We had our final meeting of the year earlier this month and while there was a snow storm, we still had over 20 people show up.  Not the greatest turnout but more than last year’s December meeting.  During which it also snowed… maybe someone is telling us something about December meetings.

New Board

I’m pleased that I will be serving on the PASSMN Board of Directors for the next year. <sarcasm> It wasn’t a very difficult election this year, there were five people running for the five open slots on the board. So I finished in both first and last place. </sarcasm>

To build on the momentum from last year, the board members that continued from last year are filling the same roles for 2010 that they did for 2009. Those board members are:

• Lara Rubbelke as our Microsoft Liaison.  Lara writes on SQL Server topics on her blog and tweets as SQLGal.
• Dan English is continuing as Chair. Dan writes on Business Intelligence topics on his blog and tweets as denglishbi.
• Eric Strom is continuing as Director of Technology.
• Jason Strate (that’s me) is continuing as Director of Program Development.  You can read my blog on SQL Server and related technologies through my feedburner feed or come straight over to my website.  Also, I tweet as StrateSQL and am the more frequent Board of Directors tweeter for PASSMN.  Feel free to contact me through e-mail if you need anything.

New to the board this upcoming year is:

• Gordon D’Souza as the Director of Membership/Treasurer.
• Mark Rocco as Director of Corporate Development. 

Hopefully this upcoming year, we’ll have more opportunity to bring education and events to our members.  As always, the PASSMN Board of Directors wants to hear from it’s members, potential speakers, and potential sponsors.  You can get a hold of us through any of the above, comments on this post, or just e-mail the board.

New Site

As one of the last things for wrapping up this year’s business, the Board of Directors completed our move from our existing user group site to a new web site.  The new site is hosted by PASS and allows us some great opportunities to coordinate our activities with the larger organization.  The direct URL to the new site is http://minnesota.sqlpass.org.  But to keep things easy, the old link re-directs to the new site as well.

If you haven’t been out there yet, take a look…

Some things that might be worth checking out on the new website:

• Meeting announcements can be found right under the Home menu.
• Upcoming meetings are listed on the Meetings page.
• The About menu has a Contact PASSMN option with an area to leave comments.
• The Discussion area has some generic forums along with an area for recruiters and candidates to discuss open positions
• Underneath Resources, logged in users are able to find content for the last couple years worth of meetings.  Going forward we’ll include session descriptions with each of the items to make materials easier to search for.

And as I mentioned above, if there is anything that should be added to the site.  Let us know we’ll work on getting it out there.