Attendee Recap - May Meeting

You'll have to forgive the quality of my notes. The conversations being conducted and content presented during the May meeting had me distracted like a cat with a laser pointer. My head still hurts.

For the april meeing we had about 15 or so attendees show up. Number was down from the first meeting, but that's to be expected. Turnout and participation still indicates there's interest and I'm certain we'll get more folks to attend as we settle in and start producing.

Speaking of producing, Bradley Dupay of RBA kicked off the meeting with an introduction into the structure and goals for the group. He outlined the first attempt at putting a regular aggenda to the meetings (Topic Discussion, Infrastructure presentation, developer presentation, *somethingicantremember*). Bradley also set a fairly ambitious goal for the group given how new we are. He would like to see us come up with a delivereable, something we can share with the Twin Cities IT community that addresses many of the perceptions about Cloud Computing. Great idea and I look forward to helping try and make that happen.

After that, we started into the discussion portion of the meeting. Talking not just about some perceptions that Bradly had identified, but about future discussion topics. The discussion was so good we quickly ran past the time Brad had set aside for it and he dropped his intended presentation on Exchange Online. Hopefully he can present that next month.

Todd Van Nurden of Microsoft presented next on the EpiCenter application. I've seen Todd present on this topic before but this time was much more in-depth. Todd focused this time on how he used the cloud to solve some real world issues. We got a peek into how EpiCenter was constructed and operates. More important Todd filled us in on how the entire application was built not to just show off cloud computing, but instead the could was used to make the solution possible. Todd talked about the Prism Composite Application Design Pattern. I appreciated this deeper look into the EpiCenter solution instead of the normal glossy overview.

In conclusion it was an excellent second outting for the user group and I'm really looking forward to our June meeting. Hope to see you there.