Another update on user group & website activities
It's been a while since I've blogged, so here's an update on a few things that have been going on with the site lately.
Dec / Jan saw no meetings for the Melbourne user group but we're soon kicking off the 2005 meetings with an overview of SQL 2005 Business Intelligence features by Peter Myers on Feb 15th.
In the break, I've been quite busy making plans to run a SQL Server conference in Australia in approximately 12 months. I've always felt it's a shame that we have to travel around the globe to see conference material such as PASS US / Europe so I'm very keen to have something like that over here. I've been lining up speakers, venues, catering, sponsors, staging & theming. Man, there's a lot to organising these events! More on this soon..
WebCentral have also organised sponsorship of an email service to host our sqlserver.org.au email addresses over the break. This should help us solve problems with some of our email based processes such as meeting invitations, reminders, site signups etc. These processes previously suffered because we spoofed hotmail accounts when sending mail & many of your mail servers were rejecting the emails as spam. So hopefully more of our emails will reach you with less fuss now. WebCentral were already sponsoring us with a dedicated hosted server which is a very valuable sponsorship on its own, so thanks a lot for the extra email sponsorship! (c:
I met with a few of the other user group organisers in Sydney last monday to discuss website features & content. Unfortunately we didn't discuss features & content much but had a long discussion about changing our website framework from the current Hurricane (www.projecthurricane.com) framework to DotNetNuke instead. Anyway, we're evaluating DNN over the next month & we'll see how this goes.