Web User Group is the youngest user group in Croatian MS Community. I’ve founded it in December 2009 with support of Microsoft Croatia. Meetings are scheduled on the third Thursday of each month (except during the summer, in July and August).

Web User Group covers wide range of topics in the web-development area, including design, slicing, server and client technologies, tools and server software, services and libraries. The main focus is on Microsoft ASP.NET and Silverlight, but many standard technologies supported by Microsoft tools and platform are covered as well, like HTML, JavaScript and jQuery. Our wide topic area allows us to be appealing for a wide range of people, including web-designers, front-end and back-end developers, system engineers as well as decision makers.

Online

The group’s official web site can be found on www.webug.com.hr (in Croatian). Users and visitors can subscribe to the mailing list. Via mailing list, we inform people about meetings, benefits for user group members and availability of post-meeting materials.

Every meeting is recorded both video and audio and the video and screencast are available on our web site about a week after the meeting. There is also a Silverlight application that plays two synchronized streams at the time (video and screencast) – application is called Dual Streaming and it is developed especially for Web User Group.

PowerPoint presentations and photos from each meeting are available on official web site as well.

During every meeting we provide free online participation using LiveMeeting for people outside Zagreb and neighboring countries.

Collaboration

We work closely with DPE department of Microsoft Croatia and they support our activities with logistics, funding (beer and pizzas) and ideas. LiveMeeting broadcast and meeting recording is powered by Microsoft Innovation Center in Varaždin, and we give away their vouchers and discounts as door prizes.

We are full member of INETA Europe and integral part of Croatian MS Community. We work closely with them on promotion (for example, activities during WinDays conference in April) and organize shared group meetings (with SharePoint group in March and SQL/DEV group in April), in order to promote each other.

We collaborate with many other organizations and companies, especially event organizers. We are trying to arrange benefits for our members, like discounts, free vouchers, books, subscriptions and other deals. In seven months, we had more than 20 arrangements of that kind.

Our work is supported by several IT media in Croatia and numerous bloggers.

Meetings and people

Meetings are held in Microsoft Croatia office in the biggest room called Dante, which can accommodate up to 50 people and it is usually full. Registration system allows registration for 70 people, since some of them cancels in the last minute or simply do not show up. Usually, the interest exceeds the capacity of the room (the record was 95 registrations in February 2010, unfortunately, 25 of them on the waiting list didn’t have an opportunity to come). Currently, this is the biggest user group in Croatia.

Our mailing list has more than 350 active and valid subscribers that regularly receive announcements (not more than three times a month, two times on average).