march user group follow-up …

in case you missed it, we tried something new (to us … but of course, not to the rest of the world.)  we streamed the entire user group meeting incorporating in person attendees, in person presenters, virtual attendees and virtual presenters!

it was really cool.  as with every user group, microsoft has continued to support us by providing the facilities and equipment to make it happen.  this time, they threw in a microsoft roundtable conferencing device, which made the experience that much cooler.  not to mention, they brought a lot of awesome swag to give away.

systemcentercentral.com was instrumental in getting this show going.  they helped secure a sponsor: prowess.  many thanks to rory and pete.  prowess came in, did a short demonstration on smartdeploy, and fed everyone a trough of barbeque – which i hear was quite good. :)  o’reilly has been a long time sponsor supplying books for giveaways and for review.

anyway, this is just a post to direct you to material which we saved from the meeting.  since we broadcasted the event, we were able to capture the entire thing.  so instead of –just- slide deck, we have the audio/video stream as well.  instead of  supplying links, we decided to take a smarter, simpler approach and place hyperlinks to the material in the original agenda.  instead of a start/end time field, you’ll find links to the livemeeting and slide deck per presentation (as they’re available).  you can find it all at www.atlsmug.org.

so what’s all this mean?  well, if you couldn’t make it physically, you had the option of being there virtually.  if you couldn’t make it virtually, you have the option now of viewing all the material you missed.

of course, if you weren’t there physically, you didn’t get to see all the giveaways.  as i was arranging things, it started getting pretty difficult to find empty space on my desk.  we had a pile of books from ed wilson.  i chased him down after his presentation to get him to sign all four of them.

he was more than happy to do it.  the funny thing was he got into a conversation with garth and was totally derailed.  i think he remembered i was standing there (eventually) with what felt like a ton of books -- about 5 minutes later.  the guy is passionate about what he does.  can’t blame him for that although it did remind me of one of my mom’s favorite forms of punishment growing up – standing in the corner, holding up a couple of encyclopedias.  <3  that’s another story.

all the books went quickly, especially the autographed ed wilson encyclopedias.  we had a couple of copies of windows 7 to give away, some office 2007 standard, and an arc mouse.  in that pile of stuff, we had money clips, courtesy of silect software, ball and paddle from securevantage, and a load of stuff from microsoft.  they really delivered on the goods!  everyone who attended got an led book light… and a green and black laptop bag.  those are the ones under my desk.  it was pretty cool.

can’t guarantee it’ll always be like that… but it’s great to share when it is.  hope you all enjoyed it as much as i did!  see you at the next one.  spread the word to your friends!