Meeting the formidable Microsoft User Group Leaders

“Microsoft community drives Microsoft products” – a statement that would make you roll with laughter, isn’t it? it did for me too till i attended the User Group Leads meet organised by Microsoft. it is here that i witnessed the seriousness with which the user group community goes about its job (i had earlier tweeted about this).ugleads

User Groups is the life blood of the Microsoft communities (other community avenues include blogs, forums, webcasts and events) in India…  there are more than 40,000 known users spread across India in numerous professional user groups in various cities (there are another equal nos. in student user groups)… the bangalore user group can alone boast of more than 10,000 users (truly amazing)..  with more than 71 user group sessions in the last year alone, u can’t be far away from one happening in any large city of the country.

ugdiscussion The user group leads were a very attentive and enthusiastic bunch who met the MS folks with great deal of passion and feedback. the commitment from MS folks was more than evident with around 10 MS employees present to engage with the community leaders. Not only were the user group leads eager to provide feedback, they also spent significant time exchanging notes and sharing their vision of the user groups with each other.

The focus wasn’t only on the established user groups like in Mumbai but also on the emerging ones e.g. in Jaipur. the most exciting moment was the User Group award time:

ugaward the BEST Developer User Group for the country was found to be the Bangalore User Group. the BEST Networking Professionals User Group was the Bangalore IT Pro User Group. Amongst the new or emerging user groups in the country, Chennai .NET User Group was adjusted as the best and Hyderabad Techies was the choice in the IT Pro UG section.

If you want to enhance/ share your knowledge with the community, head over to http://www.microsoft.com/india/communities/usergroups/default.aspx to find the user group in your city and join the same. Joining any MS User Group anywhere in the country is absolutely FREE. The quality of speakers in the user groups is surprisingly high with most being MVPs, Microsoft Employees and other reputed speakers.

If you know of an active MS community that is not mentioned in the list above, please leave a comment here and I will take the responsibility of getting it listed

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi, m Vishal Gupta (Jaipur UG), where are other pics..
still nice blog.
September 12, 2008 at 8:46:00 AM GMT+5:30
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