We are very excited and proud to announce the newest and 2nd Director of Education for the ODUG, Darrell Hardy (@DarrellHardy).  Darrell has been a member of the ODUG almost since its beginning.  He has presented at one of our meetings and numerous code camps, and co-wrote the recent Professional DotNetNuke® 5 book by Wrox.  He typically attends OpenForce every year too!  For all these reasons and more, it is a no-brainer that Darrell fits into this position perfectly, where he will be recruiting and scheduling speakers for the ODUG meetings for now on.  Congratulations, Darrell!

Joe Brinkman announced on Monday that there was an Alpha release of DNN version 05.03.00 ready for everyone to check out.  Among the exciting new features are Taxonomy, Messaging, Site Map Provider, and the Telerik control wrappers.  Remember, this is Alpha software.  It's not meant for production, and you should expect bugs and other problems.  Se Joe's blog post for more details.

The DotNetNuke Corporation now has more help to build its sales and marketing strategies.  This time in the form of a disclosed amount of $8 million in funding from new investor UV Partners, along with August Capital and Sierra Ventures.

Come and support our very own Darrell Hardy as he competes with other area .Net speakers at the Regional Microsoft Speaker Idol competition.  The winner will go to the state competition.  There will be food, drinks, and .Net Jeopardy where you too can win prizes.

Joe Brinkman, Co-Founder of the DotNetNuke® Corporation, announced that the newest version of DotNetNuke® is ready and released to the public.  This is version 5.02.02, which proves to be a "stabilization release," meaning that there are many bugs and usability issues fixed in the web application framework.

GITCA is holding "fireside chats" for all of our members to attend. Right now, the content is SharePoint and LiveMeeting. Check it out!

The ODUG site has been upgraded to DotNetNuke® version 5.02.01 CE.  This involved quite a bit of downtime, as we had some disk space issues with our SQL Server.  However, our incredible host, Applied Innovations got us up and running in no time at all!

The Blog Module that ships with DNN is nearing a final realease.  This is a huge milestone, as when we get past this beta version, the Blog Module should finally be on the same playing field (or past) as most other blogging solutions on the Microsoft platform.  Some of the improvements include, enhanced Windows Live Writer support, categories, tagging, and a tag cloud.  Salivating yet?