Friday, December 31, 2004

My First Community Chat : VB 2005 Language Enhancements

A bit of tension, a bit of apprehension, a bit of uncertainty, great crowd - my first community chat!

Today, I got an opportunity to host a technical communities chat on the new language enhancements of VB 2005, for the first time. The response was pretty good with about fifty people and more than two dozens of questions to attend to. Being my first chat, I lacked the experience of conveying succinct information in little time. So, I ended up not answering a lot of questions. Nonetheless, I hope the chat was useful, for at least, I had a good set of links to share towards the end! The Chat Manager tool, I must say, is pretty user friendly and I didn't have any problems during the course of the chat.

Overall, I think it was a great experience to say the least, and I am looking forward to more in the future.

CNUG-IT Session on SFU By Program Manager Gaurav Daggan - SFU from Microsoft - Seattle

One of the best times in the history of CNUG-IT was that it had a Program Manager Gaurav Daggan - SFU from Microsoft - Seattle as speaker. This shows the great interest Microsoft has in the user group and shows how it extends itself to spreading the passion of community around.

The presentation was scheduled for 17th November and it was hosted in Microsoft Regional Office in Chennai. All regular members turned out for the presentation and they were all excited and keen to hear from Mr. Gaurav Daggan. The presentation started off with a discussion between Mr. Gaurav and the members who had already arrived. The members evinced interest in SFU and wanted to know all about SFU since this is one of the most exciting interoperability tool from Microsoft to bridge its famous Windows operating system with that of with one of the other leading competitor in the Operating System Market to say Unix as well as Linux.

Mr. Gaurav started with an introduction about the existing scenario of the server platform in the market and also discussed about the other platforms viz Unix and Linux. Then he spoke on how important it was for the customers of Windows to have access to Unix so that they could have access to both OS in the heterogenous market. He also gave demos on using SFU and how to access the unix volume from & within NT. There were a lot of discussions from the users and they had a lot of queries on SFU.

Myself and Mr. Gaurav discussed and shared our views with examples and case scenarios. The most surprising thing was that the meeting was planned for just 1 hour but it went on for 2 hours and finally late night the presentation got over and themembers were all excited at having listened to the Product Team demonstration of SFU.

As part of the group incentive, copies of evaluation software like windows,exchange server, MOM, etc were distributed to the members.

Why are we here?

UGs in India rock! With so many activities buzzing all over India, we need a common space to share all those wonderful activities. Blogging, happens to be the most popular channels to share information, providing an easy means of syndicating too. So, here we are!