I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

I haven’t written anything on my blog lately, mostly because I’ve been busy organizing what seems to be one of the largest IT community events in the country: ITCamp 2011

We’ve received an amazing response from both the speakers we’ve invited, the sponsors we’ve contacted, and from all of you out there who have registered for the event (we’re way past the 200 people mark).

Quoting from the event website:

ITCamp 2011 in numbers:

• 2 conference days, with 2 parallel tracks each day (Dev and ITPro)
• 19 speakers (among whom we have 10 Microsoft MVPs and 4 international speakers)
• 21 technical sessions and over 5 hours of networking/discussion breaks

Don’t miss ITCamp if:

• You want to be up to date with the latest IT technologies
• You appreciate the chance to interact with highly skilled professionals in your area of expertise
• You are an IT manager, team lead, programmer, database or systems administrator and you work with the Microsoft Application Platform
• You want to find out more about useful stuff meant to improve your existing skillset
• You enjoy presentations held by experienced speakers, who are well known across the country or even across the world
• You wish to attend trainings that are both cost-efficient and packed with useful infoYou intend to expand your customer or collaborator/partner portfolio

The event starts tomorrow, and will take 2 whole days. You can follow what’s happening there on Twitter  (@itcampro or #itcampro) and Facebook (facebook.com/ITCamp.ro).

Again, download is available here (both as an installer and in VHD format).

An official announcement confirmed yesterday that the SP1 for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 has reached RTM. Quoting from the Windows Team blog:

On February 16th Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 will be available for MSDN and TechNet Subscribers as well as Volume License customers. On February 22nd, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 will become generally available for folks to download via the Microsoft Download Center and available on Windows Update.

I believe this is actually the first Service Pack that’s highly anticipated for the new features it brings, and not for the fixes. What features is that you ask? SP1 brings RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory to Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 (and client-side support for those on Windows 7).

Dynamic Memory lets you increase virtual machine density with the resources you already have—without sacrificing performance or scalability, while RemoteFX is an exciting technology that lets you virtualize the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) on the server side and deliver next-generation rich media and 3D user experiences for VDI. RemoteFX is also enabling new low cost ultra-thin client devices to enter the market.

More details on this in the Windows Server Division Weblog.

As I was telling you in my previous post, we’ve recently launched a new local ITPro community. What I haven’t insisted on in that post is some of the technical details behind it, so I’m going to start doing it now.

First things first: the site is hosted on a Windows 2008 R2 Server with an IIS7.5/MSSQL 2008 back-end, and on top of that lies a deployment of Telligent’s trademark product called Telligent Community, which is an amazing and robust product in itself, and it’s the community/forum/blog platform of choice for Microsoft, Dell and many others. So, if you’ve ever been on their forums or blogs, this is what they’re running.

But even with it’s blog/forum/wiki modules, it still lacks an essential feature: a calendar/event module, which is definitely a major gap in the standard deployment of the product (you can get it as an additional module, but it’s not in the main product). And for any community, organized events (be they online or offline) are most likely one of its core activities, and a way to let everyone in the community know what happens when (and where) is essential.

This is where the guys at 4 Roads and their cool TC plugins come in. In particular, they’ve been very generous in providing our new community with their social calendaring plugin for Telligent Community, Chronos. We’ve been using their Chronos for TC 5.6 for more than a month now, and I have to admit we’ve been very happy with it.

Out of all the cool features Chronos comes with I would point out the ability to map the event locations using Google Maps, the RSVP support (somewhat similar to what you have on Facebook events), event comments, RSS/iCal support, color-coded event categories (for instance, you can use different colors for offline meetings and online webcasts/webinars), recurring events and event privacy levels (e.g. Private, Friends, Group, Public).

Even with all the features, the one thing I simply love about Chronos is that the team developing it is extremely responsive and has definitely included our feedback on their product in the roadmap for its future releases. It’s one thing to use a good product that simply makes your life easier, and it’s a whole different thing when you know your feedback can actually shape future releases of that product.

P.S. We’re also looking at testing out their latest release of their social integration framework, Nexus very soon, and by the looks of it, it should be a great addition to our website.