Its been a long time since i had a chance to sit down and write  a new post. I’ve been really busy at work. We had two major events that seemed to take up all of June. Now that everything is over I don’t really know where the month went. So i guess I’ll do a quick recap of the events that happened during June.

The first even took place the second week of June called TRUE. TRUE stands for The Relocation and Upgrade Event. Last year it was called the Select-A-Seat event. It was basically the same thing as Select-A-Seat but not at the Ford Center. Due to construction at the Ford Center in preparation for the 2009 – 2010 season we had to move the event from the Ford Center to the Coca-Cola Center in Brick Town. This presented several technical problems to us as an organization. Firstly, its hard to sell a product when you can’t actually SEE or touch the product. In our case, we are selling seats. Last year when the team first moved here, we were able to bring customers into the Ford Center and show them around the arena. Customers were able to sit in their seats and get a feel of what those seats would be like during an actual game. Obviously we can’t do that when we don’t have access to the Ford Center. After a lot of back and forth we decided to go with a 3D model of the arena created by a company called Ballena using their Seats3D software. If you click here you can see the actual application they created for us.

The second problem we had to deal with was bringing the 3D model to life at a different venue a mile away from the Ford Center. Not only did we have to deal with the 3d model but we also had to relocate our entire sales & retention staff to the Coke Center for one week while the event was going on. What that translates to in IT terms is that we had to transport and setup about 35 computers and workstations from the office to the Coke Center. On top of that we also had to setup a bunch of computers and large plasma/LCD monitors as well as 3 large projection screens to show off the Seats3D chart of the arena. Many of the workstations we setup required two LCDs. And the icing on the cake was that the Coke Center had just a single DSL modem that provided Internet to the entire place. Obviously with 35+ PCs constantly downloading 3d data over the Internet the existing DSL connection would not work. We ended up having our own temporary Internet connection installed at the Coke Center for the event. The 45mb DS3 that was installed worked extremely well and we had no problems the entire week. We also had a VPN tunnel back to our main office for all of our POS and ticketing transactions. Over all the event was a huge success and went off without a single problem. (IT problems at least)

After wrapping up TRUE we had about 2 weeks to plan and prepare for the biggest event of the summer, the NBA 2009 Draft. Seeing as how the 2008 Draft occurred prior to the teams relocation, this was our first Draft in OKC. As this was my first experience with the Draft, there were a lot of unknowns. The Draft isn’t as complicated or technical as other events such as the TRUE event. However it does require much more work and planning. The main issue is that we have to absolutely ensure that everything works as it is intended to work. That means when the team’s GM, Sam Presti, picks up the official Draft telephone, he better get a dial tone. It means that when our head trainer needs to lookup a player’s medical chart in the medical database, the database has to work. It means that when our assistant GM needs to look up something on espn.com, the Internet has to work. All of those things add up to making sure every piece of technology in the war room and facility works and has sufficient backup plans in place to keep it working if something unexpected should happen.

After much planning, preparation, and testing the night of the draft arrived. For those unfamiliar with the Draft here is how it works. All thirty teams in the NBA are put in a specific order. (Some by chance and others by record) The Thunder, for example, were fortunate enough to be given the third pick. Each team was connected to the NBA’s headquarters via a webex conference and each team designated one telephone number through which the picks were to be verbally chosen. When it’s your team’s time to choose, the commissioner calls your team’s designated phone number and informs you that you have five minutes to make your selection. (You are only given 2 minutes for your choice during the second round of picks) The most intense part of the draft, for me, were those precious five minutes. Should anything go wrong, especially during those five minutes, it would have had to be corrected within seconds to avoid possible fines and penalties from the league. Luckily for us and as per the plan everything worked flawlessly. None of our backup plans or even the backup to the backups were needed. The team acquired three new players and everything is set for next season. Regardless of what kind of planning we did, those five minutes were still nerve racking. I’m glad its over.

And with that, the end of the month is upon us. I finally have some time to breath and start to plan for next year. We have a lot of work ahead of us. The Ford Center is being remodeled and a lot of the technical aspects of the arena have changed since last year. We have to do a bunch of rewiring and redesigning. I’m not to worried at this point. But I’m sure that will change when we get closer to Opening Night. I’m hoping to document some of that work here. I’m not sure how much of it i can actually publish but I’ll do as much as i can.