With about 15 attendees from 13 differenct companies, I think I can call our first user group meeting a resounding success!  Thank you to each and every one of you for your participation in that meeting and for providing me with plenty of ideas for future meetings.  Among the things we discussed:

www.crmsuccess.com - Have you visited crmsuccess.com yet?  If not, do take some time to visit.  There are message boards full of users with solutions to your Salesforce.com challenges. You'll also find Salesforce.com's published tips & tricks, videos of presentations from Dreamforce, and, of course, the Orange County User Group blog!

Dependent Picklists - make entering data in Salesforce simpler and more efficient by minimizing the sometimes massive drop-down lists that grow, as we do, in our use of the product.  Available in all editions, dependencies are defined at the field level.  Custom fields may be either controlling for dependent fields, but standard fields may only be controlling.  We demonstrated the creation of a dependency during the meeting.  For more information, see 'Dependent Field Considertions' in the online help.

Campaign Builder - the coolest new tool for marketing folks like me. This tool enables you to skip the report-export-import exercise we used to have to go through to add contacts to a campaign.  Now, you can add members quickly and easily by creating a view within the campaign 'manage members' tab!  You can also mass update member status. If you prefer to do it from a report you've created - you can!  Simply open you  report and click 'add to campaign.'  It's really that easy!  Campaign Builder is available in Enterprise, Professional, and Developer Editions.

Formula Fields & AppExchange - we were lucky to have Randy Case, Sr. Sales Engineer with Salesforce.com in attendance at the meeting.  He spent some time showing us how to create and use formula fields on page layouts and in reports.  He also took some time to show us around the AppExchange.  Many expressed interest in learning more about the AppExchange in upcoming meetings.

One thing we kind of discussed, but didn't really resolve is what our charter as a group might be.  In reviewing the forms you all filled out I see that we are a pretty equal split of Professional and Enterprise users, many of us are administrators, and most of us are interested in the User Group as a place to bring our challenges and have them addressed by others who have been there. 

We did have a brief discussion on how often we should meet and while we initially said 'quarterly' I think we should try every other month for a while and see how that works.  If it's too much, we can cut it back to quarterly.  I will send out the next meeting date to all soon.  We didn't have any volunteers for meeting space (I would offer my office, but I don't think you all want to drive up to Monrovia!), so we will continue to meet at the Salesforce.com office for as long as they will allow and can accommodate us.

If you have anything in particular that you'd like the group to address at the next meeting, please email me at barbara.kuntz@miyachiunitek.com or post a reply to this blog!  Looking foward to seeing you all in March.

Barbara