When I first posted here at TechTalkBlogs, I mentioned that Tatham Oddie and myself would be doing an Atlas presentation at TechEd in Sydney this year.

The aim with this presentation, apart from showing some cool Atlas functionality, was to make the content very localised and applicable to the Australian audience.

One of the best ways to do this at such a technical event (and thanks to Frank Arrigo for the suggestion) is to provide some functionality that can be used to search for, and mark user groups within a specific area. Additionally, have a mechanism that easily allows you to see the next meeting date and topic of your selected usergroup.

So how will Atlas help in all of this?

Well, for one, allowing a Virtual Earth map like interface to easily browse around the country and select your user group/area of choice. Atlas provides an easy mechanism to do this.

Secondly, providing a simple textual search interface where you can search for a particular user group by area, linked with the map functionality. Again Atlas makes this easy, as well as providing auto-complete like functionality around this.

Finally, being able to mark your selected usergroup and somehow have the next meeting date and topic displayed for you. Atlas can make this easy too, and one of the ways to do this is to utilise gadgets. Using Atlas, we can provide a gadget that you can install onto sites such as Windows Live, which will provide you with a simple interface showing your user group, the next meeting date, and associated topic.

If your interested in finding out how its done, or just what it looks like, come and our presentation at TechEd this year.

Oh, by the way, if you are looking for nice intro on some other features of Atlas, have a look at this MSDN article http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/07/AtlasAtLast/