Where do you find out about events?

Last week while I was in Des Moines I got a question from someone in my session asking why they hadn’t heard about the event we were doing on Visual Studio 2010. I thought that was odd since they made it to the event, but all kidding aside it brings up a great point which is how do we promote upcoming events? Where can you go to get a list of what’s happening in your neck of the woods beyond looking my site (https://benkotips.com) or twitter (@mbenko)?

If you’re looking for a Microsoft Event, such as MSDN or TechNet, we’ve got a couple sites that we use to promote and provide registration links for the upcoming quarter (we run the events on a quarterly schedule, switch topics each quarter). These include https://msdnevents.com and https://technetevents.com. Both sites have been around for several years and are the definitive place to look for scheduled events. We’ve recently updated them to include a Bing Map that allows you to search for events in a given geography. As soon as we have the events scheduled with a location and a date we publish them to these sites.

In addition to publishing to our sites we also push the event information to a site called Community Megaphone (https://communityMegaphone.com) which includes not just Microsoft but other public events including user group meetings, code camps, charity events, etc. This site also includes a map as well as an RSS feed so you can subscribe to a feed with your favorite reader. A sampling of events listed for our region includes the upcoming Twin Cities Code Camp, and a Charity Fragathon, as well as a Visual Studio VIP Tour that will be coming thru several cities. If you’re organizing events you can register and publish your events too. Another site worth checking is https://tech.mn/events if you’re looking for events in the Twin Cities.

For online events from Microsoft we use https://msevents.microsoft.com as the starting place for things like webcasts, podcasts as well as a general listing of in-person events in the next week. They’ve even got an interactive calendar (https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InteractiveCalendar.aspx) that provides a month view as well as registration links.

So yes, there are many ways to find the information you’re looking for, but hopefully this will give you some places to start.

See you on the road or online.

-Mike