On Thursday and Friday last week, MSPs from all over Australia gathered at Microsoft’s Australian HQ for the Aussie MSP Summit 2009.

We were treated to two awesome days of presentations, workshops, gaming, food, prizes and plenty of free stuff.

Day 1 kicked off with some intros to awesome programs available to students such as DreamSpark, Imagine Cup, Students 2 Business, Microsoft Student Partners, MSDN-AA, Student Tech Clubs, Channel8 and more. Microsoft provided lunch with a chance to checkout some cool technologies in the cafeteria. The afternoon continued with presentations from Microsoft staff on Microsoft programs such as It’s Not Piracy, Microsoft Learning, MSPress, IT Academy, Imagine Cup and technologies such as Windows Live and Windows Mobile.

After a big first day, we all jumped into the bus and headed to the Great Northern Hotel for dinner and drinks.

Around 9pm we made it back to Microsoft Australia and went straight to the Xbox room. We were lucky to be able to play Halo Wars before its release along with other great games. Gears of War 2, Call of Duty and Forza seemed popular!

At the end of the night the MSPs were shocked to hear they would all be given Xbox 360s along with 4 games and an extra controller! Microsoft has gone out of their way to ensure when MSPs share their love of technology with the community, they can actually share it!

After a quick refresh on the previous days content, Day 2 started with a presentation from GP on where MSPs fit into the big picture at Microsoft. Michael Kordahi followed with an awesome presentation on the future of technology. Andrew Coates demonstrated Live Meeting and Nick Hodge presented on Microsoft’s Open Source program. Lunch was provided by the guys from Atomic Magazine who asked us to give away their magazines at our events… awesome for students all-round!

But one of the highlights for me, was each MSP getting up to present a 5 minute demo on stuff they are passionate about.

Of course there were prizes throughout the event, for the best questions and the most involvement from MSPs.

After  2 full days, MSPs headed back to their homes, Xbox under one arm, and various other loot under the other and heads full of ideas on how they can share their passion, excitement and love of technology with their fellow students.

In fact, some already have, such as Sean’s O-Week Presentation along with his post on new stuff added to DreamSpark.

All Aussie MSPs are fired up and equipped, so join us for an awesome 2009!

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

As I am the newest WA MSP I figured the best place to start is to introduce myself.

My name is Mitchell Sullivan, I am currently studying Information Technology at Curtin University. I work for a web development company called Nutworks. Nutworks is the company behind Loconut, a WA based website which incorporates social networking. Nutworks is also responsible for many external projects as well and our tool of choice is Asp.Net.

I decided to become a MSP after seeing the great work the other WAMSP people did last year and as I am part of the Curtin University computing social club (ComSSA) it would be easier for me to execute events. The fact that there are so many perks also helps greatly but I really was unprepared for all the additional perks introduced for this year’s partners.

That’s a long enough introduction for a person you probably don’t want to know that much about.

These are exciting times for technology, for Microsoft and to be a MSP and I shall be posting here regularly about all of those.

Mitchell
Curtin MSP

The Australian MSP Summit 2009 has kicked off today, for 2 packed days of fun and information for all Australian MSPs at the Microsoft Australia HQ in Sydney.

MSPs from over Australia are here for the event to get the resources to help students to reach their potential over 2009.

Luke
Australian MSP Lead

It had to happen sooner or later. The Microsoft Student Partners Program Worldwide now has an official blog on MSDN Blogs.

Head over to http://blogs.msdn.com/mspprogram/ to bookmark and subscribe to the RSS feed.

Luke
UWA MSP

When the Windows 7 beta was released last week, MSDN subscribers got to jump the queue, and were given access to Windows 7 two days before the public… and without all the site up-down stuff.

One of the benefits to being a Microsoft Student Partner is you not only get access to a great range of Microsoft resources, but you also get a free subscription to MSDN.

So if you are going to be a University student in 2009 and have a passion for technology, apply to become a Microsoft Student Partner today for the 2009 year.

Luke
UWA MSP 

Being an MSP demands dedication. We encourage every MSP to undertake 4 activities and numerous voluntary activities throughout the year which are designed to suit everyone’s level of ability and creativity. Activities range from giving technical lectures on campus, writing articles for the student newsletter to entering the Imagine Cup or running your own computer society.

BUT… we will recognize and reward each activity you undertake. The more you do, the more chances you’ll have of wining one of our fantastic end-of-year prizes. MSPs get together, share experiences, attend Microsoft training and events and even get together for the odd meal or friendly drink.

In order to be eligible, you must be:

• Over 18
• An undergraduate or post-graduate student at an Australian university
• Studying a full-time technology-related degree or course and able to name a reference from your departments
• Passionate about technology and willing to share your expertise with others at your school
• For more information, please contact Karo Esmaili at: i-karoes@microsoft.com

 Click here to download MSP Application form

Send your completed application form via email to: i-karoes@microsoft.com

For more information about Microsoft Student Partners go to http://www.student-partners.com

There’s only two days before Imagine 08 so if you haven’t already registered CLICK HERE to register now.

Luke
UWA MSP
http://twitter.com/ekulmi

What it is?

The Student Daze MSP Summit 08 is the first of what will be an annual event to bring together the top MSPs at the Microsoft HQ in Remond, WA. MSPs from each of the 13 regions meet for 2 intense days to help shape the MSP program for the year to come. Up to 4 MSPs from each region are flown to Redmond to make a group of around 50 MSPs.

Read the rest of this entry »

UWA MSPs would like to announce their Live Mesh Competition.

Simply sign up for Live Mesh through our gateway and go into the draw to win a stack of prizes.

You can even increase your chances by adding your own content to our Mesh.

For more details and to sign up CLICK HERE.

Sign up now at: imagine.wamsp.com.au

We’ll elaborate a little more on the program and plan closer to the date, but for now – head over to imagine.wamsp.com.au and sign up so that you don’t lose your spot!

Don’t forget to tell / bring your friends!

For those who somehow missed the posters plastered around uni…

Wow. Just Wow.

Sporting over 3500 delegates who will participate in over 200 sessions TechEd Sydney just kicked off with an amazing KeyNote that included free runners, concept videos (hopefully widely available soon) and, of course, the keynote speech by Amit Mital, lead of the Live Mesh project.

For those who haven’t checked it out yet Live Mesh is designed to allow automatic synchronisation of files (and later settings, applications – you name it) between multiple devices.

As part of the tech demos one of the presenters “let slip” and, in a worldwide first, showed Live Mesh for mobile which automatically synced photos he was taking of the keynote with his laptop! With the promise of Mesh developer APIs in a few months (think synch across all devices, even non-Microsoft, such an iPhone or your friendly coffee maker), Mesh is definitely something to keep your eyes on.

There’s something for everyone – technical sessions on every type of Microsoft (and some, just general) technology that you can think of, break out areas to relax and play Xbox, sandpit for mucking around on live systems and food (literally everywhere). 3 days of heaven

Stay tuned for photos and more updates as we progress through the next few days!

Exams (the Storm) are around the corner, hence the “Quiet” around here. GameCamp ‘08 has been and gone (although planning for next year’s is well underway!) so to pick up the slack a bit I thought I’d post some interesting stats:

Tickets

We allowed for 220 tickets (the hall had 211 spaces) – all of which were sold out the week before the event. During the event we had about 230 participants (thank you to our volunteers for running around counting!) from which we got about 200 feedback forms. Here’s the general breakdown of participation:

As you can see, the majority of attendees were UWA students – although we had a great showing from other schools. Future events will focus on bringing in more students from other universities and attracting a larger crowd of year 11-12 students.

Session Feedback

Overall the feedback for the event was excellent – 99.7% of people indicated that they would like a return event and indicated that the general direction we went in was a good one. As you can see below most of the sessions fared well, although there are a number of observations after the graph:

1. The worst faring session was the 5 minute talk by iiNet who were one of our monetary sponsors.
   Next Time: we will endeavour to ensure that all talks by our sponsors are given by industry people and are tailored to the audience.
2. The Q&A session received excellent feedback although there were quite a few people who did not rate it either due to them not being there at that time or due to them believing it to not be relevant to their area of interest.
   Next Time: we will try to include representatives from the graphics and storyboard side of the industry

Overall Feedback

We were impressed by the level of written feedback that people provided and here’s the general breakdown:

1. Technical problems need to be sorted out before the event (the Xbox 360 was not responding during the demo, although it did wake up towards the end of the event)
2. Code demo needs to be given a bit slower to cater for non-coders
3. Presentations need to be more interactive

Summary

The event was an awesome success, most people enjoyed themselves and walked away wanting more – as did we. We have a whole slew of ideas for next year, and we’ll be asking for your ideas throught the year – for now though, we are always looking for more ideas so either post in the comments or just send us an email at uwa@wamsp.com.au.

Thanks again to all those who attended – we hope to see you, and everyone that missed out, next year!

Wooooh! We just got back from Game Camp ‘08 and despite a number of technical issues that caused some glitches when transferring our XNA demo to our Xbox 360, we had an awesome time!

Clocking in at around 230 participants with an XNA overview & demo, a number of industry and university presenters, and topped up with an industry Q&A panel the event was roaring success. There’s lots of feedback (thanks if one of these is yours!), I’ll let everyone know what the main points were when we finish collating it all.

Thanks to everyone who came along – I hope you enjoyed it all, we certainly enjoyed putting it on and are looking forward to WA Game Camp ‘09!

P.S. Keep on the lookout for source code, slides, photos and more from the event…

Register Now at xna.wamsp.com.au

 +  +

I am very pleased to announce the MSPs at UWA have teamed up with the UWA IEEE Student Branch to bring bigger and better services and events to UWA for the students.

As many of you know, the IEEE has a arm called the IEEE Computer Society, who also have access to MSDNAA along with Computer Science students.

The UWA IEEE Student arm will be sending out Welcome Packs to their members shortly. Be sure to look out for some extra goodies provided by the UWA Microsoft Student Partners.

Any IEEE Student member can also register on our forums at http://forum.wamsp.com.au/ with any queries they may have!

Luke
MSP (UWA)

Nick from Microsoft has posted on his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/msozacademic about the recent MSP Bootcamp in Sydney.

WA MSP now has a forum which can be found at http://forum.wamsp.com.au.

Luke
MSP (UWA)