It's been pretty busy since my last post. Just in one week I had at least 12 hours devoted to PASS activities, and I'll share details of some of that here. To start with, I was able to mark another of my Q1 goals complete as Sanj from PASS HQ was able to update the web site with the missing issues of the Connector (and will maintain it going forward). It's not a huge item, but I believe in consistency and in making as much PASS material as possible available via the web for search engines to find - and the occasional new member may enjoy digging through some of the history.

I've received a handful of additional blogs to list, and still watching for more, though I'll say it's challenging with a list of almost 200 to ask myself "do we already have that one" when I'm reading them!

Grant Fritchey has sent me another revision of his page for sqlpass.org that covers all of the SQL Server online communities. It's another sign post page, one that will be of particular interest to those new in our profession. Look for that to be online in the next week and I'll add a short post when it's live.

I spent a lot of time this week working out task details for the volunteers that work with me; giving them what I hope is a good overview of what I had in mind, then letting them run with it and see what develops. To the end I'm trying to leverage our relationship with Microsoft, already I've gotten John Magnabosco connected with two members of the SQL certification team as he builds out some certification content, I have a call next week to talk with MS about how we can jointly produce technical content just for PASS, and I had a call with MS this week to talk about how we might aggregate MS news & high interest items related to SQL.

We also had a board meeting via phone, and that is definitely a different sort of meeting than the one we had in January. Scheduled for an hour, the format of this meeting is to raise topics that need a vote or significant input, or to just update the board on key items. I actually had nothing on the agenda this time and really we didn't discuss much that was exciting. One thing I expected but didn't see was progress reports from each board member. I think it would be valuable to get a pre-call paragraph or two about what was going on, because we tend to churn away in our own silos. At the same time I'm reluctant to advocate adding another task to everyone's list, I expect Wayne has a pretty good view of how each person is tracking on their goals and that's really the biggest thing. Probably the biggest thing going on internally is the European PASS Summit, schedule is set and things are moving along. I don't have plans to attend (just too far!), but I think it is important that PASS be more than a North American focused organization.

We still don't have the minutes of the January 2009 board online, somewhat to my frustration. I think we're close to having that done, and going forward our goal is to have them available 2 weeks after the meeting.

We have two big challenges coming; the SQL Server Standard relaunch plan, and trying to get our content strategy written down and implemented. I imagine you have a rough idea of what's involved in writing/editing/publishing solid articles, but on the larger content side trying to figure who owns pages, who can update them & how often, what is valid and what isn't - just not a small process. As I've gotten deeper into it I see it will have to be an iterative approach, we're going to start with a couple day effort to realign some menu items and put up some new content pages. We're using DNN, but many of you probably feel the same pain around Sharepoint. At the end it's not so much about who can/can't as it consistency in messaging.

Got a question about PASS, my efforts, or ? Comment below, or contact me andy dot warren at sqlpass.org.