Sydney CRM Usergroup Meeting a great Success!

Well tonight we had the first Sydney CRM usergroup meeting in over a year and it was a great success! We had 25 people join us and they ranged from End Users, customers, Partners, ISV’s, MCT’s to individual CRM consultants & contractors! We were fortunate enough to have both CRM MVP’s there to participate and answer questions (OK so Guy had no choice as he was running the group, but it was great to see George Doubinski there as well!).

The ratio of men to women was much higher than other usergroups I have attended with 5 of the 25 attendees being female! :) There was a number of dedicated CRM folk who used to attend the CRM usergroup previously, but also a lot of new faces as well – which was fantastic.

The conversations flowed well as we tested the round table set up rather than the traditional Lecture theatre setup, and I was pleasantly surprised at everyone’s openness to the idea of opening up the usergroup to become a Virtual Usergroup using something like Live Meeting to share with other participants who may not be able to make it to the usergroup in person (either because they are not in Sydney or not able to get to North Ryde) so look out for more details on that for our next session.

Guy did a great run through of the CRM Accelerators, focusing tonight on the Events Management, RSS Notifications, eService and Goal Planning ones. It was great to hear everyone discuss the modules potential, and how they could be extended in different scenarios. If you need to download the Accelerators they can be found at https://www.codeplex.com/crmaccelerators.

We spent a bit of time talking about what sort of sessions everyone would like to see coming up in future usergroups and there was a call out for people to present on how they ‘dogfooded’ CRM – so implementers and partners showing how they use CRM themselves. Also a request for how to use tools like Silverlight & WPF to extend CRM, why that is even of value and what sort of solutions it would apply to. Also a request came up for a session on the most amazing thing you have seen CRM used for – I think there may be a competition potential in that one so will see what we can do on that front! If you have any other ideas for sessions please feel free to add them as comments below or direct to either myself or Guy.

We quickly discussed everyone's thoughts on topics for Philip Richardson’s visit to the Usergroup in March and nothing definitive was given so please feel free to add comments to this post if you have any questions for Philip or topics you would like to see covered and I will get them to him before he visits our Shores! :)

I would like to thank everyone for coming out tonight – especially on such a rainy Sydney night on the first day after a long weekend. The energy in the usergroup was fantastic and it was great to chat with such a great range of people that use CRM. A big thank you to Guy for kicking off this usergroup once again – I am so excited to see it back up & running!