Sometimes you have a week where you don’t stop. They happen every so often and you don’t really look forward to them. One of mine for 2012 was last week. Whilst I did not look forward to the week in general, the different activities were all expected to be great. It started out with SDL Innovate in London, return to Amsterdam for some office time and the SDL Tridion User Group Benelux and then SDL Innovate Amsterdam later in the week. Both the Innovate events were much of a muchness so I was more taken with the London event, both in terms of the content (I had not seen any of it before) but also in terms of the venue. The London event was held at the Landmark Hotel in London which is just superb.
For the SDL Tridion User Group (STUG <- do we like that?), we held our first user group for the Benelux. There have been two user groups springing up in the last year elsewhere in the world and this is the first for the Benelux. Dominic Cronin, of Indivirtual, and I decided to see if we could start one up for the wider community. Not really with a view to run it ourselves forever but to see if the community would like one and if there was enough enthusiasm to continue to hold events and sessions. Our first event – sponsored by Indivirtual and SDL, went well and around 20-25 people attended which was spot on for our target of attendees. We introduced the session and then let SDL Product Manager, Alexandra Popova, give us an overview of the 2013 release. After that we dived, in groups, into what we want from the user group going forward. Below you will find the results of that session which gives us great input into the future of the user group.
- Experiences
- Implementation Experience
- Presentations real user experience
- Find out what people are doing
- Input from users
- workshops
- business cases
- coding conventions/best practices
- knowledge sharing
- report ERs and discuss
- users feedback / ichallenge!
- Share Roadmap
- Share Project Information
- Share Technical/Functional Implementation
- Motivation
- Free stuff / goodies!
- Curiosity
- Turn listeners into contributor
- Grow
- More “real” users
- Reach out, promote to functional
- People
- Who is who
- interaction
- networking
- More functional
- Event
- Time of day?
- Technical sessions
- Inside info SDL
- Peers
- Peer review/advice
- Product
- Roadmap
- hands on workshop
- pre-configured VMs
Going forward, we plan to hold one evening session per quarter and perhaps additional sessions on other topics (technical deep dives) or social events in-between the quarterly events.
To be involved you just need to turn up to one of the events we hold and you can find out about those by joining our SDL Tridion User Group Benelux LinkedIn group.