I am excited to report that we had a great Tech Ed 2008! One of the highlights was co-sponsoring the “INETA Mini-Summit” the day prior to the official start of the show. For those of you not familiar with INETA here is their website:
http://www.ineta.org/default.aspx.
Essentially, INETA is responsible for working with .NET user groups all over the world. They spend time and money making sure that the user group members get the most out of their community through innovative speakers and events. I highly recommend that if you are not a member of your local user group you look into attending a meeting. FarPoint has compiled a list of user groups here:
The Mini-Summit brought together user group leaders from around the United States (about 50 total) and centered around large and small group discussions regarding how to make the .NET community better. During one of our large group discussions the fearless leader Rob Zelt posed a question to me regarding how a vendor looks to get involved with a user group. Never one to shy away from giving my opinion or the limelight, I shared with the group that our number one priority is NOT to just write a check. We want to be involved in supporting the .NET community through innovative ways. The question I posed back was how do we do that?
Although all the feedback was positive the best idea to come from this discussion was that FarPoint needs to work with our happy customers and see if they would be willing to present one of our products at their local user group meeting. As one user group president put it, “I would much rather have a representative of MY community present your product than have a person from your company come and give me a pitch”. Wow! What an idea!
Ironically within 5 minutes of this discussion, loyal customer Dan Mathson from the San Diego ASP.NET User Group sent an email to me and said he was going to be presenting his application made with our Spread for ASP.NET at his July meeting. Way to go Dan! I also heard from David Hockenberry, President of the Western New York .NET User Group, who said he may have a member willing to present as well. That would rock Dave! The question in this…..Are you so happy with the application you built that you would like to be a presenter at your user group? Would you like to be the next to step up? If so, please email me (
petew@fpoint.com) and I will work with you to attempt to make this happen and share with you some of the FarPoint perks you get for doing this! More to come!