Yesterday I caught up with Finula Crowe who is currently the Wave 2008 Community Launch Leed for Microsoft. She had some awesome news which is that she is rejoining DPE as Audience Marketing Manager. In Fin’s own words her “passion for Developer, Architect and extended Influencer communities is no secret”. There will of course be a transition period over the coming weeks but I expect we will start to see her influence in the way that DPE interacts with the community.
I’ve always been a big proponent of the way that Microsoft supports the community. From what I can see the communities surrounding .NET and more recently specific technologies such as SQL Server, Sharepoint and SBS are all very active. Whilst most of these are now organised and supported by the community itself, it is encouraging to see that Microsoft still believes that they are important.
As the number of user groups and other communities grow the engagement model for DPE has had to evolve. Unfortunately in recent times this has resulted in a number of groups feeling un-loved or under valued. Hopefully over the coming months we will start to see a new model emerge that will once again provide the much needed support for the user groups in a way that it can scale with the number of groups.
Don’t forget to “Ride the Wave” early next year with the launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and of course Visual Studio 2008.