On Nov 19, Office System MVP Tian-An Tan spoke at the Digital Accessibility Public Forum and Training Workshop at Society for the Physically Disabled (SPD), reaching out to 80 NGOs and volunteer organizations working with people with disabilities. Tian-An was one of the thought leaders in digital accessibility who stepped up to highlight the importance of digital empowerment and equal access for people with disabilities.Guest-of-honor - Mr Leong Keng Thai, Deputy Chief Executive of Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore was present at the event.

In Tian-An’s session on ‘Ease of Access - Accessibility Features on Windows Operating Systems’, he showcased  text to speech, speech recognition and touch / handwriting features of Windows OS, leading on to how Office 2007's ribbon and productivity enhancements can benefit challenged and normal users of Windows and Office.

This event had provided an excellent platform for greater knowledge and garners awareness for people with disabilities. Microsoft sponsored the technology and hardware at the computer labs there and had been actively supporting SPD in their outreaches.

Thailand Management Infrastructure MVP Suttipan Passorn has been working with the ThaiAdmin.org Community to conduct a series of free training courses for the ‘IT Training Foundation 2009: Sharpen Your Skills, Brighten Children’s Future!’ Program in November. All course fees that are received from the training courses are donated to the needy children in Thailand for their future education.

His first series of training course kicked off on Nov 7-8 where he covered ‘Best Practice Design & Implementation of Active Directory 2003 to 2008 R2'’, reaching out to 45 attendees.

His 2 other courses are scheduled to take place in late November whereby he will speak on

-   Best Practice in Operation Guide in Active Directory Backup & Disaster Recovery Windows 2003-2008 (Nov 21-22)

-   Administrative Guide in Design and Configure of Group Policy Object (Nov 28-29)

For more information, click here for his blog entry.

Regards,

SEA MVP Team

On November 11^th, Microsoft Singapore organized and hosted a half-day session to explore the Portal capabilities of Microsoft’s SharePoint Server 2007 with some of the best experts in Singapore. 2 Singapore SharePoint MVPs (Steve Sofian and Randy Williams) each delivered a 45 min presentation on the benefits of using SharePoint for your Internet Sites, reaching out to 80 attendees comprising of web developers, web designers and also senior IT managers responsible for application developments.

Steve spoke on ‘Unified Platform for your Web Presence’ where he shared how SharePoint Server 2007, not only provides an optimized business productivity infrastructure, but is also able to provide a unified enterprise platform to help business communicate, collaborate and interact with customers and partners around the world. Randy’s session was on ‘Designing SharePoint websites’ where he provided an overview on the major design considerations when branding SharePoint as your Internet-facing solution and a comparison summary of the primary design tools used..

Regards,

SEA MVP Team

Please refer to 'Announcing our September Early Warning Signal (EWS) Apprentice (Part 1 of 2)' for the first part of this newsletter.

EWS HALL OF FAME 

Country	EWS Apprentice	# of EWS Reported since Jan 2009 till present
Malaysia	Visual C# MVP Chan Ming Man
Malaysia	SharePoint Server MVP Chee Meng Yong, Patrick
Malaysia	Expression MVP Kok Chiann
Malaysia	Consumer Security MVP Donna Buenaventura
Malaysia	Project MVP Eric Ku
Malaysia	Visual Basic Wei Min Chan
Singapore	ASP/ASP.NET MVP Jeffery Tay
Singapore	SharePoint Server MVP Loke Kit Kai
Singapore	Silverlight Michael Sync
Singapore	SharePoint Server MVP Riwut Libinuko
Singapore	SQL Server Pom Figueroa
Singapore	Directory Services Sainath Sathya
Sri Lanka	Visual C# MVP Chandana Athauda
Sri Lanka	System Center Configuration Manager MVP Shaminda Illangantilaka
Sri Lanka	SQL Server  PPG Dinesh Asanka
Philippines	ASP/ASP.NET Vincent Maverick Durano
Philippines	SharePoint Services Elczar Pelarta Adame
Philippines	Enterprise Security MVP Joseph Felix Velasco Pacamarra
Philippines	Windows Live Platform MVP Sanchez Roman Garcia Canlas
Philippines	ASP/ASP.NET  John Patrick Oliveros
Thailand	Access MVP Henry Habermacher
Indonesia	Client App Dev Ridi Ferdiana

Legend: 

Here is what some of our NEW EWS Apprentices has to say:

“I got a reasonable response time for my concern as it involves the MSDN team where users can't download files from MSDN despite having "active" accounts. The good thing with this one is I not only got a response from the system but gave me steps needed to address the problem.” - ASP/ASP.NET  John Patrick Oliveros

“ I am very passionate about windows , from kernel level to the user mode API, I keep dwelling into the processes, threads and their activity. I didn’t know that Microsoft support EWS for a long time , I understand the importance of EWS and how it will alert customers using Microsoft products and the engineers themselves in Microsoft about the issues. I am very much impressed with Microsoft Connect process” - Directory Services Sainath Sathya

“I am blessed of an opportunity to share a tiny dot in the huge picture of SharePoint through the Early Warning Signal. A fulfilling boulevard that gives us a chance to advocate in the advancement of the products we are passionate with.”- SharePoint Services Elczar Pelarta Adame

“Whenever, I ran into issues with microsoft products, I used to publish to them in my blog. Then found this EWS where I will get feedback as well as it is will help community. So I think EWS is a great way to inform Microsoft about their tool so that they will improve for better usage.”
- SQL Server  PPG Dinesh Asanka

Will November be another record breaking month for our SEA MVPs? Stay tuned!