NewsLetter - A New Year For the Baltimore SharePoint User's...

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A New Year For the Baltimore SharePoint User's Group

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by: Eric Harlan 6/19/2008

First, thanks to everyone that attended the event last night and those that couldn’t, thank you for making the BSPUG a great place to come to network and sit a spell. We had 24 of our 25 RSVP’s show up went through 62 beers/glasses of wine and had a great time of networking overall. I know we said we would have all kinds of news at the Happy Hour last night, but the environment didn’t really seem conducive to really have any kind of announcements or verbal communication, but I guess that’s what you should expect at a pub. So we wanted to go over these Spug changing events as soon as possible so their still fresh in our minds.

First and foremost we are moving our location! We have been located at the emagination building for a year now and we wanted to try to find something more central to everyone and that would have room for the growth we have planned. The new location is at the UMBC Training Center, they have stepped up in more ways than one to make us feel welcome and get us into their facility. They are maintaining a level of involvement that we are just not used to, and we love it! Some of you have either worked at this location in the past or have done training here. Its right off of 95 just south of the 695 split so really we’re only about 5 mins more south on 95 than we were at our previous location. 99% of the cases of our members coming to the event after work will be opposite of heavy traffic so this is an added plus. There’s no vistas over the harbor but there is ample room for us to spread out and a few lab environments. You can check out the “location” link on the site for the new location. Our first meeting there will be on July 17th. The speaker will be Thomas Carpe on Dashboards and KPI’s. Which leads me to my next news item.

Free weekend labs. If we’re completely honest with you, we don’t think it’s right to charge anything to the users regardless. If done correctly and morally, training, events and meetings should always be free regardless of the size or location. You shouldn’t have to pay 200 bucks to get value out of a meeting. So very soon more details will follow with this, the basics at this point are going to be 2 tracks, a “developer” and “admin/architect” track. We’ll open it up to our members first then allow any others to partake. We don’t always get a chance to dig down specifically into details at our 1-1.5 hour meetings so this will be a good way to start. We’ll have trainers and users alike giving the labs. We’re really pumped about this and hopefully all of you will be able to spare a little bit more of.

The next bit of news I have for you is that we’ve decided to move our current site over to a SharePoint based site. This may take a little longer to do as we want it to maintain most of the look of the current site. We’ve had a hosting vendor step up and offer to host the site for us. It will be a externally facing WSS 3.0 site with most of the bells and whistles. We’ll give you more details on this as they get closer, right now, just keep that in mind. Lastly, we have a lot of really cool speaking opportunities coming up. We have been in contact with two very well known speakers in the SharePoint community. Hopefully in the next few meetings we’ll have some of that nailed down and finalized.

So there you have it, the exciting news around the next successful year of the Baltimore SharePoint Users Group. Thanks for hanging in there this far, we hope you all continue to get something out of the group. And remember, once again, this is a USERS group, feel free to start up any topics you wish to discuss, changes you’d like to see this is a democracy after all. We’ve already been given and are taking steps to change the way we structure our meeting agendas so you’re opinions don’t go un-heard!

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