The UG is coming up to it’s 3rd meeting on the 26th of this month.

The first meeting, in September, was a presentation style meeting, where two presentations were given to the audience in Perth. Courtesy of Microsoft Australia, Live Meeting was available to provide an online capability which was manned by Jeff Alexander. The attendance was modest, but as the only advertising was through this site and Twitter, that was to be expected. This was also to give me the chance to practice presenting to a room and handling the Live Meeting interface as well.

In an effort to reduce the strain on trying to get presenters and material together every month, we are trialing alternating the presentation style sessions with “script clubs”. The idea behind this is that the presentation sessions will follow the format that was used with the UK PowerShell Group (Get-PSUGUK) of 3x 20 minute sessions with a beer and pizza break to encourage the socialising side of the group. For these sessions we’re hoping to provide access to Live Meeting and make the recordings available on the UG website afterwards for download.

The script club is new to me, but is becoming popular with a lot of the PowerShell UG’s everywhere. The idea here is to turn up with your laptop and in a relaxed social environment get some hands on PowerShell scripting. Whether, this is best handled by setting small “challenges” to the group to encourage working out how to achieve this through PowerShell, or whether members of the group bring ideas, or problems with them that as a group we work out is yet to be seen, but I’m happy to look at both approaches. I’ll put a poll up and we’ll see what the interest is like.

I attended the .Net Community of Practice a couple of weeks ago to meet members of the Perth UG community and to spread the word of the PowerShell UG across a social beer afterwards. The intention isn’t to steal any members, but to raise awareness and get the word of mouth advertising amongst the Perth IT geeks. It was a great bunch of guys and Mitch had one of their biggest turn out’s of 63!

Last week, Mike invited me to present a small session with the Perth ALT.Net UG. This was a much less formal approach and I really enjoyed hanging out and talking to these guys about PowerShell. Talking to Developers provided a totally new approach to me as I expected them to have a great understand of the .Net classess and namespaces so with the help of Mike, showing some of the basic tasks that PowerShell can do was fun and the questions were interesting.

On the East coast, Shane Hoey has been running script clubs at Microsoft Brisbane. Details for the PowerShell UG are on the web site, and using the #PSUGAU hash tag in twitter.

The thing I have found the most interesting from my two visits is that the User Group community in Perth is vibrant, and there’s a lot of cool geeks to hang out and chat with. Over the next few months I’m hoping to attend more as my schedule permits and keep evangelising PowerShell. I’m still amazed how little IT pro’s seem to grasp what it’s capable of!

So, if you’re looking to get involved in your community, and want to find a User Group, check out the list of Microsoft Australian User groups, but be warned this link only plays nicely in IE.