As anyone that reads my blog will know, it has been neglected even more than usual over the past couple of months. I thought I’d share with you some of the things I’ve been up to during that time. Note: This is a bit of a long post.

Tech SummerFest

While sitting at the table early one morning in a Bed & Breakfast in one of the wine growing regions of South Australia, I came up with the idea of running a road show around the small capital cities to help promote a new formed company I set up with fellow MVP, Peter Ward. As a newly formed company with limited resources, much of the “leg work” for the road show was shared by Peter and I in addition to our existing work. This included marketing and promotion, brochure design, travel and venue booking, registration and payments, event web site, etc etc. The list goes on.

The events have been run now in Hobart (population ) and Adelaide (population ) and were both very successful in meeting our goals. While the number of attendees wasn’t large, those that did come along had only very good feedback about the event including;

• Very good, well presented, knowledgeable presenters
• Good. Labs well written with complete steps
• I found it very informative and entertaining. Definitely gave me some things to think over for work.
• Very informative – learnt lots

Following the success of the Tech SummerFest in Hobart and Adelaide, we have announced dates for another four events in different venues in Australia and New Zealand.

Venue	Week commencing
Brisbane	16th March 09
Hobart	23rd March 09	* Second event with new content
Perth	20th April 09
Auckland	18th May 09
Wellington	25th May 09

You can keep up to date with what’s happening with Tech SummerFest on the event web site at www.techsummerfest.com

 

New VSTS/TFS courses

I have also been busily writing a number of new courses focusing on Team System. These will be available either through a soon-to-be-published public schedule or on-demand for organizations wanting to run these in-house. The courses are being proofread for final updates now and the course outlines are with the graphic guy to make them look good.

VSTS ESSENTIALS SERIES

• VSTS Essentials (2 day)
• VSTS Essentials for Project Managers and Business Analysts (1 day)
• VSTS Essentials for Database Professionals (1 day)

ALM ESSENTIALS SERIES

• Moving to Scrum with VSTS (2 days)

WORKSHOP SERIES (On-site only)

• Developing custom reports from TFS (1 day)
• Build process enhancement workshop (1 day)

 

Presentations

Over the past month I have also been busy delivering presentations for a number of Australian user groups. Here’s a list of the session I have delivered.

• “A Lap Around VSTS2010” for Adelaide .NET Users Group
• “First look: VSTS2010” for QLD VSTS Users Group
• “A Lap Around VSTS2010” for QLD MSDN Users Group

During the last month I have also delivered 4 in-house presentations on VSTS 2008 & 2010 to various companies in Australia.

 

A new company

Over the last few months, I have been busy with Peter Ward setting up a new joint venture. This new company called Portal Synergy has been created to focus on providing professional services and training in the Microsoft SharePoint market. For anyone that has setup a new business with a limited number of resources, you’ll know that it takes an enormous amount of time to do it right. Between Peter and I we formed the company, registered the domain name, setup email and a web site, setup bank accounts, arranged credit card merchant services, arranged a booth at TechEd Australia, applied for trademarks, created marketing material, etc, etc. This extra workload has meant many things like my blogging and newsgroup activity have been less than usual over the last few months.

 

US Trips

While not specially limited to the last month or so, I have managed to make four trips to the US this year.

• Microsoft MVP Summit, Seattle, WA
• Microsoft Tech Ed Developers 2008, Orlando, FL
• Microsoft TechReady 7, Seattle, WA
• Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference, Los Angeles, CA

For 2009, I already have two trips to the US booked and paid for and another one in the planning. Look’s like my travel won’t be slowing down any time soon.