mr. happyfunboy goes to birmingham

that's right...yours truly was once again the cameo partner at a microsoft connections event.

held a week ago in trussville...your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy got to talk about how my firm implemented small business server for one of our customers.

all in all...a pretty good day.

first of all, the connections presenter, lara, was super-friendly and supportive...even if she kinda looks like she wants to kick me in the face right here.

lara did a superb job at presenting the customer-targeted material. one of our clients was in attendance, and remarked how much they got out of attending.

your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy wasn't sure how well our case study would go, since ms changed it to a q&a format, and you just never know how "canned" that kind of presentation will sound.

it seemed to come across very well tho. i was able to talk fairly in-depth about sbs and how it was the key to the overwhelming success of the project.

the difference in interest in us among attendees was like night and day after the case study. before then...very few people were all that interested in talking to us. afterwards, we were pretty busy chatting with folks at the breaks.

even better, the client who was presented in our case study was in attendance...and at lunch afterwards remarked how they had kinda forgotten about what bad shape their systems were in before they got our firm involved.

if there was anything i'd change about the connections format...it would be to have the case study earlier. not just because it would garner us more time after piquing the interest of attendees, but also because it would get sbs front and center much faster.

right after connections, ms held a ts2 event. stephen, the ts2 presenter, was also fantastic. he was very generous with his time, and let yours truly not only mention the smb/sbs user group i lead, but also talk briefly about sbs show to the attendees.

stephen also did a great job at continuing thoughout the event to generate interest in the social meeting our user group was holding later that evening.

even with some really bad weather in the area, we managed to draw 9 folks to the social meeting, 6 of whom were new & prospective members. lara and stephen joined us later, as did shawn, one of the gulf states sms&p pams.


thanks to the interest we were able to generate from those events, our user group added 15 new members last week, a 66% increase in the size of our fledgling group!

like i said before...a good day.