text: As part of the Real World SQL Azure series, we recently talked to Eugene Shustef, Chief Engineer in the Global Document Outsourcing group at Xerox, about using Microsoft SQL Azure to build an innovative new printing service for mobile workers. Let's listen in.
  Shustef: We've created a service called Xerox Cloud Print that allows mobile workers to print to any available public printer from their smartphones, iPads, and other mobile devices.
  Shustef: That's what we hear constantly from our customers. Thousands of their employees are on the move all the time. Some don't even have permanent offices. Their smartphones are their primary computing devices, because smartphones have gotten really ... well, smart. About the only thing they don't come with is a print button.
  Shustef: You bet. Who's better qualified than Xerox, the global leader in printing, to give you a way to print from your phone?
  Shustef: Your mobile phone manufacturer or wireless provider would provide Xerox Cloud Print as an app on your phone. When you get an email attachment that you want to print, you just pop open a dialog box that lets you locate a nearby printer, perhaps at a copy shop, and you route your print job there and pick it up later.
  Xerox Cloud Print gives mobile workers a way to locate and print to nearby printers by routing print jobs through the Windows Azure platform.
  Shustef: SQL Azure provides multitenancy, dynamic scalability, and cost effectiveness. We can securely stack data from multiple customers in a single SQL Azure instance, which makes it very cost effective. Also, our development staff is Microsoft trained. We used Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for the predecessor to Xerox Cloud Print, a private-cloud version of the service that enables phone-based printing from inside a corporate firewall. We wanted to reuse that SQL Server development investment, and SQL Azure provided the most economical way to do so.
  Shustef: Absolutely. Our customers demand continuous innovation, but innovation is expensive. You have to try things that may not pan out and scale quickly if an idea takes off. Building a physical infrastructure for development and deploying new ideas is cost-prohibitive. Doing development, testing, staging, and hosting in the cloud removes all those upfront costs; it lowers the barrier to innovation.
  Shustef: Oh definitely, another great benefit. With SQL Azure, we pay only for the storage resources we use; not a cent more. If 5,000 customers sign up for Xerox Cloud Print tomorrow, we just click a few buttons and increase the number of SQL Azure instances. If they all leave in droves, then we can scale back.
  
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  Coronavirus has presented the event world with an unprecedented challenge. Millions of attendees have abandoned trips, thousands of events have been cancelled and the financial losses are inconceivable. For ten major tech conferences alone – including Google I/O, Facebook’s F8 event, Mobile World Congress and SXSW – the economic loss is beyond $1.1 billion. And as travel disruptions continue, social distancing becomes standard and anxiety towards gatherings persist, events are facing a rocky road ahead.
  In response, events have swarmed online. Webinars, lectures, panel discussions, summits, conferences, workshops and more are now expected to take place online so they can ensure the safety of attendees whilst still delivering quality experiences.
  Whilst the digital space is a lifeline and an opportunity for businesses, it has its hurdles. The technical requirements to host an effective, glitch-free event are more demanding often thought, needing both specialist equipment and expertise on hand. And once you have that in place, it’s difficult to create the same level of engagement found at in-person events. Attendees can get up and leave at any time and looking at a screen instead of being surrounded by thousands of excited minds is hard to match.
  Enter hybrid events. An idea that has gained traction amid the pandemic (although not new), hybrid events mix the wide-reach and almost unlimited capacity of an online event with a physical location and audience. By doing so, they enable companies to connect with global audiences whilst still benefitting from a sense of place and human interaction. Some say that hybrid events are the near future of the event industry, and we think so too. Here are three reasons why your digital event needs a home.
  Engaging people online is hard. Not only do you lack a physical presence which can feel alienating, but you’re also competing with texts, emails, social media, unclosed internet tabs and household conversations. These problems are universal for anything that happens through a screen, but online-only events face even more problems as they often don’t have enough human context for people to relate to – seeing a face streaming on your computer is rarely enough to keep someone hooked.