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To help us understand your likes and dislikes regarding The VOICE, please take a few minutes to complete this month's survey by clicking here.
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© 2007 The VOICE is published by Culminis, Inc. 6729 Fairview Road, Suite E, Charlotte, NC 28210. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited.
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Welcome to the Culminis publication The VOICE . The VOICE provides relevant data to all members of the global IT Professional community. It conveys gathered metrics, produces a report on the state of the community, and encourages increased and consistent communication between solution providers and user group members.
Members of the Community, including solution providers, have the opportunity to express their opinions and concerns and to receive validation through peer responses. Solution providers have the opportunity to better understand their Community, the issues the Community faces, and to respond to these issues.
Please feel free to make any suggestions by writing to us at thevoice@culminis.com. |
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Congratulations to this month's survey winners listed below:
This month we had a total of 680 responses. NORAM is not listed because they only had one User Group qualify and that group had already won this quarter.
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Qualifying Group |
Region |
Entries |
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InfraMS-InfraRio(InfraRio) - LATAM |
Brazil |
32 |
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PLSSUG Katowice(PLSSUG KCE) - EMEA |
EMEA |
41 |
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ITLeaders(ITLEADERS) - LATAM |
LATAM |
19 |
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MicroTec(MICROTEC) - APAC |
APAC |
10 |
Culminis Global ALLIANCE Membership Numbers 5/9/2008.
This month's survey will relate to UGSS (User Group Support Services)
The Culminis monthly survey link will now be posted in The VOICE. This survey is open to all Culminis members. Please select the link in the chart below for your Region. If you do not know your Region, the countries of each are listed for your convenience.
As always, names and e-mail information will not be collected. This month's survey will close on May 31, 2008.
Culminis is pleased to offer a prize to a User Group for responding to our monthly survey. In order to encourage participation from the entire Culminis population, a $250 gift certificate or equivalent will be awarded, from a random drawing, to one qualifying user group from each region (North America, Brazil, APAC, EMEA and LATAM). For every response Culminis receives from a group (minimum 10 to qualify for drawing), the user group will receive one entry in the drawing. The more members a group has that take the survey, the more entries into the drawing for their group.
Example: when a user group reaches the minimum of 10 responses, they have 10 chances in the drawing. For each survey response after the minimum 10 they receive one more chance in the drawing. Therefore 11 member responses would receive 11 chances and so forth.
The leader of the selected winning User Group will be notified as soon as possible after the drawing and arrangements will be made for receipt of the prize. The Culminis rewards policy states that any reward offered must be claimed within 30 days of the notice of receipt of the award. All rewards that are not claimed within these 30 days will be forfeited and no longer available. The definition of claimed is that we have received a valid means of payment and have initiated the payment process within the 30 days.
CONTEST RULES:
- User Group must be a member of Culminis
- Minimum of 10 responses from a user group to qualify for the random drawing
- Five $250 prizes will be awarded, one for each of the qualifying Regions: (North America, Brazil, APAC, LATAM and EMEA)
- Prize must be claimed within 30 days of notification
- Only one survey response per member is permitted
- The prize should be used to encourage user group participation
- Contest and survey results will be posted in the next issue of The VOICE
LIST OF COUNTRIES BY REGION
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EMEA
Europe,
Middle East, Africa
English
Take Survey |
APAC
Asia/Pacific
English
Take Survey |
NORAM
North America
English
Take Survey |
LATAM
Latin America
Spanish
Take Survey |
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Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahrain
Belgium
Cameroon
Croatia
Cyprus
Denmark
Egypt
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Kuwait
Macedonia, Former Yugoslav
Malta
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom |
Australia
Bangladesh
China
India
Indonesia
Japan
Korea
Korea, South
Malaysia
Nepal
New Zealand
Pakistan
Philippines
Singapore
Sri Lanka
Taiwan
JAPAN
Japanese
Take Survey
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Canada
United States |
Argentina
Bolivia
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Mexico
Panama
Paraguay
Peru
Puerto Rico
Uruguay
Venezuela
BRAZIL
Portuguese
Take Survey |
By: Russell Clements
DFW SBS User Group
Culminis is always eager to hear what User Group leaders want and need from us. This is a central theme of many of our surveys and articles. We urge all leaders to send us ideas and specific thoughts and Russell Clements sent us this thoughtful article. Please add comments and tell us all if you agree.
In large part, I think the single biggest thing that our members get is the ability to keep abreast of some of the changing nature of the technology environment as it pertains to these IT professionals in our local geographic area in a low cost (time and money) mechanism that is comfortable and convenient.
Secondarily, these members get the opportunity to interface with other IT professionals who also serve similar client bases in a similar geography. This means that when they ask questions, there's a fairly large chance that the person dealing with the issue will have resolved it and can provide information that is relevant to the question. Again, this is in a format that is comfortable, convenient and low-cost.
Part of the feedback I heard from Culminis is that there is little participation in Culminis' The Voice. I'm not surprised by this. I think I've read every issue, but I don't think I've ever left a comment. This could be for a couple of reasons: 1) I thought the article summarized the concept fairly well and I don't know what my opinion on the subject at hand would add to the discussion. 2) If it is something that I could add to the discussion on, unless there will be some fairly immediate and direct reward for writing, I could be reading other blogs, responding to emails or otherwise participating in community, family or business or other areas that I'm passionate about. It's not that I don't read it, or don't even care; it's just that I really can't be involved in everything. There are some times I don't get around to reading The Voice until it's been out for a month and I get the email about the next issue. Sometimes I get so many emails from clients, potential clients, group members, or family that I just have to mark a bunch of stuff read and keep going. Once you get behind, it's almost impossible to catch up.
Regarding the lack of feedback, I can also say that outside of the participation in the actual meetings of our group, that there are a fairly small number of people who contribute questions and answers to our small forum. However, from questions from group members at the physical meetings, I can see that there are a lot of people reading the posts, even if they don't respond. It seems that even in that context, the same rules of "immediate, direct reward" come into play. The biggest exception to this rule is someone who gets stuck. Then they are more than willing to reach out to the group. I'll bet that 95% of first postings are a request for information.
WISHLIST FOR CULMINIS.COM
I wanted to say too, that there are several "technologies" that I'd love to see implemented.
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I'd like to see presence indicators and the ability to tie into MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. I don't know how viable this would be, but I think it would be cool. I'd especially love to have this functionality on the sites that groups have now.
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I am wanting to move our Yahoo group to the Sharepoint Site. I'll be working on that in the coming weeks, but I'd like to see the ability for members to provide feedback on the value of a posting. I'd like to track reads, track questions, track responses. Before we got the site from Culminis at WSS v3, I was looking at moving our group over to my server. One of the challenges I faced was that I only had 25 CALs. I wanted to do a search of the yahoo group and find out who the top 25 posters were. There was not a way to do that. This kind of ties in to the recognition thing that we discussed about having an award that I can give to our members for participation. I'd like to be able to give one for top contributions, top attendees, top inviters… things like that.
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I'd like to see that MOSS gets rolled out. I'd like to leverage audiences for technological interests like Exchange. Also for geographies.
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I'd like to see Culminis subscribe to every MVP blog and make them searchable. This may be a lot bigger request, but I'd also like to be able to have a web part where I could put a check mark by some of the blogs and have them aggregated on a single page. For example, I'd like to have a top navigation tab that would say SBS MVPs and to be able to click on it and get an aggregated listing of the posts from SBS MVPs. I'd like to be able to do the same thing for Exchange. It would be even more functional if members could mark posts as being newsworthy and highlight them.
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How about a blog for just Solution Providers Network. Let me know who signs up, what they'll offer our group, how to get in touch with them and the involvement with other UGs.
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Expand the functionality of the locator. Let me see INETA and PASS groups and where they meet geographically. For groups that meet regularly, give me a chance to subscribe to their meetings via an Ical item. How about a vcard with the contact and meeting location information for the group? I know, this could be easily exploited (snatched by marketers), but that's the down side of being a publically advertised group.
NOTE FROM CULMINIS: Please add a comment on what you would like to see added to this WISHLIST!
By Mohamed N. El-Guindy, PhD, MBCS
When we're talking about IT user groups, we normally talk about technical issues, professionalism and many other things but one of the most important things to talk about is the publicity of the user group. How the world will hear your voice? As a leader for ASK-PC the largest IT group in Middle East in Arabic language, I faced many problems at the beginning. The idea was strange to our community to offer free IT troubleshooting services and providing answers to everyday's challenge from home users up to IT staff. Funding was always problem to operate the group and pay for many expenses but we found that if we waited for someone to come to us and help, nothing will be done! We decided to start and work hard to let everyone knows about us. I'll walk through our progress as I know it is different procedures for every group leader and will vary in each country.
In Middle East, all are looking for new technology and more users are coming online everyday according to Internet World Stats. We worked toward reaching online users where they go search for their daily IT problems and answers and we invited many users online to join our online group to benefit from our free services like Technical support and troubleshooting for most Microsoft products including the latest Windows Server 2008. People are always looking for encourage, so we started many services which will reward each member depending on his contribution to the group in the form of adding great technical topics, answering IT questions or writing technical IT paper in Arabic. We offered free Experience certification which all members can work toward getting this certification free of charge and become member of the experts’ team. Such activity made our group well-known in Middle East and people start talking about the activity and if people start taking, you’ll know that you’re on the right track as you picked up someone to talk about you!
Then we started to think of new services that can bring much attention to the group and we came up with ASK PC Online TV. The TV idea which still young but it offers much attention and publicity for the group. We offer free training sessions in the form of little tips because streaming large files is big problem in Middle East and thanks to Culminis as we’ve now a Microsoft LiveMeeting account which will help a lot more. The Idea of online TV beside other services that offered for free to all Middle East users made our group on the spot. Many newspapers in the region started to talk about the group and how we served the Arab community by offering those services. Media is looking always for something hot and fresh to talk about and it doesn’t matter if you’ve relation with them or not but they’ll come to you if have something deserve! So we learned the lesson, always offer new ideas to help others and don’t think for profit. We all know that nothing is completely FREE but really thinking of profit from day one might make the whole idea fails especially when you’re making something as volunteers. In addition to the new ideas, it’s very important to add your group to most search engines online, for example all our traffic is coming from Google as it has large base in Middle East. We’re all proud of our group and I always say that It’s not my own group, this group is made up of people who worked hard to make it big thing In Middle East, our members, our experts and our partners for sure like Culminis and Microsoft.
In this great moment, I would love to share with you our latest good news in the media:
Alseyassah, one of the largest Kuwaiti Journals:
http://www.alseyassah.com/PDF/08/MAR/18/50.pdf
ASK-PC is featured in many local and national newspapers and magazines across the Middle East and received certifications from Governments thanking ASK-PC for helping many online Arabic Users in the Middle East for solving their IT problems and the latest was from Ministry of Human Resources in Iraq. I hope the success continues to support our community members as long as we can.
The Network Professionals Association along with many of its chapters are members of Culminis. The NPA administers the Certified Network Professional® (CNP) international designation program and has recently presented their 2008 Awards for Professionalism.
Best Networking Professional Career Achievement Award:
Debra Rowe - Knowledge Management Lead for the Operations Group, Information Technology Directorate, Air Traffic Organization of the Federal Aviation Administration, West Columbia, South Carolina
This award honors Debra Rowe who has demonstrated years of the highest ideals of the network computing professional. Debra serves as a role model in the network computing community and may be considered by peers as an industry luminary.
Debra is a Certified Network Professional, and manages all ATO IT infrastructure operations including all networking infrastructure and support for non-NAS in an area from Richmond, Virginia, through St. Simons, Georgia, and to the west through Tri-Cities, Tennessee. The scope of responsibilities include, but are not limited to, enterprise IT directory services, desktop support, asset management for hardware/software, helpdesk support, network management, technology refresh, procurement of hardware/software/related consumables, and information security management providing Computer Customer Service to nearly 1,000 FAA and contract employees. This has been her primary responsibilities since 1997 as the Service IT Lead (SAIL).
Best Mentor Award:
Boris Jocoy - President, Tech Brainy Consulting, Aliso Viejo, California
This award honors Boris Jocoy who has made the most effective combination of the ideals of professionalism and the accomplished mentor.
A willing speaker and enthusiastic advocate of certification, he willingly shares his wide-ranging technical competencies with others. His leadership and wide-ranging computer knowledge command respect. Despite a schedule that sends him all over the southland, he is an evangelist for computer professionals within networking groups. Boris regularly speaks at events on subjects such as technology professional ethics, value of certification, security, Microsoft Exchange, servers, and much more. He also finds the time to support networking professionals within the NPA itself.
He writes articles for NPA publications, regularly volunteers time to man the NPA booth at Microsoft training events and leads fellow NPA-OC members by example, displaying proper professional ethics at meetings and through his daily business dealings. His value of education, certifications and outstanding integrity are his hallmarks, thoroughly in line with the values of the NPA.
Professional Excellence and Innovation Award: Corporate Fortune X:
Michael Morris - Technical Team Lead and Network Architect – IT Communications Engineering, NetApp, RTP, North Carolina
This award honors Michael Morris who has made the most effective combination of the ideals of professionalism and the innovative use of networking technology and/or products for a particular networking project.
With a background in enterprise WANs working with telcos, and developing large-scale routing designs, Michael has worked on networks at government and corporate organizations, including networks at two Fortune 10 companies. In his current role, he leads large-scale IT projects, develops and maintains communications architectural standards, and leads a global team of 10 engineers. Michael is a CCIE and has 11 years experience in networking and communications, including four years as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army.
He lead the team setting the groundwork for network standards and network design templates that could be used to build a new network at NetApp, while concurrently beginning the procurement process for a new global network based on MPLS IP VPNs. Michael designed the global routing for the new network, based on an incredibly scalable and elegant BGP and OSPF design
Professional Excellence and Innovation Award: Government:
James E. Atkinson - Budget Analyst, Special Operations Command Europe, Stuttgart, Germany
This award honors James Atkinson who has made the most effective combination of the ideals of professionalism and the innovative use of networking technology and/or products for a particular networking project
Originally from Houston, TX, James is a retired US Navy Chief Petty Officer (submarines) currently working as a Budget Analyst in Stuttgart, Germany at Special Operations Command Europe. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional and Certified Defense Financial Manager, holds an MSc International Management which earned him the unique Dutch academic honorific "doctorandus"(drs), an MBA, and an MSc Computer Information Systems, and he is currently working towards a Doctor of Business Administration (DBA
James independently developed a secure network, automated Special Funding Guide for use by the Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR), Headquarters European Command (EUCOM), Headquarters Africa Command (AFRICOM), NATO Special Operations Coordination Centre (NSCC), Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA), and other commands in the Special Operations Community to identify, track, submit, and obtain special funding from a variety of sources to support missions and exercises. The Special Funding Program guide was initially developed in hard copy PowerPoint slides, but he successfully developed an automated, interactive system for posting, maintaining, and updating special funding criteria on the SOCEUR SharePoint Portal. The automated system on the European Command network includes interactive links with funding title, description, narrative of authorized uses, links to legislation and regulations and other references, source of funding, and supporting information. The Special Funding Guide has greatly increased the speed and accuracy of providing the Commander with funding information and is now used as the primary source for researching and validating appropriate uses of funding. James received recognition for excellence as runner-up, 2007 United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), Financial Management Awards Program, Outstanding Contributions in Automation & Technology Award, and nomination by USSOCOM for the 2007 US Department of Defense Financial Management Awards Program, Outstanding Contributions in Automation & Technology Award
Professional Excellence and Innovation Award: Education:
Bill Maynard - CIO/COO, NetCom America, Carlsbad, California
This award honors Bill Maynard who has made the most effective combination of the ideals of professionalism and the innovative use of networking technology and/or products for a particular networking project.
In his leadership role at NetCom he is responsible for the corporate infrastructure and California operation. Bill chairs the technology committee for the San Diego Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and is a co-chair of the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce technology committee. Bill has a BS degree and MBA.
Bill took a new private 7-12 grade school's technology from blank paper to implementation in approximately 8 months, including plans to grow from 150 students to 600 in four years. He was responsible for the design approval, coordination and management of the complete project, encompassing everything from fiber optic networks to battery backups. The school opened as planned and all the technologies implemented were fully functional. Through the careful selection of the technologies and technology partners the school will be able to scale their solutions to the mature state without replacing any of the technologies that were implemented
Top of the Mark — Volunteer Award:
Adnan Rafik - Principal Consultant, IT Selekt Consulting and Solutions, United Arab Emirates (Dubai)
This award honors Adnan Rafik who has combined the most effective ideals of professionalism and is a notable example of the best in giving back through selfless effort.
As a passionate IT Professional, Adnan loves to promote IT Professionalism around the region. He founded Techies, UAE IT Pros technical community and has grown the group to 350 registered members which attend regular meetings.
Adnan's journey started back in 2004 when he began writing his blog and gradually started participating in online forums. In the same year he heard about Culminis and got in touch with his Culminis Regional Lead to learn about all the programs available through Culminis, and how he could contribute to the community to promote IT. His user group, Techies, officially joined Culminis in January of 2006. Techies participated in the very first Microsoft Office 2007 roadshow in Dubai where he recruited more than 120 IT Professionals, which was beyond his expectations.
In the same year Techies also participated in the Microsoft Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 roadshows organized by Windows ITPro Magazine and this time more than 150 people were recruited to join Techies.
NFR software provided by Culminis and worth approx $4,000 USD was given away. These events gave Techies a strong push and it started growing. Followings these two big events there were many challenges, such as how-to keep the group engaged with the activities, organize the regular meetings, find speakers, sharing knowledge etc. For these first few events Adnan did everything himself such as designing the membership forms, printing the forms, publishing the website, updating the user database, and contacting the users after the events. All these things look simple but take a lot of time.
In order to keep the user group interactive he started publishing a newsletter regularly. He did a number of surveys to make the user group better serve the community. He did publish the interviews of David Sanders Culminis CEO and Sean O' Driscoll in the newsletter; these interviews were originally conducted by Stephen Ibaraki and officially allowed him to publish those interviews in the NPA newsletter.
For all these efforts, Adnan has been given the opportunity to take the responsibility of Culminis CLV (Country Lead Volunteer) for the UAE, where he represents Culminis and reports about the activities in the region. TECHIES website www.techiesonly.com was given the best website (Bronze Award) in the ICT category by the UAE Web Awards in the year 2007. This website was designed and maintained by Adnan since the beginning.
At the time of this writing, Adnan is very busy in the SharePoint Conference Dubai organized by Microsoft. According to Adnan, this is best event ever to happen in Dubai. Though it was a paid event, more than 1000 people attended this event because people are eager to learn about Sharepoint.
By: Marco Shaw
Running a User Group via Live Meeting
Why?
Seeing as Windows PowerShell was so new, and I live in a smaller town in Eastern Canada, I didn't think I would have an opportunity to actually start a regular local user group. So I started off looking for a bigger pool of professionals and try to start a Canadian user group (similar to UK UG PS).
I'm not sure when it hit me to create a virtual PowerShell group, but it is likely after I started having various discussions with Rodney Buike from Microsoft.
With the help of Rodney, I have Live Meeting server access and could hold my first meeting. Since that first meeting, I was able to find access to a Live Meeting server because I had just received a MVP award, and had made some new contacts.
The story so far
I had my first meeting late in 2007. I decided to have my first meeting at noon EST to try that out. My main reason for doing something at that time was that I had a presenter from The Netherlands. The attendance for that meeting peaked at roughly that meeting. Currently, I have had three more meetings since, and am working on others. The attendance has dropped a bit, but I have also been very busy, and haven't put as much effort into marketing my meetings. Besides, the proceedings are available for anyone to download and view at their own convenience.
Demographic
My meetings so far have been mostly an 85-15 mix: 85% from North America and 15% other. One of the features of Live Meeting is being able to create a quick voting page and have participants indicate what continent they are from.
Numbers
I had 50 or so at meetings #1 and #2, then about 25 at #3, then just 10 at #4. I don't have stats on offline viewing of the videos.
How the sessions work
Typically, I either have my sessions at noon EST or 8PM EST. The reason basically is to open up the possibilities of who can attend and present at the live sessions. So, for the most part, I believe other one of these sessions is usually acceptable to anyone in North America, and when I have someone from another continent talk, then I likely try to set up a noon EST session so it isn't too late in Europe, for example.
I usually start off with a 10 minute introduction presenting the agenda, sponsors, and running a few polls to get some general information about who is attending (continent, experience with PowerShell). Then each speaker is allocated about 20-30 minutes each to present. I'll usually invite 2 to 3 speakers for one meeting.
Previously, I kind of had the intention of organizing the sessions like this: Microsoft invitee, vendor invitee, general invitee. So for each session, I would try to invite a Microsoft employee to present, have a 3rd party vendor present, and then some people from the community in general.
The presentations go for a total of 1-2 hours.
Finally, I close off the last 10 minutes talking tentatively about the next session: when, presenters, etc. I usually run two closing polls: sessions too long or short?, will you attend the next session?. Usually the results from those 2 polls are positive.
Presenters
The majority of my presenters have been from North America, but I have also had a presenter from Russian, and The Netherlands, as I previously mentioned. One of my upcoming presenters is from Israel.
Of my four sessions so far, I've had a mixture of about five general presentations, four vendor related presentations, and two Microsoft employees. Of the general sessions, all the presenters were at the time, or currently are, Microsoft MVPs.
Marketing
Here might lay one of my problems. I don't have any set way to get the word out about my user group. Usually, at least one week before, I'll post something on my blog, a few mailings lists that are PowerShell related, and on the PowerShell newsgroup. Also, I'll put on a notice on www.powershellcommunity.org.
I could definitely put some more thought into getting possibly a domain name and some web space of my own for my user group information.
Level of attendees
For the most part all of my sessions so far have been intermediate to advanced. I'm not currently planning any introduction sessions, and besides, giving a 20-30 minute introduction session on something doesn't seem like the most efficient use of anyone's time. Furthermore, for the most part, people who have come to my session are already pretty experienced with PowerShell and have thus managed to find out about my user group.
Using Live Meeting
In a future posting, I'll talk more about what I like about Live Meeting.
Things that can go wrong
The biggest outstanding problem I still have is occasionally not taking myself off of mute and talking away, while nobody can hear me. With each session, I try to be more and more conscious as to whether I'm on mute or not.
Session is recorded. Now what?
The process to get Live Meeting to record is simple, and also getting the recorded session to your local computer is easy also. Most of my raw, recorded sessions have been about 10MB in size which is pretty good. Now, that's raw... What if you want to start cutting/editing out parts, then the fun begins. The process to get from a Live Meeting recording to an edited WMV format is tough from my experiences. I'll cover the process in a future posting. For now, I'll just say that an edited video turns out to be about ten times bigger using my method.
For the time being, here are all the recorded sessions from my previous meetings:
#1: http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com/2007/10/windows-powershell-virtual-user-group.html
#2: http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com/2007/12/windows-powershell-virtual-user-group-2.html
#3: http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com/2008/02/windows-powershell-virtual-user-group-3.html
#4: http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com/2008/02/windows-powershell-virtual-user-group_21.html
The videos are uploaded to my free 5GB SkyDrive account for your viewing pleasure. Because of the apparent limit with maximum file sizes, each file is usually a maximum of 25MB, so I have had to split individual sessions into 2, somet | | | | | |