"We are Microsoft" Charity Challenge Weekend

sswienton — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:46:00 GMT

As we have mentioned at the last couple of FWDNUG meetings - the "We Are Microsoft" Charity Challenge Weekend is this upcoming week-end (January 18-20, 2008). This is an easy way to give back to the community by simply donating your coding skills to one of many charity projects. Please visit the official website for more details:

New Website, Membership Scrub, and RSVP Beta Tool

sswienton — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:32:00 GMT

The FWDNUG is proud to announce we have upgraded our website to Community Server! We are excited to see how the new functionality of our website will keep our members better informed as well as foster a greater sense of community. In the coming days and weeks we will continue to modify and enhance the website with additional features such as forums, photo galleries, job postings, study groups, etc... One feature we are offering immediately is blog space - any member can create a blog as soon as they have registered an account at the site. Already have a blog? Simply create a "mirrored" blog and you're existing blog posts will get copied to fwdnug.com. In the meantime - please bear with us as we remove the default Community Server content and replace it with FWDNUG targeted content.

Along with the new website - it was time for us to "scrub" our very "stale" membership database. Our membership list has grown considerably in the past 5 years, and understandably, many of our early members: no longer live in the area, have a working email address, or work with .NET technologies any more. We are contacting all existing members and requesting that they register with our new website to ensure that they continue to receive communications from the FWDNUG. This is a good opportunity to check and make sure you have fwdnug.com white listed in any spam filters (many of our members never receive our email communications due to spam filters). For a fixed period of time - we will send reminder emails to existing members who have not yet registered with our new website (based on previous email address). Please send an email to president@fwdnug.com if you no longer wish to be contacted by the FWDNUG or are registering with a new email address and we'll remove you from further mailings.

You should also receive an email from Codezone with an invitation to join their website. Codezone is a Microsoft run website that is "a place for developers to share and promote top-notch content and community resources." Codezone has created a new RSVP Event Tool and the FWDNUG is participating in the Beta. Our January meeting RSVP's will be handled via Codezone. Please make sure you sign up for an account at Codezone, if you don't already have one, and ensure that you are listed as a members of FWDNUG in the "User Group" tab or you will NOT be able to RSVP for our January meeting. If you do not receive an invitation email from Codezone - you can manually register at codezone.com and then add yourself to the FWDNUG using the password "fwdnug".

Special thanks to Rob Howard and the folks at Telligent for providing us with a license to Community Server.

Announcements

"We are Microsoft" Charity Challenge Weekend

New Website, Membership Scrub, and RSVP Beta Tool