April is a special month for me in many ways.

Spring is around the corner already and it’s just mid March. I can’t wait for what April brings.

But for good of the community that makes this User Group, we’re doing one better. As we talked about Load Balancing Exchange Server 2010 in March meeting, we saw a lot of interest in KEMP Technologies offerings.

In April meeting, we decided to bring experts directly from KEMP Technologies so they can demonstrate deep technical details of how to load balance your Exchange 2010 servers and how to optimally configure KEMP load balancers to get the most out of it.

Attendees will have chance to ask questions and hear directly from experts who brings the cost effective load balancers to the masses. Enterprise class and full features load balancers are not luxury item anymore!

Come join us on April 12 for a relaxed evening with great food/beverages and giveaways to top off great networking with your peers in the Delaware valley and Philadelphia area and learn from experts.

You can sign up here: http://www.phillyexug.org/2011/03/16/april-monthly-meeting.

The event is open to everyone. We are a no fee, no restriction user group. While registration is not necessary, but highly encourages as it helps us organize meetings better.

We hope to see you there.

While we are always looking forward to monthly meeting, everyone's safety is important to us and due to anticipated snow storm, we are sorry to announce we are cancelling this month's meeting.

We will hold our meetin on February 8 instead. Look out for upcoming announcement for the same.

Thanks for your understanding.

We heard you loud and clear. Many have been asking what does Microsoft Online offer? What does it mean? How do I upgrade my skills for new type of computing that is gaining popularity rapidly.

Well, we are answering the questions by dedicating this meeting specifically to Microsoft Exchange Online offering. We will discuss details, answer questions and demo BPOS-S deployment live!

While, we are deviating from our standard meeting schedule (second Tuesday of the month), we are sure you will enjoy the content being covered and greatly benefit from it.

We highly recommend you attend in person if possible. You can RSVP here.

We meet at the Microsoft Malvern office (45 Liberty Blvd, Malvern, PA 19355). The Microsoft office is located on second floor.

When you arrive, please inform security that you are attending the User Group event and they will grant you access to the building.

You can also call Bhargav's cell (570) 709-9046 or Chad's cell (610) 973-7123 to gain access if needed.

Remote users can join using Live Meeting at URL http://bit.ly/phillyexugmonthly. If you do not have Live Meeting client installed, you can install it from http://bit.ly/livemeetingclient.

We look forward to your valued participation in this very exciting meeting.

The August meeting is coming up soon.

We will be discussing Exchange 2010 Reliability workbooks form the Microsoft Operations Framework. We will also discuss metrics. Metrics can be a powerful tool to show how sound your infrastructure is and can be used to forecast future growth or spot potential issues.

We are sure the content we cover has been providing you valuable insight into the features, management and operations of Exchange Server versions ranging from 2003 to 2010. Not to mention a great opportunity to network with your peers.

We continue to deliver on our promise and hope you will continue to support us by participating actively in the User Group meetings and forums.

If you haven’t registered already, please do so at http://www.phillyexug.org/2010/06/08/august-10-2010-user-group-meeting.

 
Registration isn’t required to attend in person or remotely, however it greatly help us to organize meetings more efficiently. Live meeting link (if you chose to attend remotely) is provided on the page linked above.

We look forward see you at upcoming meeting.

As many of you know, PowerShell is not only a powerful language that changes how you script and automate, it is essential when it comes to managing Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010 and if you are not familiar with PowerShell, you can't ignore it anymore.

Since PowerShell is such a key for Exchange Administrators, we would like to invite Ed Wilson (The Scripting Guy) to share best practices with us in July 13th session.

This is absolutely amazing opportunity for the User Group members but before we extend our invite to Ed we want to make sure we will have good participation as after all not making best of the session like Ed's is terrible thing to do.

We have opened a poll to guage your interest in the session and we invite you to please take the poll or reply to us using contact form so we can decide in coming weeks if Ed should be invited to share valuable insight on PowerShell with us in July 13th meeting.

We look forward to your valuable participation.

Since we launched our user group in November, out first home -  www.ehlougphila.com used to serve us for our communications needs but was designed just before launch with lack of vision and time.

We have been working on vision and new design ever since. The goals we discussed in January meetings were to create a site that is flexible and user friendly. We wanted the site to be able to provide:

• Switch to reliable hosting company
• Dynamically updated content that is relevant to the group
• Provide a platform where members can come together and discuss their concerns/issues and help each other out
• Provide users with single portal to access events and allow signups
• Use existing IDs for signups – LiveID or OpenID

Based on the vision and functionality/features we discussed, we introduce you to the new identity of out user group – http://www.phillyexug.org.

Here’s what we have done to make the portal more useful and we will be looking to our members – you – to make it even better by incorporating your feedback in improving it further.

• Moved to different, more reliable hosting company
• Live ID signups – allows members to maintain their existing identity and reduces duplication be requiring new sign up and creating new username and password.
• Polls – Allows us to collect vital information in making decisions to make user group better.
• Forums – Allows user group members to collaborate and build a community based learning and support system.
• Feed Aggregation – Allows us to fetch relevant information from blogs and provide group members single click access to it.
• Syndication – With RSS feeds, members can keep up to date with user group activity using their favorite syndication reader.

Effective immediately, old site will forward to new site. We realize the content from old site is not available to new site just yet and we will be working on migrating relevant content to the new site in coming week. We appreciate your understanding.

Our hope is that the new name along with new site will provide use with a portal we all can build our community upon. We welcome your comments.