User Groups and Community

Say hello to the new Culminis!

By now I'm sure you will have heard of the significant changes taking place in the organisation of Culminis. 

Microsoft is delighted to see the way that the global IT Professional community is progressing. Over the preceding years Culminis has been a driving force in the growth of the IT Pro community worldwide, and we are extremely pleased and proud to have been part of the journey to date.  These changes can only strengthen the user group family, and we remain completely committed to Culminis in its new evolution.

I’m sure I echo the sentiments of many, many people both within Microsoft and in the larger IT Pro community in my thanks to Dave Sanders and his team for all they have done over the years, and would also like to give my thanks to Stephen Ibaraki and the new volunteer board for taking on the leadership role.

 To see the official announcement from Culminis, go to their web site - http://new.culminisconnections.com/default.aspx or their blog post - http://thevoice.culminis.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=173

 Culminis have also put together a page with a list of all the board members at http://www.culminis.com/BOD.

Announcing the UGSS Regional Leads

A new leader for TAGM...

As many of you know, one of the key roles of the TAGM group I'm part of is to connect with and support the technical user groups around the world, working with the Microsoft field and more importantly with associations such as Culminis, INETA, PASS and others. A few examples of the things we provide are: -

• Funding to the major associations and for some of your local meetings.
• Technical content to help with your user group meetings.
• Community Led Launch Events (over 7000 last year)
• A communications channel between yourselves and the various groups within Microsoft.
• LiveMeeting accounts!
• Advice and guidance (from you as well as to you!)

Many of you will have met either Christine Betts or Michael Alcock, who have been very active with the User Groups over several years now. Both are moving on to new opportunities within Microsoft, and I thought I should take the opportunity both to let you know this and also to introduce you to Rick Martinez, the new leader of the Technical Audience Global Marketing Team, or TAGM.

Christine Betts is moving on after almost 4 years of leading the mission for technical audience connection.  Christine will be continuing to work on our cross-company strategy for audience satisfaction until she transitions to a new role later in the year. As you may know, Christine is a 25-year veteran of Microsoft, having done many and varied roles across the company before this one.  Christine wants me to pass on the following words to you all - "One of the greatest pleasures of the past 4 years has been the opportunity to meet and work with members of the technical community across the world.  Microsoft is improved and completed by the amazing work that you do with technology every day.  I'm delighted to have done what I can to enable that.  I am confident though that we are still only at the beginning of an even stronger partnership and I look forward to watching it continue to flourish.  Keep giving the feedback and helping Microsoft to step up its game to help you all do bigger things to realize your own ambitions."

Michael Alcock was my manager, has had a key role in driving broad community connection for Microsoft, and was the IT Professional Champion for the division.  He had responsibility for the Microsoft user group,  influencer and community content strategy programs, and his new role builds on his experience from working with User Groups to bring those learning deep within Microsoft.

Michael would just like to say that "User Groups Rock! I'm glad I met you all and don't think I'm going very far. My new role is to help bridge the community of Microsoft's technical professional s better with all of you!!! I'm so glad to have been a part of the past 3 years of transformation for how we serve the community at scale. It's so cool to have roles within Microsoft that interact and listen to you and work with all of you to improve how this company works with the community. I'll see you all again soon."

I am excited to announce that Rick Martinez has joined Microsoft to lead the TAGM organization going forward!  Rick is joining us from Disney and has a rare blend of skills that are a natural fit for this role.  He is a developer, IT Professional, community technologist and an Internet strategist. Rick has built software products, run datacenters and is constantly striving to understand the next generation of technical opportunities.  Rick's most recent role at Disney was the VP of Technical Operations - leading a team of IT professionals managing the datacenter and infrastructure for some of the most successful Web sites in the world: ESPN.com, ABC.com, and Disney.com. While there he also drove Internet strategy for all of the Disney Parks and Resorts, using technology to create innovative customer experiences and improve operational performance.

Prior to Disney, Rick held engineering roles at a startup and at a large university, building products and managing IT infrastructure.  As Director of Engineering and Manager of Database Engineering for Starwave he led teams, built software, and was responsible for all back-end and client side systems.  These roles have  given him a wealth of experiences as both an IT Pro and a Developer - he has walked many miles in your shoes.

 Rick asked me to tell you that "I am very excited to take on this very important role connecting the technical community with Microsoft.  I look forward to continuing the momentum started under Christine's leadership and over the coming months will share with you my thoughts and perspectives on how we can work together to take this up to the next level."

We will try and get an interview with Rick on UGTV as soon as he had had a chance to get himself settled in his new role. If you've got any questions you would like to ask him, please let me know - I can't promise we will get to ask everything, but we will try!

Photosynth

I'm on vacation at the moment at Hood Canal. I thought I'd have a quick play with Photosynth, and if you are interested you can see my first results here. http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=9cff99b9-7551-4b7a-8066-48e313cffb01. I know I can do better next time, now I've seen how it processes pictures. Don't treat this as an example of the best that Photosynth can do, look at it as an example of what an idiot (me) can do in a few minutes.

Photosynth looks to me to be a GREAT way to share vacation memories etc with friends and family, and it's actually really easy to create one. Why don't you see if you can create a better one than my first attempt - shouldn't be too hard!  If you come up with a cool one, post it's URL in the the comments to this post so I can see....

Social Bookmarking on MSDN and TechNet: A Collaboration Tool

Microsoft is opening up the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to the worldwide technical community. Social bookmarking is an important element of the overall vision, enabling technical professionals to easily share their web favorites, find and connect with each other, and publish community-generated content directly to our sites.

In May, we released a preview of our social bookmarking application. Today, we released v1.0 of social bookmarking for MSDN, TechNet, and Expression. Chris Slemp has a blog post going into details of the features in this release, and includes some How-To videos for getting started.

Your user group could get value from bookmarking in a couple different ways:

·         Develop a list of resources for technical pros in your area. Use the “boston” tag to bookmark great tech bloggers in the Boston area, UG sites, area vendors, and/or projects.

·         Build sets of resources on a topic of recent interest to the group:

o   An event (e.g. “codecamp”)

o   A very specific technology (e.g. “regularexpressions” or “ipv6”)

o   A broader technology topic, broken down into smaller categories using tags (“sql + explore”, “sql + deploy”, “sql + manage”)

Here's an example from a group in Australia who's just started tagging content for their geographically-dispersed team: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/#sort=all&page=0&filter=allcontent&tags=cscperth

If you'd like to start a tagging project in your user group or in your company/team, and would like to share your experience, please leave a post in the Bookmarking forum. The team is collecting case studies to better understand how groups would like to use bookmarking and to inform requirements for future features such as the ability to define groups (user groups?!) on the MSDN and TechNet sites.

Carry all your tech books with you anytime with one-click reference on Microsoft technologies..

Microsoft Press has developed a virtual library for IT Professionals, developers and information workers who want to learn about Microsoft products and related technologies.  We have managed to secure a substantial discount for Microsoft user group members.  To learn more about the E-Reference Library, please click here (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/books/ereference/default.mspx).

·         The Developer and IT Pro libraries each let you search across over 100 technology books (New books are added every month!) published by Microsoft Press with one click to locate just the information you are looking for – by topic, code fragments, problems, etc.  You can also create your personal bookshelf, bookmark, make notes, and download up to five chapters per month.

If you are a Culminis or INETA user group member, you should see details of how to evaluate and then purchase these libraries at a substantial discount appear on the Culminis and INETA web sites in the next few days.

INETA Summer Hit: Turkey

Goskin Bakir, the MS Developer Evangelist from Istanbul just let me know about a cool event held by INETA in Turkey. It was a two day event focusing on Silverlight and IE8. They put together a rather nice video with a number of interviews with the attendees. It was suggested that you should watch out for the Silverlight T-shirt, but I think the funky music at the start of the video was easily the best bit! Daron, let me know who this is please - I want this on my Zune!

http://daron.yondem.com/PermaLink.aspx?guid=166924fd-2aff-4e31-bb0b-9cf2ce14aaee

Mesh

I've spent a bit of time recently playing around with Mesh (http://www.mesh.com). I really think this is a great idea, and with the SDK I can't wait for some of the creative applications people will be able to build in this environment. I could take social computing to a whole new level simply by making some of the tricky wiring easier to implement successfully.

 Although it's still in development, we've removed many of the restrictions on who can get access to Mesh. Visit the site, take a look and let me know what you think. In particular, if you've got a cool idea as to how to use Mesh to help build tools for the User Group community, I'd love to hear from you. I can't say any more just yet, but you may just be glad you did so!

The next edition of User Group TV is out!

You may have heard about UGTV, the "TV news" program especially for user groups.  The next edition is now out and you can see it at http://channel9.msdn.com/Search/Default.aspx?Term=UGTV for developers, and http://edge.technet.com/Search/Default.aspx?Term=UGTV for IT Pros. If you have ideas for articles, and/or want to appear on UGTV, send an email to ugtvidea@microsoft.com

Live Meeting and User Groups

You may not know this, but we have been providing Live Meeting accounts to user group leaders for a couple of months now. It's something that has been very successful - as an example, here is a comment we received from www.developers.ie.

Just to inform you that the .Net Coffee Break Show, a series of webcasts lunched by INDA and Developers.ie is doing very well. In Ireland, I think this is a new trend and just after one show with Martha Rotter Microsoft Ireland, our user group members have responded very well. Next week will see our third live show broadcasted. I secured some great speakers names so far, like Tim Heuer, Stephen Walther next week, Joe Stagner and Dino Esposito in September. Now I would like to call all INETA speakers to join our line of speakers. The show has a duration of 30 to 40 minutes with some demos and talk around a specific topic. So far, we have subjects like silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, Dynamic Data, Ajax, etc... I see the live webcasts as an excellent alternative to normal meetings, as long as we keep on broadcasting regularly. Finally we setup a new section on Developers.ie where users can register to a new show, or watch a previous one. Check http://www.developers.ie/webcasts.aspx to have an idea. My experience with Live Communications is very positive, it's really a fantastic tool!

This whole idea of running events using Live Meeting, recording the events and then making them available online afterwards is a great one, especially where your user group is geographically dispersed. Check out the www.developers.ie site, and think about either working with them or perhaps doing something similar yourselves!

 If you are a User Group leader and would like a LiveMeeting account for your user group, contact INETA, Culminis, PASS or your Microsoft Evangelist.

Microsoft and Culminis launch User Group Support Services

The UGSS platform went live today!   Here is the full announcement...

MICROSOFT AND CULMINIS ANNOUNCE USER GROUP SUPPORT SERVICES

WHAT ARE USER GROUP SUPPORT SERVICES

User Group Support Services (UGSS) offers a free set of tools specific to user group management and content built specifically for User Group events . These services are available through Codezone (Developer & INETA supported), and now for ITPRO are available through Culminis!

WHAT IS READY NOW?

Content Access

UGSS has partnered with Microsoft product teams to provide content built specifically for User Group events (demos, discussion presentations and other content). This content will be free to User Group Leaders and available through the UGSS Connect portal. In the future, User Group Leaders can access community led launch event content as well as explore other Beta Connect program opportunities.

How do I know what’s available to me? A user group specific content editorial calendar is available to User Group leaders within the UGSS portal on Culminis.

Where can I go to download the content? UGSS Connect portal (user group content download center) is accessible from:

·         Culminis

·         TechNet

Online Services
UGSS framework offers a free set of tools specific to user group management. These services include:

·         Speaker's repository

·         Sponsorship Repository

·         Event management & attendance tracking

·         Member management and communication

·         Consolidated User Group Management Interface

·         User Group Kits: Available in supported regions

·         Study Groups

More Details:

Speaker Repository

We have built infrastructure to help support local and regional speakers.  This allows UG Leaders to connect with speakers in their own areas so they can always find great presenters to come and present at their monthly meetings. 

Sponsor Repository

The intent of this repository is to help groups connect with potential sponsors in their area.  We will be working with the Microsoft partner group to educate our partners about the opportunities they have to engage with the User Group community.  While we sponsor many groups, it is important to help groups find other sponsors as well so that they can get all of the resources they need to help their groups grow and be successful.

Event Calendar

Add your own events and search for meetings and events locally and globally. 

Event Management and Reporting

The event management and reporting system functionality includes:

·         RSVP functionality for pre-event engagement

·         Improved connections to speakers and sponsors for events

·         Event attendance reporting format choices for their events (online/offline)

·         A tie-in to User Group kits (if applicable)

HOW DO LEADERS PARTICIPATE?

If you are a member of the Culminis ALLIANCE, your leader credentials are already activated to give you access. Simply sign-in to the Culminis Leaders Portal (www.culminis.com) and navigate to UGSS.

If you are not a member of Culminis and would like to be, register here or access similar services by joining Codezone and follow the steps necessary to become a member. Codezone was developed thru collaboration between INETA and Microsoft to deliver services to the Developer Community

Membership in Culminis and Codezone are both free.
http://www.codezone.com/MyCodezone.CodezoneCom?ActiveID=2821

WHEN DOES THIS START?

The services are available via the Culminis leader portal June 30^, 2008.

HOW DO LEADERS PROVIDE FEEDBACK?

Leaders can provide feedback via this blog post by adding a comment below. You can also respond send a note to us directly via thevoice@culminis.com or contact Microsoft directly via ugsadmin@microsoft.com.

Don’t Forget!  Free Live Meeting Accounts!

Free Live Meeting Accounts for User Group Leaders are available to UG Leaders. Please contact Culminis, INETA, PASS or your local Microsoft evangelist for more details.

Why is Culminis so successful in Brazil

From the comments (thank you) I received from the community about the changes we are making to User Group support, it's obvious that Brazil has been a shining example as to how we should do this.

The purpose of this post is to allow the Brazilian user group leaders to define what exactly it is that has worked well for them.

 If you are in the Brazilian user group community, please comment here and let me know what has been so good about your experiences....

Announcing some key changes to the way Microsoft supports User Groups

As you may know, I'm a senior marketing manager at Microsoft and I focus on technical communities and how Microsoft can support them better. I want to give everyone a heads-up on some important changes we are making in conjunction with Culminis which are designed to bring improvements across the board in how Microsoft supports user groups and how user groups and their members interact with Microsoft.

First, let me make it clear: Microsoft regards the “grass roots” User Groups as a core community in the development and delivery of our business software and development tools. No community is more important. We engage with literally millions of User Group members around the world on an ongoing basis. This gives us invaluable insights into what IT Professionals and Developers really want and really think. That, in turn, helps give you great software and resources, not to mention great times at events like TechEd!

We are always thinking about how to improve the ways we work with and support communities around the world. In that light, we are excited about some changes we’re making with Culminis that I believe will help the community tremendously. I’d love to hear what you think, so please comment away…

Culminis has been a tireless champion of the IT Pro community for several years now. INETA has done the same for the developer but with a purely volunteer organization. We think that each model has its benefits, and together with the Culminis management team we have decided to make the following specific changes: -

1. Culminis will become a volunteer-based organization, very similar to INETA, with regional boards.
• The initial board appointments will be selected by Microsoft and the Culminis company.
• The initial board will be in place for only one year, and will then be replaced by members elected by the community.

1. Microsoft will directly provide the following “core services,” many of which are currently delivered by Culminis.
• Event Support
• Community Development
• Content Delivery
• User Group recognition and reporting
• Newsletter support.

1. The core services will be available to the new volunteer Culminis community and INETA as well as other associations such as PASS. We think this is particularly advantageous to the community as a whole, as it ensures that Microsoft support is available to all User Groups and not just IT Pro groups.

These are some fairly significant changes, and they aren't all going to happen overnight - we expect it to take a couple of months or more before the new structure is fully in place. Please watch this blog for updates as things progress!

And don't forget - I really do want your feedback on this - please feel free to either add a comment to this blog or to email me directly at graham.watson@microsoft.com

What will the industry look like in 15 years time?

I've been at Microsoft for 15 years now. A lot of things have changed in that time, for example the whole social network thing, blogs - heck even to some extent the internet.... But with the benefit of hindsight, I wonder how much of it couldn't have been predicted? For example: -

• Current machines seem incredible when you compare them with what was available 15 years ago. Their size, power, functionality and cost would all have amazed me in 1993. But really, it's just the effect of Mores law in action, and that was well known in 1993.
• The web is something that at first glance would never have been expected, but 15 years ago, although most people were either not online at all or were using BBS systems over modems, the internet did exist - I was using it at Xerox - as did the work of Tim Berners-Lee which really started the whole thing off. Although what the web turned into would have been hard to imagine in 1993, it's not so hard to see it in retrospect.
• The pervasiveness of computing is to my mind one of the REAL changes - 15 years ago, computers were really only used by businesses and geeks. Now they are everywhere, everyone has one*, and everyone uses one to stay conencted socially. For example, my daughter spends her entire life (it seems) text messaging her friends on her mobile phone. Compare everything about that scenario, including the size of the device, it's connectivity, the fact that all her friends are also texting each other with what the world was like 15 years ago...  But again, these are all largely incremental changes, with a clear path from 1993 to 2008.
• The merging of entertainment with computing is also an interesting trend, and perhaps less obvious in retrospect than most of the above - but again, once you add in the digitization of media, it's fairly simple to connect the dots from the cassette walkman of 1993 to the Zune of today, and even the VCR to the Media Center.
• A change which I think is likely to cause real problems in the years to come is the perception of the computer industry as a whole. 15 years ago it was still considered to be an exciting career, but I think that is changing now, and this is born out by the reduction in the numbers of students taking IT related courses in university. Given the overall changes in demographics as well, we may be in for a rough time as far finding the IT skills needed to run the world!

So, after a quick look back at the last 15 years, what could we reasonably say could change in the next 15? Here are a few thoughts from me - I'd be interested to hear what you think?

• Perhaps we might get to the point of a single "ID Card" - one card on which you can keep all the info you need, and which can be used to replace all the cards currently sat in your wallet (go on - count them!), your passport, your access to computers etc. I can see some people wanting this as an embedded chip, but I think the majority would still not be happy with the required surgery or even injection. Of course, this would require real advances in security over today, where issues are in the news all the time - even though usually caused by human error.
• Ubiquitous computing is a possibilty - at least the ability to walk up to any computer anywhere and get access to your information, files etc. Of course this requires significant progress on a number of areas, but I don't see anything needed which would require technological miracles.
• There has been recent talk of dramatically increasing the capacity of batteries. Add inductive charging to this, and perhaps we can at last past the tyranny of the power cord?
• The web is obviously going to get bigger, better, faster, more accessible and just cooler. I'm waiting for FIOS where I live, but in some parts of the world it appears that they are jumping straight to wireless (cell phones) without stringing up loads of copper. I can see the web and the personal computer melding into a single system where logic and data sits wherevere makes best sense, and the user (and possibly even the developer) doesn't really care. Again imagine being able to go to any machine and do anything you need to.
• As far as social is concerned, I think this is one area where that are still real opportunites for development. To take a really bad example, think of the Borg from StarTrek. Completely connected to each other. Now take a better example - you've got a widget you don't want anymore, and would happily give it to someone else if you could only find them or have a question which you don't even know how to go about finding the answer to. Imagine simply being able to say "Does anyone want my widget" or "What's the meaning of life" and the systems would find the right person to talk to. No more advertising on eBay or Craiglist and just hoping that the right person is actively searching for your widget during a one week period, no more trowing questions out on odd forums, resulting in long discussions on if the meaning of life really is 42 or not....

Anyway - a few random thoughts from me - what do YOU think will change in the next 15 years?

 * Actually, "everyone has one" is a complete lie!  It may be largely true in the developed world, but the truth is that over 30% of the earths population still doesn't even have access to electicity, never mind computers.

REALLY interesting video from the Vista team featuring Mark Russinovich..

I just watched a really cool video that the Vista team I used to be a part of (I've got a long and checkered career!) put together. Featuring Mark Russinovich (you DO know who he is, right?) and several other "names" from the industry, there are lots of good tips and food for thought, especially if you are in the middle of or about to start any scale of VIsta deployment.

 This video (https://ms.istreamplanet.com/events/event.asp) is highly recommended, and well worth an hour of your day!