What matters to you as a presenter? Certainly you’d like to know time information as well as what’s coming up on your next few slides; also very handy is the slide notes feature, which can work as a reminder — or sometimes even a lifesaver when your mind runs blank.

Everything you need as a presenter: time information, preview of the next few slides and slide notes.

It’s time to take a look at what you need to do in order to enable Presenter view. First you have to make sure that your additional screen extends your desktop instead of just cloning it. To extend your screen, right-click on your desktop while the second display device is connected, and choose Properties. Under the Settings tab you should see two screens. Select the second one and select the “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor.” checkbox. If your screens aren’t cloned anymore, you have accomplished the first step.

The second step needs to be done in PowerPoint. If you’re using version 2007, click on the Slide Show tab in the ribbon and select the checkbox “Use Presenter View.” Above that option, you can also specify on which screen the presentation should be displayed, so that the screens will be in the desired order. After that, simply start your presentation as you normally do.

If you’re using PowerPoint XP or 2003, click on Slide Show > Set Up Show and then select the “Show Presenter View” checkbox. If you’re using OpenOffice.org Impress, you can download the presenter screen extension to enable the functionality.

I only wish that Cisco would not have abandoned slides in new Instructor Kits by introducing secured PDF files. Having such a great tool for presentations becomes useless if your content is locked into a different format and can be viewed and presented only as a document.

Virtual classroom will be led by Ivan Pepelnjak, CCIE and author of highly successful MPLS books published by Cisco press and Service Provider courses now offered by Cisco Systems.

Check also NIL training schedule for other courses.

The workshops will be led by Mitja Robas, the lead developer of Cisco Data Center and Cisco Unified Computing System courses. Welcome to join us at these interesting presentations.

Check also newest courses from Nexus area (NIL Cisco Nexus 5000, Nexus 2000, and Nexus 1000v Implementation, NIL Cisco Nexus 5000 and Nexus 2000 Implementation) or choose among courses in schedule.

NIL’s expertise in the Data Center and virtualization was recognized in development of the Data Center Unified Computing Design (DCUCD) course, which supports the new Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Design Specialist certification. NIL also offers the Data Center Unified Computing Implementation (DCUCI) course, which supports the new Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Support Specialist certification.

The knowledge gained by attending NIL’s DCUCD and DCUCI courses enables learners to design and implement scalable, reliable and intelligent Data Center Virtualization solutions based on the Cisco UCS system, along with other Cisco Data Center products, server virtualization software and server operating systems.

Learners will benefit from NIL experts who have almost a decade of experience with virtualization, data center infrastructure, storage and unified computing. NIL’s proven expertise has resulted in its being one of the first Cisco Authorized Technology Provider (ATP) partners for UCS in the region. NIL has been actively involved in the development of related learning solutions for Cisco; the Data Center Unified Computing Design (DCUCD) and the Data Center Network Infrastructure 1 (DCNI-1) courses were developed by NIL experts.

If you’re interested in other DC courses or want to attend NIL training on other areas, check also our schedule.

If you’ve answered no to at least one of these questions, you’ll benefit from attending our new SP Services and Solutions bootcamp. It’s a three day highly intensive course crammed with hot SP topics that will help you get started in designing, implementing, selling and delivering advanced and managed services for business and residential customers. The course does not focus on technologies (they are just the tools you use) but on the services you can offer using them.

After the third day, you’ll definitely not be able to configure VPLS service on your GSR routers or deploy an IPTV server, but you’ll know where and how you can use these technologies to create new services and how to offer them to your customers.

Feel free to attend scheduled training for SP bootcamp in september or find a suitable training for you in the schedule for all other courses.

Poor performance. The hour-long session (that I was able to join only between two conference calls) started after a six-minute delay. And five minutes before the end of the session, we heard a voice from the audio conference bridge: »Your session will expire in five minutes«. According to the agenda, we were less than two-thirds of the way through the session. Poor performance.

Sorry to say, but I have made the same mistakes (rarely, fortunately) when teaching instructor-led training classes. The coffee was so good, the discussion during the break so interesting that I simply returned to the classroom late. A couple of faces sitting behind the desks were stony. Not happy. They wanted to finish on time. Even worse, when I was at the stage, in front of my students, I noticed that one or two attendees were still missing (bathroom, phones, God only knows what) – and I waited another couple of minutes for them. Never again.

I have come to realize that whenever you are conducting an event – classroom training, webinar, conference – you have to be a »dictator,« and people appreciate that. If the session is scheduled to start at 10 am, then it’s precisely 10 am when you start. In today’s world of tight schedules, people want that. And soon they will recognize the presenters, instructors, conference leaders who start on time. Starting on time means that you have enough time to cover your content, you have enough time for participants to ask questions, and, finally, you were ON TIME!!! One of the most important criteria for measuring airline performance is on-time departures and arrivals (well, they’re measured by average delay – but still, minimum delays qualify the best airlines). So, in the virtual world, no matter whether you’re on stage or in the audience – be on time!

What happened? The presenter spent almost an hour in the virtual environment, displaying three (3, yes, it’s not a mistake) static slides in 30 minutes, monotonously talking about how important it is to be dynamic, to show dynamic content, to be enthusiastic – all the things that motivate the e-learner in an otherwise rather »de-motivating« e-environment. I lost all interest after the first half hour, and still don’t know what happened to the presenter that day … or was the presenter no different than usual?

What had I expected? Definitely a largely dynamic screen so that, even if the presenter’s voice was slightly monotonous, the on-screen actions would keep me awake. Some nice, colorful slides, with attractive graphics, bullet points dropping as the presenter spoke, highlighting, bracketing, underlining … maybe even some sophisticated animations. I expected a presenter showing enthusiasm about this online medium, about the fact that, at that very moment, businesspeople, training strategists, instructional designers and various managers from all over the globe were listening.

I left the session of a prominent learning expert before the end. Long before. Isn’t that a pity? But my disappointment was simply too great.

In NIL’s online webinars and virtual classrooms, we try to imagine all these people »watching« us through their LCD screens, and listening to us. We try to make an impressive show, adding dynamics to the content and to our voices. You (the learners) deserve it – and we (the presenters) feel better for doing it that way.

E-learning has always fought for the learner’s attention. An enthusiastic instructor in a comfortable training room is definitely the winner against boring, never-ending narrated e-learning. But let’s assume that the e-learning content is interesting, well organized into small pieces, and you have full control over your progress through the content. What can ruin your experience? Definitely the technology, the e-learning platform. According to the study “Achieving Learning Impact 2007” (IMS Global), technological support needs to become largely transparent to the user. Learners don’t want to spend hours setting up their e-learning environment, finding their way through non-intuitive menus, etc.

Are you familiar with this scenario? Your scheduled remote lab is available in two minutes, but your browser has just began downloading some huge applets … and then your firewall blocks some ports … and then the Java version is incorrect … and then these pop-up blockers … And you give up! The diversity of e-learning platforms doesn’t contribute to transparency, no matter that most of them are web-based.

NIL wants to make the learner’s experience as comfortable as possible. NIL Remote Labs simply provides a “browser capabilities test” to make sure that your environment is ready before you enter the lab. The test enables you to check the native access (Telnet, Windows) or, should your firewall block it, an alternative – the respective Java applets. So, when you work with the remote labs, your only focus is the content and the devices on which you’re practicing – just as if you had them on your desk, thanks to transparent and mature web technologies.

Find out more about NIL E-Learning.

• By default, GET VPN doesn’t hide endpoint identities and will allow traffic-snooping adversaries to perform traffic analysis. In other words, GET VPN will not hide who is communicating with whom-information that may be valuable to an attacker who could learn where the servers are, who exchanges the bulk of data, etc.
• GET VPN uses group session keys, as all routers share the same set of traffic-protecting cryptographic keys. Thus an attacker who compromises a single GET VPN member device can break crypto protection of other GET VPN traffic. This issue makes GET VPN less resilient to VPN member compromise as compared to classic peer-to-peer tunneling VPNs.
• GET VPN has somewhat weaker anti-replay packet protection, as it cannot synchronize anti-replay counters across group members. Unlike “classic” IPsec encapsulation, which has a very small anti-replay window using sequence numbers, GET VPN uses pseudo-timestamps and a longer time window (on average) to reject replayed packets.
• GET VPN puts a lot of stress on key servers. If you’re using RSA for peer authentication, you must plan for the worst-case scenario, in which every member wants to do a phase 1 IKE exchange with the key server at the same time. In this situation, the key servers’ tunnel setup rate becomes very important, as is the case with all hub-and-spoke IKE topologies.
• There is a tradeoff between geographical redundancy and the danger of network partitioning: the more resilient the network becomes (by distributing key servers to many geographical locations), the greater the danger of network splits and parts of the GET VPN using different keys, isolating themselves from other partitions.
• By default, the overall resilience of GET VPN is lower, as it depends on the availability of a small number of key servers. By contrast, the classic fully meshed distributed IPsec VPN can always function as long as members (peers) have mutual connectivity.

This is not to say that GET VPN should be avoided. On the contrary, it will be a preferred solution for many companies that seek a simple implementation of a fully meshed, cryptographically protected WAN over a private WAN or MPLS cloud, or even over the Internet when combined with GRE tunnels (and probably NHRP). Additionally, GET VPN does an excellent job providing scalable transmission security to multicast traffic. Just get all the facts straight and make acceptable compromises. Happy network engineering!

P.S. Give credit where credit is due. These are my afterthoughts from Frederic Detienne’s excellent GET VPN presentation at Networkers 2009. Good job, Fred!