yet, the response I got was “I don’t have the knowledge to answer that”. Most of the staff there seemed to be sales people. Then again, the whole event just seemed to be one Sales pitch demonstrating the latest Microsoft products, but not actually selling anything or signing anyone up to the service.