Rahul Nathan, an MVP, together with an NGO - Positive Actions Foundation and the State government, launched a User Group in for technology enthusiasts in Mandya and Mysore region of Karnataka - MY-TUG (MandYa/MYsore Technology User Group), with the inaugural offline event - Power of 7... Windows 7 – on May 23, 2009. Other MVPs, Vijay Raj and Anand Khanse, have also supported the initiative.

At the event, Rahul took a session on Windows 7 demoing new features and innovations in the upcoming Windows version. The event had 33 attendees. You can find the photos of the event here.

Encouraged by the interest and the enthusiasm, the group is planning to host a grand event in Mysore on June 27, 2009 with specific focus on Microsoft Technologies for both developer and IT Pro audience.

Selvaraj Kaliyan, an MVP from Bangalore, and the User Group Lead for Bangalore IT Pro has been awarded the Top of the Mark - Volunteer Award, in a programme conducted by The Network Professional Association.

The Network Professional Association® (NPA), in conjunction with Interop, Network Computing, Culminis, and Cisco Press, recently announced the NPA's eighth annual Awards for Professionalism program, which honors individuals for their outstanding achievements as professionals within the network computing industry. Awards for Professionalism winners demonstrate the best balance of professional responsibilities including technical competency, ethics and a proper professional, education and industry credentials, community and industry contributions, leadership, professional affiliation.

At Microsoft TechEd India 2009, we spoke with Sreejumon KP, an MVP from Kerela and President of Kerala – Microsoft User Group (K-MUG) and Binoy, Vice-President, K-MUG about the user group’s academic initiatives.

Download the video (192 MB)

K-MUG has recently organized a Scholarship Program for students to enhance their skill-set.  K-MUG conducts qualifying exam and students get an opportunity to get the free training if they qualify. Nearly 10,000 students appeared for the qualifying exam in the first batch of the unique intiative. More details here.

We had a chance to speak to Geetesh Bajaj, a PowerPoint MVP from Secunderabad, India at Microsoft TechEd India 2009. He talks about the subtle nuances of Microsoft Office PowerPoint, the ecosystem around it, and the community he nurtures.

Download the video (43 MB)

Geetsh owns Indezine, a hugely popular PowerPoint community portal and also Scrapbook Presentations.

Product teams from Microsoft India Development Center, Hyderabad hosted two interactions with MVPs – Office Mobile/Sharepoint and SQL Server.

Each session was attended by MVPs in the concerned expertise and the teams listened to broad feedback over all domains of the product. Several MVPs considered this rare opportunity as the best activity of the TechEd, and both the IDC folks and MVPs requested for more similar engagements.

More photos of the SQL Server IDC interaction are here.