Corporate Campaign of CNUG-IT in Southern Railways on 8th April 2005

On the 8th of April 2005, it was a red day in the history of user groups in India. CNUG-IT hosted its first Corporate Campaign in Southern Railways. Southern Railways is one of the largest railway group in Asia.

CNUG-IT along with the Developer and Evangelism Team of Microsoft hosted the Corporate Campaign in Southern Railway’s Head Office located in Poonamallee High Road. The presentation was done to create awareness of the features of Windows XP and how it was created with important specifications so as to meet the needs of the professional user and the home user.

The presentation was attended by the staff of the IT department including some of the top people of Southern Railway’s IT Team. About 50 people attended the program. The presentation was given by Mr. Ravisankar (IT Pro Evangelist of Microsoft). He spoke about the core features of Windows XP. Some of the points covered at the presentation included

Versions of WindowsConsumer editionBusiness EditionServer EditionsPost Installation RecommendationsTransferring SettingsPersonalizing Windows XPApplication CompatibilityWireless CommunicationsInternet Connection FirewallFeatures of Windows XP SP2?

The attendees showed a lot of interest in the presentation and showed their enthusiasm by raising interesting questions and discussions points. Even a small quiz program was organized as part of the program and the lucky winners walked away with gifts sponsored by Microsoft.

After the presentation by Ravisankar, CNUG-IT gave a presentation on the importance of user groups and how user groups have helped to bring together the administrators and IT Pros of the leading IT Companies in Chennai. The speech and presentation was given by Mr. Ravickumar – President of CNUG-IT.

This was the first part of the campaign program and there are plans to host more events in future covering the features of IT Products of Microsoft in a detailed and phased manner. This will help the staff of Southern Railways to improve their knowledge as well as help them to get the most out of Windows XP.

The program showed that the “Corporate Campaign” is indeed a success and is vital to spreading knowledge and creating awareness of Microsoft’s IT products among the top Corporates in India. Since most of the Corporates have end users, enlightening them will go a long way in creating a successful awareness of Microsoft’s IT Products in India.

We would like to thank Mr. Ramakrishnan and Mr. Loganathan of Southern Railways for their help in organizing this Corporate Campaign as well as thank Mr. Ravisankar for taking his efforts to fly down to Chennai and take the presentation in Southern Railway head quarters.

you can be a part of this excitment by joining the IT Pro User Group of Chennai at: http://groups.msn.com/CNUGITGroup

First UG Meet of the Bangalore IT Pro Community

Audience at the First Bangalore IT Pro UG meet on April 23 2005.
We had more than 30 people attending and the speakers were Sheila Gulati, Abhishek Kant and Anupam Viz. The topics covered were:

- DPE Team and Communities
- Setting up Wireless Network for home and corporate network
- PKI Infrastructure
A lot of freebies (read T-Shirts) were distributed at the event. Food (chips, biscuits and cold drinks) was served during the break.

DevCon 2005 Hyderabad - Exciting new technologies

DEVCON 2005 was a Grand Triumph and Kudos to the MUGH Core Members and the Audience. DevCon 2005 was a great effort from all the core members of MUGH.
I didn’t believe to see the audience sitting in for more than 7 hours, and all the session are very interactive and appealing. Many of audience have given feedback that the event was wonderful and looking similar events in the future. It was a thrilling and challenging experience for me and I love to do that more.

Let me thanks all the Speakers and others, who spare their valuable time with us and make this event a big success. Thanks a lot. :)

Devcon Pictures: http://www.mvpblog.com/devcon/
http://www.abhishekkant.net/devcon2005hyd/

In short, I would say: DevCon 2005 and MUGH Rocks!!! Let us make MUGH a Vibrant Community!!!!

DevCon 2005 by Microsoft User Group, Hyderabad (MUGH) - April 10th, 2005
A full day event focusing on various latest technology topics of Microsoft Product line, featuring Dev Guru's and IT Celebrities of India, from Microsoft Developer Evangelism Team, MS IDC and MS GDCI.These sessions covered the upcoming cutting edge technologies Indigo,
Visual Studio Team System and Whidbey and SQL Server Mobile 2005. Over 500 members registered online with the event and more than 130 members attended and participated in a very interactive way.

Conducted By:
This technical fiesta was conducted by Microsoft User Group Hyderabad (MUGH), in association with Microsoft GDCI, Vasudeva Realtors and Satyam Computers.

Participation:

Professionals: 110+
Students: 25+
Total: 135+

Sessions Conducted
Key Note Speech: Berry Rogers, Microsoft Services IT, Redmond.
VS 2005 Express Products: Janakiram MSV, Academic Evangelist, Microsoft.
Indigo, Connected Systems Framework: Kumar Gaurav Khanna, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft.
Testing in Visual Studio Team System 2005: Pratap J Ladhani, GDCI, Microsoft.
Enhancements in SQL Server Mobile 2005: Sachin Sinha, IDC, Microsoft.
Globalization and Localization in .NET: Deepak Gulati, ISV Evangelist, Microsoft

Participation from companies : Infosys, Cognizant Technologies, Wipro, Keane, Satyam, TCS, Microsoft, Virtusa and InfoTech

Overall feedback:
Some of the objective feedback include: (Collected from feedback forms)1. Excellent, impressive (more than 30 responses)2. Want more sessions, at least 3 in year !!!! (there were more than 5 reponses like this)3. Really Good (more than 23 responses saying this)4. Wanted to share material/slides (10+ responses)5. MUGH is doing very good. Wanted to contribute more to MUGH !!! (at least 10 responses)
Comments of some of the participants:

Ramesh Srinivasan, Cognizant Technologies
Thanks to MUGH for making this event happen this way, this is a great experience and I appreciate DevCon event managers to make everything happend on time with out much schedule deviation.
When I looked at the schedule, I strongly decided to attend Kumar Gaurav Khanna's session on INDIGO. That's a great session on a great technology coming up.

SQL Server Mobile - IDC Team, Microsoft India
This event has exceed our expectation, It's a very good experience for us to address such a large developer community in Dev Con 2005. We look forward to do more sessions on
SQL Server Mobile 2005 with Microsoft User Group, Hyderabad.

Rajesh, Infosys
Sessions are very good and very helpful for Developers to work with emerging Microsoft technologies, especially Indigo and Visual Studio Team System.
I want to contribute more to MUGH as a core member as well. Thanks to MUGH.

Lakshmi S, Virtusa Ltd.
Felt like I have attended Tech-Ed or some MSDN Event. Extremely cutting edge technology sessions and Great speakers. 10 times worth than a sunday @ home :-)
I request MUGH to conduct these kind of events atleast 3 times a year.

Umesh Thota, Student
As the day started we with our hopes high, all done with our arrangements were waiting for clock to strike 10. At 10 it was a marvel an astonishing number of people, both students and developers showed up. in spite of it being a Sunday. It was a feeling of fruits for our hard work. there was an element of fun, which was never planned. i enjoyed every moment of it and hoped the day would never end.


Hindu coverage on DevCon 2005 :

http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2005040910240400.htm&date=2005/04/09/&prd=th&

Some Blogs:

http://arun.mvpblog.com/2005/04/devcon-2005-by-microsoft-user-group.html
http://geekswithblogs.net/umesh/archive/2005/04/18/36582.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/ssadasivuni/archive/2005/03/16/394716.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/anjanaram/archive/2005/04/05/397142.aspx

WinEmbedded - Reloaded

There are lots of .NET, IT Pro & SQL user groups all over India but a UG for Windows Embedded and Windows Mobile was definitely missing!

The WinEmbedded UG (http://groups.msn.com/winembedded) is a platform for anybody interested in Microsoft's Embedded & Mobile technologies to interact, share knowledge and learn. WinEmbedded is the embedded and mobile space for both Professionals and Students.



WinEmbedded UG was started in September 2004 by Mr.Pradipta Kumar Sharma (MSFT, Heads the Windows Embedded & Mobile Division in India) .

April 16th 2005, we had the 2nd UG meet at Microsoft GTSC, Bangalore. Mr.Anantha Kashyap (Microsoft eMVP), Wipro Technologies, Bangalore, delivered a session on Windows CE.NET and Mr.DSK Chakravarthy spoke about .NET CF. [Winembedded previous sessions]

The UG will be conducting a Hands-On-Lab on WindowsCE in the 1st week of May 2005. Apart from the UG Meets & Hands-On-Lab, WinEmbedded is also planning on contests with exsiting prizes (sponsored by MSFT).

Newly nominated Microsoft Student Ambassadors - Bangalore

Microsoft India - Academic Team had opened nominations for the title of Microsoft Student Ambassador, in Bangalore. It was a self-nomination process followed-up by an interview with the Microsoft India - Academic Lead, Mr.Chandar Sundaram.

On April 7th 2005, the results of the same were announced. The Bangalore Student Champs were invited to meet Mr.Morris Sim, Senior Director of the Academic Developer Group, Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately, Mr.Sim had to return to US, the previous night, due to some personal reason. The meeting went on and jointly precided by Mr. Chandar Sundaram and Mr.Kevin D'Souza (ADE, MSFT). After discussing issues like - current student champ activities, availability of software resources to students and if its not wrong to mention, even an ultra-low-cost software developement kit including WinXP & VS2003 was discussed. However it was just an idea and may take time for MSFT to come out with such a kit.


(The Microsoft Student Ambassadors with Mr.Chandar (left extreme) and Mr. Kevin (right extreme)

Towards the end of the meeting, Mr.Kevin D'Souza announced the Microsoft Student Ambassadors - Sabarish R, Ghanashyam S, Sharath M.S, Raghavan, Deepthi Rao and Sunil Jagadish.

PuneITPro UG Meet

It was 9.00 am in the morning of 10th April, 2004. A blissful Sunday, with the sun already out and shining. It was about 60 minutes for the session on Longhorn to start off. So I got ready and reached the Venue by 930 hrs.

Moments later, my cell rings. It was Manik Ahuja, IT Professional Evangelist, Microsoft Bangalore, on the line. He was also close to the venue and was asking me the last minute directions (since it was held at my college :)). Its about 0945 hrs now, and the session was to be started. However, the hall seemed margingly full and I was worried if people would turn up for the session or not. All I could see at that moment, were some students from various colleges across Pune, about 10-12 of them. They were really interested to know about Longhorn.

We (read: Manik and I) setup Manik's laptop and the project by around 0955 hrs. Few more people had come into the "Smart Room" and I was feeling relaxed about the audiance. More minutes pass by, about 1003 in the clock and we start the session. There are about 35 people now in the room.

To start of with, Manik showed an interesting video on Transition in Microsoft, from Windows 1.0 to 3.0 to 95 to 98 to 2000 to XP and then the most awaited Longhorn. This video, actually got the audiance into the groove of the session. Later on, Manik explained the audiance about the 3 pillers of Longhorn, viz. Avalon (the presentation SubSystem), Indigo (the programmers dream) and WinFX (a completely new file system built on top of NTFS). He also explained various facts about installation, which would take only about 15-20 min to install a DNS server. He also explained stuff about IIS 7.0, using a video, which would be shipping in as a feature of Longhorn. He also showed a video, of how you could install the Longhorn Server using the command prompt. So basically there was a lot of Gyan for all the System Admins present out there.

Not to leave some developers behind ( and ofcourse students), the onus came onto me. After Manik's nice and intersting talk about the Servers, I gave a demo about the Longhorn Client. It was actually fun telling people about the SideBar, a complete new Interface, the New Calender and stuff. So basically showed what is there in the Longhorn OS for people to watch out for and what features would it provide for the developers. Laterz, I take a back seat and Manik starts a nice Q&A session. Lots of question get answered, however, someone pops up a question on XAML.

I was planning to show an XAML basesd application which worked fine on my desktop, (Win XP with SP2, November CTP Download for Avalon and Whidbey Beta 1). Manik knew that I had some knowledge about XAML so he directed the question to me. However to my bad luck, the app did not work fine on Sarang's lappie. Not to fall back, I explained the XAML Code to ppl and told them steps on how to go about downloading it from the NET for their XP based machines.

Lastly we winded up the session by 11.30, and Manik was open to all the offline questions. However before winding up, Manik threw a surprise for all the attendies, that PuneITPro would be giving away a cool Grey MSN India t-shirts. It was a great surprise for all of them.

Before I forget, a great thanks to Anand Deodhar sir, for providing PuneITPro all the infrastructure for the session, without whom, the session wouldnt have taken
place.


Me on the talks ;)

Audiance 4

Microsoft Community Alliance - Kanbay Inititative II

Thats more from Pune Diary :)

Indian Microsoft Technology User Groups Rocking!

Indian Microsoft Technology User Groups Rocking!

Dear All,

Please check out the link.
http://www.presidentofindia.nic.in/scripts/eventslatest1.jsp?id=848

Here you can see the our great President's Address at the Microsoft Academic Summit Meet 2005.

Please take part in the discussion about the meet.







Regards,

Mohit Vijay
Microsoft Student Champ,
Manager of Microsoft Jaipur .NET UG
Asst. Manager of Microsoft Jaipur IT Pro UG
Cell: - +91-98291-32502
I blog at: - http://indiamstechug.blogspot.com