We have wrapped up another successful event to celebrate the Top Contributors of the HP Support Communities. Last week from Sep 26-28, 2018, we had the chance to meet some of the Experts of the English Community during the HP Meetup 2018 at the Hotel Kimpton Palomar in San Diego, CA.

On March 28, a record number of HP employees swarmed the HP Support Forum to participate in #HPExpertDay and help as many customers as possible — 561 employees to be exact!

During that day, here's what was achieved:

We have some exciting news to share: the first #HPExpertDay of 2018 will be on March 27-28!  

With winter solstice upon us, we wanted to say:

The HP Support Forum has taken another trip around the sun – happy 9th birthday to the community!

From #HPMeetup17 to #HPExpertDay, we had another amazing year.

If you have any other favorite memories of year 9, please do share them in the comments.  Thank you for yet another wonderful year!

Last week, from September 20-21, 483 HP employees from around the globe logged onto the typically peer-to-peer HP Support Forum to help as many customers as possible over a 24 hour period on the final Expert Day of 2017.  How impactful was this?  

One of the privileges that the HP Experts Program offers is access to the latest technology directly from HP through their Product Loan Program, which loans out the latest HP technology to the most active members of the community.  

The Product Loan Program allows first-hand access to HP's latest products.  Experts can choose between desktops, notebooks, tablets, and printers.  By using them for about a year, I have real world experience with latest HP technologies, as well as tech components and software. Therefore, I can better help members who are having issues.

However, the best part of this is that after using them for about a year, you have the unique chance to keep them walking... and benefit your local community by donating the products to charity.

Whether it's sipping on hot chocolate or egg nog, donning ugly sweaters, hitting the slopes, or however you spend the holidays with your loved ones, we hope that you have a good one and wish you the best in 2017!

From our family to yours...

Today marks 8 years since the launch of the HP Support Forum -- that means happy birthday to our community!

It seems like just yesterday that we were kicking off #HPMeetup16 in Beijing and Grenoble, then making our way over to Seattle, so it seems too soon for me to write this, but -- #HPMeetup16 has concluded with a bang in Barcelona, São Paulo, and Dublin!  Where has the time gone?  I guess it really does fly when you're having a good time ;)

We are pleased to announce that the next #HPExpertDay will be on September 21st. That means that for 24 hours straight starting at 7am on September 21st, the very HP employees who create and support your HP products will roll up their sleeves and swarm the HP Support Forum to try their darndest to answer all your toughest tech questions.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm still reeling from the excitement of last week's HP Experts Meetup in Seattle.  Following the fantastic Meetups of the French community in Grenoble and the Chinese and Korean communities in Beijing earlier this spring, the English community descended upon Seattle for our own adventure, and boy, does this crew know how to have a good time!

If you’ve been hanging out in the community, you’ll know that our HP Experts are a dedicated group of volunteers whose passion is helping our customers each and every day.  To show our appreciation for this amazing group of folks for all that they do for our community, we host meetups for them annually, where we fly them out to a destination for a few days of fun, because how cool is it to meet the folks who you’ve been chatting with on the HP Support Forum, in person?!

Following last year’s epic Global HP Experts Meetup in San Francisco, with Experts from all seven language communities attending, we decided to switch things up this year — rather than one big global meetup, this year, we’re having several regional meetups for each of our language communities.  To kick off the regional meetups for #HPMeetup16, the Chinese and Korean communities met up in Beijing this past month, and the French community met up in Grenoble!

Is a question that I get asked a lot.  Um, only the most awesomest stuff evar!!   It's hard to believe, but this week, I actually celebrated both my 7th anniversary of being a community manager (CM), as well as my 1 year anniversary of being one at HP.  I often get asked what exactly a CM is and does, so I thought that with these anniversaries, now was more a fitting time than ever to reflect, shed some light, and share a bit about my story.  I could probably write a novel about CMs and community management, but I'll try to keep it to one blog post. 

With a new year upon us, we wanted to freshen up our look, so I'm excited to announce – we've launch a new look for the HP Support Forum!
 
The new homepage features brighter colors and a cleaner design.  We wanted to make the page easier to navigate and more user-friendly:
 

Design changes include...

Welcome to 2016!!  I hope that everyone had an amazing holiday and got to spend lots of quality time with friends and family.

While I'm wishing you a happy new year, I also wanted to take a moment to reflect on 2015.  It's been a big year for the community.  From new team members, to all of the great virtual and in-person events, the community was filled with a lot of changes and excitement.   Here are some other highlights...

We grew in many ways.  

More members, more posts, more solutions...  Activity grew by over an astounding 50%.  That's over 50% more posts and solutions!

More Windows 10 tips coming at you in this episode of HP How To For You, and this one is specifically around Microsoft Edge features!  Learn more about how to make web notes, create reading list, use reading view, and then some.  You can also see how @Bill_F looks in a blue mustache and what @SE_Video does in her sparetime online:

Like what you see?  Subscribe to their YouTube channel for new episodes every two weeks!