Manda QoP

This week's missions: Mission 1 Create a DynamicsCRM environment for peeps at work to play with. The plan is, 1 x virtual CRM server on Windows Server 2003 o/s, 1 x virtual SQL server (might just include that on the CRM server), 1 x virtual MOSS server (again, will include on the CRM server), 1 x virtual client that people can copy and destroy as they see fit. It's going to be hooked in to our actual domain/AD server. Still stuck on installing the server updates for the base o/s system.... could take a while this. Mission 2 Once we have signed our partner agreement, grab a copy of the CRM vpc that can be used for demos - very handily created by Microsoft so that it's all set up and ready to go with every option you could possibly think of adding to CRM. Jump on to Amazon and set up a 64-bit Windows 2008 server, stick the virtual demo on the cloud based server and see how we go running the vpc in the cloud. This one could be fun. :)

The next Auckland Girl Geek Dinner event is on Thursday 27th August. We're holding it at GPK in Ponsonby. Tickets are $35. We have two speakers for August, Carolyn Sanders and Myles Matheson. More info and ticket purchasing on the website www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz.

Sharepoint Designer is now available as a free download. Check out this link for more information. http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/02/sharepoint-designer-available-as-a-free-download.aspx

After pulling an all nighter at the weekend my TechEd talk has been submitted to TechEd for peer review - WOO HOO! All I need now is a fantastic SaaS or S+S case study and feedback from the peer reviews to get it closed off. It feels so great to finally get that completed and means that I can spend the weekend concentrating on making sure the next Girl Geek Dinner is a fantastic success, preparing the GGD slides for TechEd and maybe fit in some shoe shopping as well. :-) PS: http://www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz/ if you want to buy tickets to the GGD event on the 28th. ;-)

I have just deleted my entire Hotmail account by accident. Nngggggnnnnhhhh!! Let this be a lesson to everyone, if you set up Outlook Connector in Outlook 2003, don't delete it so that you can reset it from scratch as it also deletes all your Hotmail emails and you can't get them back. It is also possible that the monster amounts of pain killers I'm taking had something to do with this monstrous debarcle. Ah well, it's one way of tidying up the emails. Hope there was nothing important in there.

Here's an alternative sponsorship request for you! Microsoft & Girl Geek Dinners are hosting a special Girl Geek Dinner at Tech Ed this year on Monday the 1st September. There will be around 300 women at this event at Sky City in Auckland. As a novel form of advertising, NZ Girl Geek Dinners are going to hand out free t-shirts during the Girl Geek Dinner at TechEd and at the TechEd conference itself. This is as an alternative to handing out flyers. The t-shirts will also be available from the Microsoft Stand and any other company stands who will let us cadge some space - hint hint. We are looking for sponsors to help cover the costs of making the t-shirts. Sponsorship for t-shirts will cost $500 per business. In return for sponsoring us you'd get your logo on the back of the t-shirt and on our National and Wellington websites. I am keen to give our existing and previous sponsors first dibs at this and will be limiting the number of sponsors so that the t-shirt does

HARDWARE GEEKERY When: Wednesday 28th May 2008 @ 6pm Where: Microsoft House, Level 5, 22 Viaduct Harbour Ave, Auckland Central Cost: $30 from www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz The theme for this event will be hardware development, including designing modern home entertainment systems (codecs/coding/firmware) and building homemade game console interfaces. These speakers know which end of a soldering iron to hold. J We have Cherie Carbines and Steven Ellis from OpenMedia who will be demonstrating MediaCentres and explaining the technical nitty gritty that goes into building them, plus we have a young lady called Tamara Olliver as a speaker. When Tamara was 15 she rebuilt the playstation dance mat to make it more robust then open sourced the code and hardware designs. There will be a quiz and maybe some other fun things to get everyone talking and mingling. Tickets are available from the website: http://girlgeekdinners.co.nz/ and I will need to limit them to 50 because of the venue size, so firs