SQLSaturday #21 in Orlando Announced

We ran into some delays getting the venue locked in, but it’s finally done, SQLSaturday #21 will be October 17, 2009 at Seminole Community College. It’s our third event in Orlando and we’re looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends! Registration and call for speakers is now open.

SQLSaturday #27 in Portland, OR Announced for May 2010

I now it’s a really early announcement, but SQLSaturday #27 will be in Portland on May 22, 2010, and makes this one interesting is it will be co-located with the Portland Code Camp. SQL MVP Arnie Rowland is one of the key leaders of this effort and we had some good conversations about how to put the two events together in a way that doesn’t take anything away from either.

I hesitate to call it easy, but because Arnie is involved in both events that definitely simplifies the coordination compared to having two leaders (though we should try that soon too). I never seem to make it to the West coast when the weather is good, Portland in May…might be a nice trip!

Possible SQLSaturday in Tallahassee on Sep 5, 2009

Steve Lane and team from Tallahassee are hosting their annual Code Camp on Sep 5, 2009, and have asked if we could also run a SQLSaturday at the same time, probably a 1-2 track event. There is not currently a SQL user group in Tallahassee which makes it an interesting opportunity for PASS as well. The challenge – or opportunity – is that that Sep 5th falls on Labor Day weekend. That could present an interesting way to mix vacation and work!

So, consider this to be an almost call for speakers – if you’re a SQL person and would be willing to present 1-2 sessions on the 5th drop me an email by August 1st. I’m sure Steve will try to squeeze in as many presentations as possible, the only question is whether we can build enough interest to run a solid SQLSaturday or not.

SQLSaturday #26 in Redmond Announced

We’re pleased to announce a West Coast SQLSaturday. SQLSaturday #26 will be held October 3rd in Redmond, run by the all star team of Greg Larsen, Ron Talmadge, Russ Nesbitt, Lori Wulfgangse, and Haining Liu. They’ve got four room reserved, plenty of room for a big event.

Registration and call for speakers is now open!

SQLSaturday #24 & #25 Announced

Stuart Ainsworth has just opened up two events in Gainesville, GA on October 9th and 10th. October 9th is a Friday of course, but we’re flexible about such things. Any day of the week is Saturday when you’re spending time learning SQL Server! Seriously though, the event on the 9th is focused on college students and the one on the 10th will be a traditional SQLSaturday with an emphasis on spatial techniques.

Registration and the call for speakers for both events is now open. Admittance is free and there is a $10 fee to cover lunch. Please consider volunteering if you’re in the area, it takes a lot of work to do one event, doing two in a row – Stuart is going to be tired by Saturday night!

SQLSaturday Admin Tool Updates

Though few see it, we also maintain a full set of admin tools for the event lead. It’s grown here and there as we had time, but we’ve definitely had times where the limitations hurt the ability of the event to make real time changes – and in turn added to the overhead of hosting the events as we had to make the changes for them.

We tried to go back and answer requests for changes, plus we added a few features from the wish list – with a goal of reducing the amount of effort for everyone involved. Here’s a short list of the changes:

• Added a true menu so we could organize functionality, before it was just a big set of links on the page!
• Added the ability to post event news to the front page in blogish format. The nice part is that users can see the last 5 or so posts in chronological order.
• We have a fairly nice system for sending messages to various subsets of interested parties, but it’s always been tedious to include a copy of the full schedule or sessions submitted to date, so we fixed that and added items to the menu to paste in all of the commonly used URL’s plus things like the call for speakers end date and the current registration count
• Many event leaders are either reluctant to message or not good at it, so we’ve drafted 20 messages that can be used as is, or modified as needed. Event announcements, event reminders, reminders to speakers to upload files, and more. We load the messages into each event, they can delete them if not wanted or use them as templates.
• We set up a list of recurring sponsors and we automatically copy that into ‘Sponsor Leads’ for each event, giving the event leader a resource they can use get sponsors for the event. They can add their own leads as well.
• We also added a simple way to add marketing contacts. A good example would be other area users groups, prominent people in the area, even recruiters that will forward on messages about the event.
• Event leads can now edit session details and information about registrations
• We reworked our first try at PayPal integration and extended it to the sponsor sign up. When sponsors register we automatically send them an invoice with the payment link, when they pay we  post it back showing the event lead the net payment (minus the PayPal fee) and flip the bit that shows the sponsor on the web site.

There’s always more you want to do, but especially on this project time and and resources are limited – time I spend on this comes at the expense of billable hours and/or family time, so we try to focus on areas that matter the most. The other part is that we’re trying to build tools that allow event leads as much flexibility as possible while still empowering them – the message templates above are a good example. More work to give them options, but important to do so.

SQLSaturday Site Changes

We’ve made another few changes to the site that hopefully will make it more user friendly:

• Added links to the upcoming events and view all events that will open up an iCalendar entry for the event
• Modified the location page to display latitude and longitude of the event if available (great for GPS)
• Changed to use Bing maps instead of Google if we have lat/long information entered
• Added a dedicated spot on the location page for hotel information. Not many travel, but for those that do it’s great to have a recommendation.
• The schedule now links to a page that shows session details plus the bio and photo (we’re not capturing the URL yet) of the presenter, plus a download link if we have the presentation available
• Added our LinkedIn group to the menu

We’ve made good progress, one part that we have to go back to is showing the possible sessions and the suggested sessions – in the rebuild process we haven’t managed to glue them back in and have to decide where/how to do that.

SQLSaturday on LinkedIn

We’ve had several requests for it, so we finally set up a group of our own on LinkedIn. Interestingly they won’t allow ‘Saturday’ in a group name! We went with SQLSat Networking Group, and you can reach it at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2107260&trk=anet_ug_hm. Please join if you’re interested in SQLSaturday!

Steve Jones is Coming to SQL Saturday #17

Steve Jones, editor of SQLServerCentral, the Voice of the DBA, is coming to SQLSaturday #17 in Baton Rouge on August 1, 2009.

Steve has been working with SQL Server for nearly 2 decades, and is presenting his very popular "The Modern Resume: Building Your Brand Online" talk to help you better prepare for that next job.

If you are in the area, please stop by and say hi.

SQLSaturday #23 in Louisville KY Announced

Malathi Mahadevan from the Louisville PASS Chapter will be leading SQLSaturday #23 to be held October 29, 2009 at New Horizons, 10200 Linn Station Rd. Suite 110, Louisville, KY 40223.

There will be a lunch fee of $10 to cover breakfast and lunch, other costs will be covered by sponsors. Registration and call for speakers is now open!

Updating the SQLSaturday Site – Part 1

I’ll take credit/blame for the up to now sparse look of SQLSaturday.com. When we started out we didn’t know what we needed, so we just built it as we needed it and let it evolve over time. I think that’s a valid strategy for this type of effort, but we just never came back to making it look good.

Earlier this year my friend Fabio Honigmann rebuilt the site for the Orlando Code Camp and did a really nice job, so I asked him to do a ‘minor makeover’ of the SQLSaturday.com site. The results that you see live today are based on his efforts but the implementation is all mine – and I’ll be the first to admit that page design and CSS aren’t my strong points. I think it looks better than it did and that’s progress.

Aside from the graphics, the one change most users will appreciate is that the schedule now shows up as a real grid and not just the listing we had before.