Decided to scrap the pizza this month after one too many late deliveries from Pizza Hut, went with sandwich platters from Publix. Ordered 2 platters, got a couple bags of chips, and some packages of Oreo’s for about the same cost as 10 pizzas.

We started a bit late with much lower than average attendance, only about 11 present. Found out a few minutes into the meeting that our Livemeeting link on opass.org was pointing to a meeting with a date of yesterday! Fixed that, but only had a couple users join via LM. We talked about the R2 Tweetup, the recently released March 2010 PASS Board minutes, and topics for an upcoming presentation by Kendal Van Dyke.

Feedback on the sandwiches was good, but several indicated they would rather have pizza – this user group food thing is tough!

We started the feature presentation just a couple minutes late, Joe Webb discussion Reporting Services subscriptions. All started well, but about 2 minutes into it the audio just dropped, and we couldn’t get Joe’s attention while he kept going. Definite note for next time, we need a cell phone number for remote presenters, and to have them put the phone where they can see it ringing (assuming it will be on vibrate). The presentation itself was useful, and sparked a good conversation afterward as our group discussed various strategies for sending (and whether to send) reports using subscriptions.

We raffled off a few prizes, enough so that everyone got something.

After the meeting we continued to chat, one of the topics was doing an ORM/Not point/counter point at our SQLSaturday Orlando this fall, and then some time on more ideas for that event, trying to do better than last year.

Good meeting, yet the attendance was disappointing. Data driven subscriptions may not seem as interesting as something like performance tuning, yet I found a lot of value in the presentation from Joe, and it ended up linking back to performance. Our thought afterward is that for a topic that isn’t quite as catchy we should try to have it done by an in-person presenter, but we also have to do more to sell our members on why it makes sense to attend a particular presentation.

Thanks again to Joe for taking time to do the presentation, we appreciate it!