What a day – what an event – what blast of a time I had. When John Oxley (my boss) suggested that we should have an MC for a Community event we were participating in – I was eager to participate. My team mate Bruce Cowper was working on the logistics and content for the event and I wanted to help out wherever I could. Community is important to me and I am a firm believer that you have to actively participate in the IT Professional community in order to ensure it continues to grow and provide benefits to everyone involved.  Hey – as I’ve been saying for a while now and everyone at the summit was saying “Your support mechanism as an IT Professional includes the community.” It might not be your primary mechanism, but I am willing to bet it’s pretty darn close to the top of your list!

When John told me Winternals and Mark Russinovich were involved – I was VERY interested in participating. I’ve been a fan for many years of the various tools Mark has developed for both SysInternals and Winternals since my win9X Admin days. I LOVED the opportunity to see the power of Process Explorer and was humbled by how little of the power and feature set I was using PRIOR to his session. I’ve made the switch and replaced TaskMgr.exe – have you?

The event was ultimately about how YOU need to be connected to the IT Pro community. Are you an Events person that prefers face to face? Do you use online forums and discussion lists? Are you a blog subscriber to various online publications? Do you participate in User Groups?  HOW do you want to connect? Drop me a Comment to this post so ALL can see what your thoughts are on how you plug in to the community. Click on the Comments link at the end of this post in order to be heard and have your say!

This was our first attempt at having a community focused and influenced event. Winternals provided some awesome “partner/industry”content, we hooked in some local MVPs and User groups as well as bringing in some members of the Canadian IT Pro team from MS Canada to fill in the gaps and keep things moving along (with me as time cop / MC). From the comments I got at the show, during lunch and breaks as well as a preliminary scan of the feedback/evaluation forms – you seemed to be very excited about the event as well as being interested in having more like them in the future.  What can we do to improve? Did you like the event and find value? Please click on the Comments link in order to have an opportunity to be heard. If I don’t hear from you, how do I know we’re hitting the mark?

—————Personal take away from Q&A forum——————

I had a question during the Open Q&A forum regarding IMF and language support. From some preliminary investigation, I can only confirm the MSI installer packages providing localised support for various languages that you would traditionally see in MS product.  I will continue to look into it to get the definitive answer on how the criteria perform in a multi-lingual messaging environment. In the meantime, here are some links to the main information pages about IMF.

Main IMF homepage
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2003/imf/default.mspx

IMF deployment guide
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/library/imfdeploy.mspx

and my personal favourite – the MSDN library area from the Exchange 2003 SDK about IMF and Spam.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/e2k3/e2k3/ast_anti_spam.asp

Stay tuned – I’ll have more info on this.