Hi all,

A while back we held a limerick contest and gave away some prizes. We also gave away some "vintage" exchange swag to user groups around the world too. It's been a while since we've done a giveaway, and it's high time we did it again! One of our favorite things to see in the exchange community is customers helping other customers with Exchange, and so that's what this giveaway is about. Send us proof that you helped another customer with technical information about Exchange, and you'll be in the running to receive a small care package of Exchange-related SWAG (at least two items per person).

What are some examples of 'proof'?

• You wrote a blog post about exchange, and another customer commented on your blog entry (or trackbacked from their own blog) saying how helpful your blog post was.
• You responded to another customer's question on a public mailing list, and they responded saying that your information resolved their problem.
• You responded to a post on a newsgroup and a customer replied in the thread saying your response addressed their problem.

What are the rules of this contest?

• Email a URL to your 'proof' to ehloidea AT microsoft DOT com.  You must include your snail mail address, shirt size and email address in your submission in case you win, so we don't have to do a lot of work to dig that up later.
• The 'proof' must be available somewhere on the web anonymously - we want to link to the winners in our followup post and help drive traffic to other exchange community sites as well.
• Multiple submissions are OK, but it'd help us out if you'd include them all in a single comment/email.
• We will accept entries for at least two weeks from today.
• The number of winners we select will depend on the number of submissions, but we have enough swag to do 20 "honorable mention" care packages with at least two items in them, and one each of a third/second/first/grand prize package with several cool items in them such as funny t-shirts we made for the product team for key milestones in the Exchange 2007 development cycle.

How can you increase your chance of winning?

• Include your snail mail address, shirt size and email address in your submission. We're lazy (well, *I* am, at least, and I don't want to have to track that information down once we've selected the winners).
• The more complex or time-intensive examples of effort will be more likely to win - e.g. just answering a question by pointing at an existing KB is pretty standard fare for community exchanges (and of course it's great that we have the KB as a resource), what we're looking for are examples of how you have helped other customers with your own content and thoughts and recommendations.

Note: The swag in question is mostly 'vintage' gear, from exchange 2003 and exchange 2000 - tshirts, the exchange 2000 pocket watch that Jon mentions here, bags, staplers, etc. There is a small amount of exchange 2007 swag in the mix but we can't guarantee that everyone would get some, it will depend on the t-shirt size the winners give us. We do have kid's sizes (2-4T) available in some cases too.

- KC