The following certification courses are freely available on iTunes -
401 - basic Salesforce development
501 - Apex and Visualforce development

also available is some basic administration vidoes

please go to Salesforce videos on itunes

Well the User group is still very active and enthusiastic about Salesforce and how we can work together to make it better.
This was clearly in evidence yesterday by the turnout (our largest yet) and the lively discussion.

Kevin Smith gave a great overview of the new features coming in Winter 10.
Among these included -

• Quotes, create right from Opportunity and generate as PDF and email.
• Content - enhanced viewer and mobile availability
• Apex triggers on email and case comments
• Answers pilot - similar to Ideas
• Analytics - improved charting and hover details
• Lookup filters
• Workflow process visualizer now generally available

Please visit Salesforce Winter 10 community site for more details and examples.

Kelly Services gave an amazing overview of how they utilized APEX and Visualforce pages to quickly create dynamic dashboards for different management reporting.

Firepond gave a demo on their product to assist in pricing managment and pipeline.

Following this Kevin lead a session where users could put forward issues that they were facing and other members of the group could propose solutions.
The following is provided by Ronald Reed of J. D. Powers

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There was a request at the Detroit User Group meeting on 10/8 for some code that would automatically reassign the contact owner to the associated account owner when a new contact is created.  I’ve gone ahead and put together an unmanaged package that includes a trigger and a test class with 100% code coverage.  I would recommend that you install the package on your sandbox first to make sure it works as expected.  I’m in the process of submitting it as a free app to the appexchange but in the meantime you can use one of the following links to install to your environment:

Install to Sandbox:

https://test.salesforce.com/?startURL=%2Fpackaging%2FinstallPackage.apexp%3Fp0%3D04tS00000000Zu0

Install to Production:

https://login.salesforce.com/?startURL=%2Fpackaging%2FinstallPackage.apexp%3Fp0%3D04tS00000000Zu0

Feel free to email me if you have any questions or issues – ronald.a.reed@gmail.com

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We are looking for more participation in running and assisting with the User Group. A lot of people offered to help. If you are interested please contact   Kevin Smith or  Erica Stowe

Due to an overwhelming number of RSVP’s (more than double what we have seen in the past) we had to move the location of this week’s SFDC Detroit User Group meeting.

We have decided to move the meeting to Automation Alley in Troy.

Here is the address:

Automation Alley Headquarters
2675 Bellingham
Troy, MI 48083

Phone:  248-457-3200

http://www.automationalley.com/autoalley/Automation+Alley/contact+us.htm