Quick Take on Our First Live Meeting for Influencers

Today we at last put together what I hope to be the first of many Live Meeting sessions for the members of our influencers program. Sacha Dawes, a technical product manager on our team, presented on end-to-end monitoring of IT services in the datacenter.

We had a healthy attendance--around 30 or so--and we had a good spate of questions at the end. Despite some serious audio glitches in the early going, I'll have to count this initial foray as a success, partly because most people stuck with it, and it gave us some insight into how these things can be improved going forward. Our ambition is to run 2-3 of these per month, without overtaxing either our presenter base or the attention and time of our members. To make sure we have success, though, we continue to need feedback on our offerings, and we also need to know that our outreach has some value out there in the community.

To this end, we've asked of our members to spread the word through blogging, Twitter, personal contacts, etc., whether in promotion of such events prior, or in write-up afterwards. For example, one of our members, Bob Cornelissen, posted his review of the session immediately afterward, which is both helpful to us in getting our content out there as rapidly as possible, and helpful to the community, because it helps add to general and specific knowledge of our products and solutions, facilitating relationships all around in the process.

So, if you are interested in attending sessions like this, and would like to get access to a whole host of resources that we're adding to all the time to build up the influencers community, please contact us and we can get the ball rolling. To be sure, though: we are looking for folks who are active participants in the community, and who are willing to add their knowledge and passion to the mix for the betterment of the community and to grow their own influence.

Next up in this department, on October 8: Jeff Wettlaufer presents a technical overview of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 and R3. Look for announcements on this very soon, both here and in other community channels.

 - dave //