Welcome to Business Intelligence Developer Network (BIDN)! We've spent the last few months building our content library of blogs, articles and coding and are happy to finally release the site in its public beta forum today. To celebrate the start of BIDN, we have a few interesting contests for all of our users. You'll notice in the upper-right corner of BIDN a score. This score and ranking represents how active you are on the site. Each time you particpate in the site by doing something as simple as voting on an article, your points go up. Both of the contests that we're going to do give every user an equal chance to win a great prize since we're all starting on equal footing.
*** Pragmatic Works employees are not eligible for contests mentioned here. In other words, you will see guys like AdamJorgensen, DustinRyan, BrianKnight, DevinKnight, ShawnHarrison, KyleWalker, BradSchacht, MikeMollenhour, PatrickLeBlanc, AlbertoMunera and several others that aren't hurting your chances to win :).
Pragmatic Works is fortunate enough to be full of authors. One book that was recently released was Knight's 24 Hour Trainer 2008 Integration Services. For our first contest we'd like to give away 10 copies of our book to the first 10 users who reach Padawan status. You can see how to achieve points later in this article or by clicking About BIDN in the site menu. Each of the 10 books will be signed by all three authors (Devin Knight, Mike Davis and Brian night).
Padawan status is the first level above where you enter at. Most of our private beta test users have achieved the status in days and you can achieve it by writing content or helping others in the forums.
Like the other contest, we're basing the second contest on participation in BIDN.com. For the first 5 people who achieve Jedi Knight status they will receive an Amazon Kindle 6". I own a Kindle and love this device. Obviouly this i a bigger prize so it is tougher to achieve. This contest will run through May 1st 2010 just as a disclaimer.
The point of the contests are to encourage you to promote yourself on BIDN and share your knowlege with others. We will look for people who are playing the system and will reject points that are just silly at our discretion to prevent cheating.
When you write articles, they're a bit more formal and go through a longer review cycle than a blog. If you're already a member of BIDN, we've already set up a blog for you. All you have to do is click Add Blog Entry to use it while in the blog screen!
There are 5 levels of users on BIDN based on the level of contributing to the community and participation.
You can receive points from something as simple as voting on an article or blog to answering a question in the forums for a fellow member. Receive the most amount of points quickly by writing articles or blogs or having an answer that is marked as an answer.
Thanks and please spread the word!