Operation Souza

This Wednesday we’re having a special joint meeting of oPASS and MagicPASS featuring Microsoft GM Mark Souza. For the past couple months we’ve referred to it internally as “Operation Souza” as we discussed how to best support his visit and do the most for our local SQL community. We contacted Mark originally to see if […]

Joint oPASS/MagicPASS Meeting Scheduled for October 15, 2014- Featuring Mark Souza In Person!

Big news for us in Orlando! On October 15th Mark Souza, General Manager – Data Platform Group at Microsoft, is going to speak to a joint oPASS/MagicPASS chapter meeting. Just having a joint meeting is a big deal, but having Mark as the speaker – hard to believe! The topic? We’ll share more on that […]

Notes From The May 2014 MagicPASS Meeting

Quick notes: About a dozen people attended, attributed to the combination of having the meeting on a different than usual night mainly, but possibly also to a topic (credit card security) not as compelling as some I delivered two presentations (usually the first one is a video from the Summit) and it was fun to […]

Speaking at MagicPASS Tonight

I’m back at MagicPASS tonight, delivering two presentations – one about credit card security using SQL Server and one about learning plans, both are topics I’m enthusiastic about. It’s a great venue, if you’re in the area hope you can make it.

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan-Part 7

Just spent some time re-reading my notes far and my ideas from before – glad I wrote them down, lots and lots to think on and easy to forget something (though I will probably miss some things anyway). Updated thoughts: What list is the list? We have an oPASS list, a MagicPass list, and the […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 6 (Seminars)

Seminars (aka “pre-cons”) have been part of the DNA of SQLSaturday going back to #1. For those that weren’t there we started off with Joe Celko doing our first one and it went really well. I think we sold it at $99, included his latest book and lunch, and had about 70 paying attendees. That […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 5

More notes, many from a chat with Kendal. We wish we could see the open rate on email and an easy way to do A/B testing. The emailer in the site (mine, or a derivative maybe) was just built to send a lot of email, no bells and whistles. Would the open rate help? Don’t […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 4

I spent some more time last night thinking about the event and marketing it. Biased I am, but I think the event has a great value proposition and doesn’t require “selling” except to first timers (seminars are different). We seem to do pretty well at getting first timers to attend, so it worth extra effort […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 3

Not to short change fund raising, but the toughest goal to meet for this year is registration/attendance if we’re going to hit our 20% growth target. No, it’s not all about numbers, but our stance is that we’d like to deliver as much learning as possible – both to do good and to leverage our […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 2

Our attendance number for last year was 285, so we’re going to aim for increasing that by 20% to 342. Our registration count was 343, so we’ll need to increase that by at least 20% as well to get the corresponding gain in attendees – I’m going to round that up and say that our […]