October SPUG
Last Tuesday (October 9th), we had our SharePoint User Group Meeting with Chris McNulty from Dell. Chris has been working with SharePoint for a very long time (10 years!) and dishing out his knowledge all around the U.S. So, it we were certainly lucky to have him speak at our SPUG and give us some good background and demo's on SharePoint 2010's ECM (Enterprise Content Management) capabilities. I've attached some pictures to this post from the meeting. He also had some swag from Quest Software including notepads, magic 8-balls, and mugs. You can find the presentation by clicking 
this link.
Erick Pitsker won SharePoint 2010 Consultants Handbook authored by Chris McNulty. You can get an e-book version for free by visiting: http://www.quest.com/get-chris-book. This was our first meeting at the new location (New Horizons, Burbank) and I think it worked out well. hanks to everyone for attending and participating.
November SPUG
As we stated at the last meeting, there will be no meeting in November. Several user group members will be attending the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. For anyone NOT attending, here's my advice. Attend. The SharePoint Conference is the most valuable conference for SharePoint professionals. Besides all the new/unreleased knowledge, you'll have access to experts from around the world, access to the top SharePoint vendors, and many social events to network and help boost your career. Time's running out and hotels are getting booked so sign up soon!
If you just can't make it, you can follow along on twitter using the #SPC12 hashtag and follow @SFVSharePoint for useful links. Finally, we'll try to do a review in December or January of everything we learned.
December SPUG
We'll have our next scheduled meeting in December (December 11th) at the New Horizons Learning Center in Burbank. If I'mnot on the road, I plan to do a quick Microsoft products demonstration: The new Office, SharePoint 2013, Microsoft Surface and maybe Windows Phone 8 with the goal of showing how these products integrate well to help people get their work done easier and faster.
Finally, we'd like to host a Holiday Mixer, like we've done for the past 2 years, if enough people are interested. Reply on our meetup.com board if you're interested and send us your ideas. Ideally, we want a short user group meeting and then start the party either at New Horizons or a location within walking distance.
Future SPUGs
Finallly, a note on user groups for 2013. We're looking for speakers, presenters, and topics. Most importantly, many of you have told us you'd like more business scenario/solution discussion on SharePoint. I'd like to ask that each of you think about doing a presentation, it can be as short as 10 minutes or as long as the full hour for our normal presentations. I will (and I bet Nedra will too) help out working on your presentation. This is your SPUG, and your involvement is critical to our growth and success.
As always, feel free to reach out to me through the meetup.com boards or directly by email, wahidsaleemi@sharepointexperts.org