Working as the Community Manager for thwack for 4+ years now, I can say that one of the most requested "features" of the community has been to bring you and SolarWinds together, face-to-face, to meet, greet, share, and discuss IT trends, hot topics, and all things Orion. I am pleased to announce that we officially kicked off a pilot program (or "beta" for those who know SolarWinds language all too well) for SolarWinds User Groups and now, we're moving full steam ahead with SWUG in 2016!
So, what happened at the SWUG beta?
The first user group was held in Austin, Texas on October 14th, 2015 and we had about 20 community members participate. We put faces to usernames, gave away some swag, discussed all things Orion SaaS (scalability, availability, alerting, and scripting), and most importantly, let YOU drive the conversation so you could get answers to your questions.
We have one more SWUG meetup in 2015 and we need YOU there! We will be in San Francisco, California on Wednesday, December 9th. If you are interested in attending this meetup, please comment below and an invite to the California SWUG group will be sent. We are currently building out the agenda for this meetup which is where you come in. Make sure to submit your questions and discussion topics to the CA SWUG group so our Head Geeks, adatole and patrick.hubbard,can bring their "A" game and make sure we leave you with answers to all of your questions.
Where is SWUG going in 2016 and how can I organize a user group for my area?
You, the community, are absolutely crucial to our ability to keep these user groups going. We need to see demand in various regions, we need people willing to host a space for 20-30 people, and we need user group leaders. Our first user group leader achievement goes to jbiggley and Jfrazier who have offered to host and organize a meeting for the Prince Edward Island, Canada region and the DFW, Texas region in early 2016. We'll be seeing you soon Josh and John!
I've created a poll to capture where people want to meetup in 2016 - VOTE NOW! The bigger the demand, the better chance I have of getting SolarWinds experts and staff to your region.
If you are interested in being a user group leader, please reach out to me directly on thwack (DanielleH) or send an email to usergroups@solarwinds.com. We will give you all the tools (and budget) needed to get this going in your area, plus a few perks for yourself as a user group leader.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions. We hope to see you at a future SWUG meeting!!
