Last Wednesday we had a Swiss DotNetNuke Usergroup get-together in Zurich around DNN 6. It’s not that we are somewhat slow in Switzerland (although evil tongues would have it that we are) that the DNN 6 Launch Party only took place now. It is more due to the fact that this was the earliest possible opportunity and we really wanted to get DNN 6 across the footlight to folks here. “Hey, remember that DotNetNuke thing we had a UG meeting about a couple of years ago? Well it’s new and improved!”
The format was an “after-work” event. Starting at 4:15 PM and ending at around 8:30 it allowed people to just about finish their business day and head on down to the Microsoft offices in Wallisellen on the outskirts of town. The Swiss DNN User Group is led by Daniel Mettler from 2Sic (http://www.2sic.com/). Together with the dev contacts at Microsoft, he put this meeting together. Erik van Ballegoij was kind enough to attend and represented “The Corp” whereas I represented “the core team”.
Content
With so little time and given the approach of a fairly concise presentation, the sessions were kept to 20 minutes each. This means: get your message across and don’t get lost in details or overly long demos. No time for in-depth technical sessions. In my opinion this format worked quite well. The audience got a heads-up on a number of aspects and the socializing time we had afterwards provided ample time to follow-up in case there were questions.
Daniel hosted the day and did most of the (German) talking. He was kind enough to do this in “proper” German (in contrast to Swiss German) so others like myself could at least get a grasp of what he was talking about. He had done some exciting things with DNN 6 and shared it with us. This included connecting to SharePoint and Mobile support which of course also are part of the professional offering of DotNetNuke. Erik presented sessions on DNN 6 PE and DNN 6.1. I, myself, spoke on localization and the efforts of the DNN Internationalization team. Other speakers included Benjamin Gemperle and Raphael Mueller (both from 2Sic like Daniel).
Venue and Attendance
We had about 30 people show up for this event. Although these are not shocking numbers, we have to keep in mind that we have never attracted huge audiences here. Zurich is not a cheap place and for in-depth technical content the Swiss tend to look to the neighboring User Groups: the Swiss German to the German User Group and the Swiss French to the French User Groups. Both are substantially larger and offer more in terms of activity and forums.
Microsoft was kind enough to use as guinea pigs for their all new presentation/recording room in their office. I’ve been they only finished installing this the day before and we were the first ones to use it. When video does come out of this event, I’ll add a link to this post.
Thanks
I just want to round off with a word of thanks to 2Sic and Daniel Mettler in particular for having put this together. Thanks also to Microsoft and Ken Cassada in particular, for their support for the event. The munchies were very nice 
Finally thanks to DNN Corp for putting Erik on a plane to Switzerland.