Party with the Pros is the brainchild of Doug Spindler, a San Francisco Bay Area technology consultant with twenty-five years experience. His specialty has been migrations – Novell to Window Server, Linux to Windows Server and Windows Server and workstation upgrades. (He’s known for getting things done.) Doug’s clients have included Microsoft, UCSF Medial Center, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, GTE, PacBell, UC Berkeley, and Lawrence National Laboratory.
In addition to his consulting practice, Doug is a technology instructor at two San Francisco Bay Area colleges, and a frequent speaker at TechEd, Windows Connections, TechMentor and several international conferences. Doug also writes on technology. His articles have appeared in Windows IT Magazine, Network World, Network Computing and Networking Solutions. Doug has been has appeared on ABC and NBC evening news and has had two features on the evening news.
In the 1990s Doug founded the San Francisco NT Users Group in San Francisco (SFNTUG). As SFNTUG membership increased, unfortunately the meeting’s room capacity did not. Doug being innovative and quick to find a solution created several new user groups and used Microsoft Media Server to simulcast live the San Francisco meetings to 11 other locations on the west coast. As members of SFNTUG moved to other states they realized just how valuable a user groups is for IT Professionals. With Doug’s guidance user groups have been established in other states.
It has now almost been a decade and a half since SFNTUG was created. There are now over 5,000 members just in the San Francisco Bay Area and several thousand more Nation wide representing over 10 million desktop computers. As the technology industry matured and people made their careers out as server/network administrators, Doug realized the user group was no longer an appropriate format for a group of professionals. So in 2002 Doug founded the Pacific IT Professionals, or Pac IT Pros, a professional association for IT Professionals.
Microsoft has contacted Doug five times to create an international IT professional association. Doug still has hopes that it is going to happen. If you have any comments, you are welcome to contact Doug at douggg@comcast.net or at Party with the Pros.
From the moment, that Bart got his first Commodore 64 he got addicted to computers. In his young years, he participated in many developer contests and was quite successful. After his technical study, he has chosen Nijenrode University for a study of Business Administration. During his extensive international sales career, he graduated from a 2 years Executive MBA at Erasmus University RSM, The Netherlands.
In 1995, he got his first Palm handheld and moved in the late 90’s to Pocket PC’s and Smart phones. During this period, the Mobile Devices community in the Benelux grew steeply from 100 members to over 45.000 members late 2004 when he stepped down from the 3-persons board. He was recognized as strong contributor to the community and received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award (2004-now).
With more than 11 years of community experience, he was asked to support the American startup Culminis. He was instrumental in creating strong partnership relations and building a Greenfield operations in EMEA from zero to over 1 million IT Professionals via 107 user groups in 35 countries.
In the last 4 years he has successfully initiated and guided new user groups in many countries and was a joint-owner of ModernNomads a business oriented community for mobile devices.
Early 2007 he has started a new private initiative called CommunityWorks next to running his own consultancy firm MobilityWorks (since 2004). Bart has extensive knowledge and experience in the field of IT user groups, both offline and online, and offers networking, collaboration, start-up support, consultancy and services independent of their particular technical focus.
This knowledge and personal network he shares at no costs with user group leaders around the world in order to build a better community environment for user group members, user group leaders and vendors.
Well known for his knowledge and network in the community eco-system he was asked to be a speaker at TechEd 2007 in Barcelona, Spain. Next to that he is a regular speaker on technical and marketing topics.
If you want to get in touch with Bart, please drop him an email at bart.martens@mobilityworks.nl or at Party with the Pros
