A Milestone Crossed, NIOUG Becomes Part Of IOUG….

Posted in Updates on February 15th, 2009 by aman.sharma – Be the first to comment

Its been a while since there were any updates over this space and it may have left you wondering what’s going on, where are these guys and what they are up to ? Well, as I mentioned in my last post, we have been working very hard to fulfill some tasks, which according to some, were important for the group. This did include the affiliation for the group. We had been in talks with many people/groups  worldwide and unfortunately, we didn’t get a much helping hand from anyone. But as like always, there is always a hope to see a ray of light in the darkest corners too !

IOUG is the largest oracle users group worldwide. We did contact them last year with a formal request to become a part of it. As like always, the paper work takes some time but we are glad that a positive outcome came out and now NIOUG is officially a part of IOUG’s Regional User Group program. You may have noticed that the logo of IOUG is flashing on the right hand side of the web portal.  Also, you can check the group’s existence if you click on this link. With this, now NIOUG is officially affiliated to IOUG , making its existence globally known. In addition to it, we have also joined forces with RACSIG (http://www.racsig.org) and Oracle Community (http://www.oraclecommunity.net). This doesn’t stop here and we shall be keep on working to get aligned with the best and brightest worldwide to make NIOUG a trusted and global community.

A Note About Future:

As we are done with this paper work, now our sole focus is to make the technical portion updated and we are working on it very hard. There are couple of papers that the team is writing and we are in the process of finalizing them before publishing. In the same process, we invite you too to send us both your ideas/posts which you think can contribute in making the knowledge pool more content rich. You can send me a direct mail about it and I shall take things forward from there.

I once again thank all of you who have been standing with us throughout this time. Without your support, it wouldn’t be possible to take this endeavor forward. Do keep watching this space and also our Oracle blog,  for the latest happenings/updates. There are some interesting plans lined up which will see the sunlight very soon !

Cheers

Aman….

NIOUG Is Alive….

Posted in Updates on November 15th, 2008 by aman.sharma – Comments Off

We had been struggling  alot to make the web face up and live since so many days. We have tested alot of things, accepted( and rejected) lots of ideas. We had a vision what we wanted to have in our web portal. It was very simple, we wanted a simple, yet sleek , unique design. About content, we already had it but we were not able to get the right kind of “front face” for it. 

This was “then”. 

Now, things have changed ( and for good). We are a big fan of Open Source mantra. There are many goodies developed under it. Joomla is one of those few goodies. Irony is that despite that we knew about it from a LONG time back but we still were not inclined to use it and were sort of trying to “reinvent the wheel”. Well, we have finally come back to our senses and now, as Amardeep mentioned, we have been joomalized. Yes, NIOUG is alive now at http://www.nioug.org. The best thing is that it did happen on a very holy day. I was lucky enough that I was in a program and I got a chance to share the idea with my students. They were very happy and excited listening about it. We have already got few members which are NIOUGians now. 

I got a chance to meet with president of another group also. I won’t mention at the moment who but this meeting was in our pipeline from a long time. It went well. Though it wasn’t a formal one as both of us met on breakfast table and had breakfast together but it was good. We have alot of ideas which we want to implement and as now our web face is up, we can focus now on those things more keenly. Let’s see how things shape up now.

Lastly,  I have been given the responsibility of being the front man of NIOUG, no not the spokesperson but the president of the group. So as president of NIOUG, I welcome you now officially here.  Take a look at our website and give us your feedback about it. 

Cheers

Aman….

Joomla’ized

Posted in Updates on November 11th, 2008 by amardeep.sidhu – Be the first to comment

Well, finally after playing with some HTML & CSS we have decided to use Joomla for our website. The new website you see has been designed using Joomla. I will be adding the new stuff in coming days.

Progressing…

Posted in Updates on November 4th, 2008 by amardeep.sidhu – Be the first to comment

Hello

Well, with a small gap in between, now things are moving pretty nicely. Yesterday me and Aman again worked on the website and coded few more pages. The content is getting ready at a good pace. The only issue which remains to be settled is the CSS design. May be there are few changes in the design before we finalize one. Its fun doing all this :)

Stay tuned…ciao !

First Cut Would Be Out Soon….

Posted in Updates on October 20th, 2008 by aman.sharma – Be the first to comment

Its been a while since we posted here. There were couple of reasons for it and the most prime one is the travel that I have to do for my work. Because of this, things don’t go at times according to the planned schedule. But despite all the reasons and causes, we are completely active and working on different areas of NIOUG.

Our foremost push is to bring the web face of NIOUG out. We are working over the design phase of it at the moment. Yesterday, we spent almost the entire day working on overall design and content of some pages. Its still not completley done as we have some last finishing touches left to be given. It could be more faster but the both me and Amardeep are not willing to bring anything out which is not up to our satisfaction level, leave the others aside for the moment. So keep watching this place for the “breaking news” as its not much far from coming.

CSSization…

Posted in Updates on October 3rd, 2008 by amardeep.sidhu – Be the first to comment

Well, as i wrote in the last post the we have registered a domain name, the next game is to decide about the design and content of the website. And for that we need to go face to face with HTML & CSS which is first time for both me & Aman. HTML is not a big deal but i guess CSS is, a bit. So these days we are enjoying somewhat of CSS. Hope to get along with CSS and then start building the webite.

Ciao…

Our first meeting

Posted in Updates on September 11th, 2008 by amardeep.sidhu – Be the first to comment

Me and Aman just had, what we can call as the first meeting of NIOUG. We have registered the domain name nioug.org. Now is the time to decide the design and features of the website and also the content to be posted. As of now we have been thinking about keeping 2 blogs; one which you are reading, for news and another technical one which would talk about Oracle and other technologies. We have already been writing a blog OracleAdmins, so we have decided to move the same to NIOUG website and continue with it. There will be one page for links to Oracle resources on the net. Also the membership related stuff. We will not be creating another forum but rather we will continue participate in the OTN forum itself. That would be the Oracle forum for all our members.

That are the updates for now.

Catch ya later !

Genesis Of An Idea….

Posted in General on September 1st, 2008 by aman.sharma – Be the first to comment

It is said that all great ideas come at odd times. Well its true in general but at times, it may happen that some ideas are actually carefully thought. And this particular idea actually came up with a constant thought process only.

Oracle community is a very big community. Across the globe, there are millions of users who use Oracle and its massive technology stack. As being an Oracle user myself, I consider me too as a part of this worldwide community. To promote and help lots of newbies , there are lots of efforts done by people around the globe. There has been Oracle Forums where people can come and share their views, issues . There are so many user groups around the globe which help in social networking among the Oracle professionals of that particular region/country to meet up and share ideas and technical knowledge. Some like Eddie Awad has created social network sites also. In short , all this is done to make sure that the new users ( and even the experienced ones too) can get more and more info about Oracle in the terms of its technology stack and with the latest happenings in Oracle sphere.

All said and done, the reality is that most ( or I should say all) of the things are done in the other end of the world. This part of the world, from where I am writing this blog post, is not having that much facilities available. Ironically , this part creates a big chunk of the total pie of oracle users globally. So it always used to push me that there must be some thing done for those areas also where people don’t have much resources. There are so many remote areas where still Oracle means sql and pl/sql only and the most latest version known is either 8i or 9i. There are so many places where its still unknown that Oracle is running Oracle Academy to promote tech education for school children. This was a constant push inside me that there may be many in those areas as well who ,if given a good guidance and support, can do wonders and also can be a very active and helpful future members of this big global family.

As with all the ideas, you always are in doubt that whether its a right or wrong one if you are alone thinking about it. So I shared the same with my friend, Amardeep over the phone one fine evening. He immediately responded , cmm’on man, lets get it done! He is the kind of guy who would not say yes to some thing which he doesn’t want to do from heart, that much I knew about him already. When he gave this enthuastic response, we got the ball rolling and North India Oracle User Group was finally decided.

This was a small note over the history of this group’s genesis. We are constantly working to make this dream come true and give this group to oracle users. I guess this is the first time, any group would be writing a blog too! We truly want this a community based group and that’s why we thought of writing blog which is a more common way to share ideas. I welcome your comments, suggestions and even criticism also here. Do let us know how we can improve this idea in a more better way. And if you are from North India, do contact us if you want to be a part of this effort.

Hope to hear from you guys.

Cheers

Aman….