We had a great meeting yesterday.  There were about twice as many people as the previous meeting.  Also, a few people canceled at the last minute so we are gaining traction.  I want to give a huge thanks to Windsor Windows for hosting and Astadia for presenting and providing lunch.  I am sorry that some of you were not able to make it you missed a very informative and engaging meeting.

To recap, we spent about an hour in 3 "birds of a feather" groups (Basic Admin, Advanced Admin, and Sales/Marketing).  After hashing out issues and raising questions to fellow users, each group reported back to the larger group what was discussed.  This was a great time oflearning and will be integrated into each of our meetings.  This is a perfect opportunity for you to bring co-workers to see how others are using the system and to gather ideas.  Just think, if you bring 3 people from your company you can get detailed insight into each group.  Free lunch and time out of the office is not a bad bargaining chip either.  As the group grows we will be able to break out into even more specific groups.  This will really help you get YOUR questions answered and dig deep in a short amount of time.

We finished up the meeting with Astadia providing a high level overview of some of the compelling new features in Spring '09.  In addition, techniques were discussed on how you can increase user adoption of Salesforce.com.

Like I said, the meeting was a great time of learning and I am sorry for those that missed it.  If you were at the meeting please post your comments to the blog so others can see the benefits of attending.  We will have our next meeting in the May/June time frame.  We will definitely have time for a birds of a feather session and I am still brainstorming what the learning/demo aspect will be.  Please send me any ideas you have for meeting topics as we want the group to be about what you are dealing with.  Also, let me know if you are interested in hosting the group at your place of business as well as helping to facilitate the planning and execution of meetings. 

Josh Van Heukelom (joshv@fostergrp.com)