TechEd '04: Day 0, part 0.
I'm attending the INETA User Group Leader summit today. Lots of interesting
folks here. Some I know, most I look forward to getting to know. There are now
over 200,000 users involved in the INETA collection of User Groups. Very cool
video introduction to INETA video was presented. Well produced.
- First discussion and presentation was about INETA Academic, given by
Jason Beres. Industry Academic Alliance will be kicked off. It's a program
to match professionals to student user groups. Need to get the details from
Andrew Flick about this.
- Next speaker was Devin Raeder talked about INETA's Infrastructure. A
redesign of the INETA website was covered. Looks much better.
- Devin was followed by Scott Bellware about the speakers committee. Much
fun poked at Missouri and Texas. Ted Neward is now an INETA speaker. The
Speakers will now be vendor sponsored. There will now a TOS between the UG
and INETA as well. Talked about the Regional Speaker program to launch in Q3
2004.
- Julie Lerman talked about the North American User Group Relations
Committee.
- Talk from Marketing group. Interesting things in the work.
- Presenter from Microsoft about Public Policy. Implied an
interesting point: does increased legal and political involvement (like the
anti-trust decision against Microsoft) actually hurt innovation. Of course
it does, but that's not the point. Its just like trying to regulate Art.
We've seen how well that works. He's also right, the technologists need to
get more politically involved.
- Following that was a vendor session: First up was DataDirect which
talked about their Data Provider stack (.Connect.) They were followed by
Infragistics who talked about offerings. This allowed by a talk from IVis
and their .NET Boost Product. This looks very interesting and I'm going to
have to check this out in depth later. The last presentation was VIA.
- Our contacts from Redmond, Catherine Vegher (cvegher) Heidi Dill (heidid)
and Amy Sorokas Mougeotte (amymose) talking about how make good use of
Microsoft's sponsorship of community events. They need lots of
participation. Bernard Wong talked MSDN events. Bernard demoed a new DVD
that should be going out with new attendee bags. Looks very neat.
- The user group relationship committee talked for while.
- Took lunch to venture over to the convention center to register. Process
was clean and easy. The facility is huge but nice. We get backpack this
year. I'll try to provide a break down of that later. But I missed the first
presentation which seemed to be about working with academics. Made it back
in time to hear more about Culminis. I'm very interested in this, but the
barriers to entry are too high
- Sara Faaz talked to us about the relationships between the UG and
Vendors. She offered 10 tips for success
- Professionalism: Make the vendor feel like your UG is a business
- Be flexible and take what you get. Building your relationship
- Supporting documentation: Have a sheet that demonstrates the facts
(membership and demographics)
- Explain the benefits of sponsorship. Try to demonstrate the ROI.
- Demonstrate that you are interested in a long term relationship and that
its mutual beneficial
- Provide options for the types of sponsorship you are looking for.
- Use the "help me help you" approach
- Make sure to have measurement of the results.
- The content owner (shawnmore) for MSDN got a good zinger in "I we know
MSDN search sucks." They get it. They are working on it.