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.