Last week, while at the PASS Board of Directors meeting, I became privy to some inside information on a merger of a user group organization with PASS. No, it isn’t the usual rumor involving the IOUG that gets mentioned a few times a year, and it isn’t something involving Sharepoint either. I’ve been dying to tell everyone about this but we were told that we could not say a word until the end of the month. Well, the month ended yesterday, and I have decided to go ahead and blog about the news.
PASS will be merging with the Exchange Users Group effectively immediately. Plans are already in place to have the transition completed before the PASS Summit in November. The Summit will have a dedicated track to Exchange as well, meaning we need to slightly adjust how we put out our upcoming call for abstracts.
The newly combined organization will get a new name, PASSÉ, with an extra emphasis on the ‘E’ for Exchange.
“We are extremely excited to be merging with the Exchange users,” PASS President Rushabh Mehta remarked, “and we look forward to the PASSÉ Summit this November in Seattle.”
When asked if he felt that perhaps the maybe the new group would be too large to mobilize, and likely fall behind the times as a result, Mehta replied “…are not going to let PASSÉ become outdated or fall out of fashion with people that have an interest in SQL and Exchange, two products that blend very well together.” No terms of the merger were disclosed during our meetings last week, other than the new name and the joint Summit effort that has already begun.
And if you are still not awake yet, grab another sip of coffee and check your calendar.
Happy April Fool’s Day!
BTW, the idea for this did come from the board meetings, it was the brainchild of Rick Heiges, and i want to make sure he has all the credit for PASSE.
Hmm. PASSE sounds bad, really bad. In my opinion something which is PASSE isn’t modern, fresh, improv. Really strange for me.