 Since April 20th, Jamaica’s IT Pros have been gathered into a new Community. It is called Cstaff, and this initiative is based on the work of 16 IT Pros who wanted to join all the professionals in Microsoft applications and tools. In the words of Darin Silvera, one of its members, “a number of Jamaican technical firms and professionals have been interested for some time in working with Microsoft more closely than a Sales and Marketing relationship would allow.” Here are his impressions. Why did you gather a community? We needed to be connected to experts who knew products in detail, we needed to have access to resources, documentation & products and, most of all, we were interested in a synergistic relationship with Microsoft. Recently we saw moves by Microsoft to reach out the technical community here in Jamaica. They put on seminars and other events. Later a few of us got invitations from Microsoft to convene the Community Staff in Jamaica. When did it happen? The first community staff meeting took place on Thursday April 20th, 2006. How long for have you been working on that? So far we have had two meetings where we were introduced to what the CStaff is all about and what other communities had been doing in other Latin American countries. So the first two meetings were about setting things up. The plan for the next few meetings is to progressively deepen local participation from the Jamaican CStaff members. What are the most important topics you are interested in? We have upcoming meetings on the topics of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Intelligence, and on building applications with Microsoft Media Player. The CStaff is even balanced between developers and IT professionals, so perhaps the topics will be split between those two interest groups.
Of interest too are topics on Project Management. What is your goal as a new Community in Jamaica? The goal is to deepen the IT exposure and skills of CStaff members, as well as to operate as a facilitator of initiatives for the wider IT community in Jamaica. Joseph Livingstone, a member of this new community, shares similar interests with Silvero. After the meeting, and required by TechNet Flash editor, he said: “I joined the Community Staff to get access to the latest technology available from Microsoft and also to network with other players from other regions who are in the IT industry.” What are the most important topics you are interested in? Utilizing the latest technologies (programming and development using Visual Studio) to create solutions, gaining access to training and to markets for our solutions. What is your goal as a new Community in Jamaica? To increase the efficiency of my clients on the Microsoft platform, to work closer with Microsoft in order to understand their technologies; and to become more involved with Microsoft products.
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