At IQMS, we approach every User Group event with a healthy dose of both pride and anxiety. We're always excited and proud to be able to introduce new features and functionality to our loyal customers, and nervous about fulfilling our customers' (and our own) expectations. Our 2010 event proved worthy of both the planning and anxiety we had dedicated to the event.
This was our first User Group Meeting since the advent of the IQMS Online Community Server, our customer-driven software change request system. This collaborative tool has allowed increased visibility into our customers' specific needs relative to the needs and opinions of all participating customers. The Community Server has proved to be an extremely effective system for direction of software development and very popular with our customers.
Given the breadth of discussion topics on the Community Server, we planned the event to address the broadest range of topics. We even added a fourth set of sessions to address our new customer-driven Automation Group projects.
All managers from IQMS attend and participate in every User Group event, as do proprietary specialists in various areas of the EnterpriseIQ ERP system. We count on the expertise and professionalism of our staff to address our customers' concerns and requests in everyone’s best interests.
By all accounts, the 2010 event was a huge success, garnering comments from our attendees such as:
"I really enjoyed the open discussions. It was a fantastic way to further development and empower all the users and customers."
"Very good user group; the best one [yet]."
"A great experience, beneficial to both new & continued users."
"IQMS is more receptive to suggestions than any other ERP software I have ever worked with."
Unfortunately, a tragic event occurred behind the scenes. Dustin Fields, one of our very talented Application Programmers, who was in attendance and scheduled to participate in many of our sessions, passed away unexpectedly, of natural causes, on the morning of the first day of the conference. While we were devastated by his death, we also knew that our customers were literally ready and waiting for us to proceed as scheduled.
Our deepest sympathy goes out to Dustin's family and loved ones. And for IQMS, it's not easy to replace an elite multi-national software engineer (as he described his position to his family).
To the credit of our staff, we held to the edict: "the show must go on" and continued on with the conference, apparently to great success.
We will be revisiting User Group related topics in the next few blogs. Please feel free to comment; we look forward to your input as always.
Thanks, Randy Flamm
