Foo Fighters, chocolate truffles shaped like mushrooms and free booze.  How could it not be fun?

  I adored the clouds.  There were around 10 of them at the event.  The cloud balloons were attached to white backpacks worn by people in white puffy vests.   When I was heading home one night a few of the cloud girls were frolicing around making the clouds bounce in fun ways. 

The cupcakes at the welcome event were really good.  Do you know the secret to eating cupcakes?  A guy at the Fremont Sunday Market sells tee shirts saying he knows the secret.  I checked and it was the same method my family uses. 

Did you take the admin or developer certification exam?  I could not get in to the session, sigh.  Passers of the exam could get jackets.  I saw Barry Plum sporting a cool cap with a similar design that was quite fetching.   

I just learned how to insert photos (borrowed with permission from our own Brian Feldtman and Mountjoy on flickr)

I managed to avoid contact with the happy no software creature until the last day of dreamforce when there was nowhere to hide.  If you have a photo of you with the creature, send it my way!

I got home from DreamForce last night and plan to stay in my pj's until tomorrow when I need to go into the office.

I thought the event was great and so did everyone I talked to.  I thought Neil Young & Larry Brilliant were inspiring and that Malcom Gladwell was interesting.  I wanted to take him home and feed him.

I saw Brian and the "other" smoore (Steve) from Univar.  I thought they were going to win an Appy award because they were sitting near the stage!  Alas, they were not nominated.  Someday I want to win an appy - perhaps they will add a category for most insane admin.

I am now a HUGE Foo Fighters fan.  Dave Grohl said  something like "this is not like any company party I ever attended" and he was right.  It was lavish and fun.  There will little containers on the tables which I thought held condoms but NO, they held earplugs.  I hung out near the stage to sweat off the alcohol and chocolate before heading to the hotel.  The band was amazing, I now see why they are so popular.

Barry Plum, my co-leader and I are energized to get our group meeting regularly this year.  I think we should meet quarterly and he thinks every other month.  Either way, we are looking for a place to meet regularly - if you have access to a space that will hold our group (normally 30 to 40 people) let us know!   We want to have a consistent time and location this year.  I met the leader of the Seattle non-profit user group and liked him a lot.  We are thinking of holding a joint meeting with his group this year.

Because my flight was late, I got to chat with Judy and Dan from Green River Community College.  I am hoping they will show us how they use sfdc for their international student recruitment.  I also met Violet from Intermec, Steve from Curtis Consulting and saw Reschelle who is now at Concur.  I sat next to Steve from Perks.com on the plane.

I chatted with Deb Weller in one of the admin sessions, I liked her instantly. She has been at past user group meetings but I had not had the chance to talk to her. It made me realize that we need more chatting time at our meetings.  I also saw Renae, Jeremy and Courtney from our user group.  I should have taken little space needle stickers so we could recognize each other.  Next year perhaps!

I was on the panel for the session "intro to dreamforce for first time attendees".  My voice did not quaver & my knees did not shake so perhaps I am over my fear of public speaking!  Or perhaps it was that they served alcohol at the session.

Barry and I would like to hold a DreamForce review so you can share your favorite sessions and what you learned.  If you did not attend you can learn which sessions to view online.  Watch for the date!

I hope to see you soon!  Suzanne Moore

Next Meeting: July 18th 8am - 10am @ Business Objects in Bellevue.
Members, check your emails for the invite, non-members, sign up (over there, on the left)!

The June meeting went as well as could be expected for my first meeting.  The invitations went out late (sorry all) and vacation season also could have contributed to the smallish turnout.  I had 15 people on the sign up sheet, thanks to all of you for attending.

Chad from Pervasive gave some information about thier integration products.  He talked about DataSync, an application that will syncronize information between Salesforce.com and Quickbooks.  He also talked about an archiving product to bring data from Salesforce.com into a local database.  Then you can point Tableau at it, like we do, and see all your data in beautiful visualizations.

Linda from DataSea also presented her product.  DataSea is sort of like Google and your personal assistant mashed up into an input box.  The coolest thing about this product is that you ask it questions and it figures out what you want.  You don't just type "bob," you type "show me opportunities for bob in seattle" and it will give you the opportunities for all the bobs in Seattle.  It's pretty slick and they're recruiting Beta testers now. They even implemented a suggestion from the user group after Linda got back to the office that day (yes, it now searches attached notes).  Contact Linda if you want to be a tester.

Tech corner is not taking off like I'd hoped.  I haven't gotten any feedback about people being interested, so I'm going to have to come up with some of my own topics.  Next post will have some juicy technical bits in it, I promise.

I'm also going to be sending out a survey to all members next week.  I'd like to get a sense of what's working and what's not for the meetings.  Should they be longer and less often or monthly and brief?  Do we like mornings or do other times work better?  And, of course, the ultimate question, east side or west side?

Thanks for listening,

Barry

The Seattle User Group will be having it's June meeting on Friday, 6/20 from 8am to 10am at the Bellevue Hilton.  It was very short notice when I sent the invites out to the group in general and a lot of people are on vacation so I am expecting a slightly smaller group than normal.  So, if anyone wants to swing by that hasn't confirmed yet, please do so.

The meeting will be sponsored by Pervasive Software, an integration partner with Salesforce.com.  We will talk about the Summer '08 release and there will also be a presentation by DataSea International.  They are looking for Beta testers for their AppExchange application.

The July meeting will be held on Friday, 7/18 from 8am to 10am at Business Objects in Bellevue.  I will send the address out to everyone in the invite, so if you're interested and haven't joined the group yet, you still have time.  It will be sponsored by Business Objects, a Business Intelligence partner with Salesforce.com.

I didn't see any comments from my last post about the Tech Corner.  Not sure if that's a lack of interest or if people just aren't reading the Blog.  I'll mention it in the meeting and judge the interest from there.

See you all on Friday!
Barry

I am in the process of scheduling meetings for June and July.  Ideally we will get on a more regular schedule for meetings moving forward.  I'd like to have them at least Bi-Monthly if not Monthly.  Right now we're looking at 6/18 as the date for June.

The other exciting thing in the pipe is Summer '08.  For those of you given a taste of VisualForce last year at DreamForce, it's finally here.  You can create custom pages inside of Salesforce using the built in look and feel of Salesforce, or you can create completely unique and customized page.  Full release notes for Summer '08 are here.

I would also like to start posting technical information here more regularly and will be taking requests via email or comments to the blog.  If you're interested in complex workflow formulas, APEX code, VisualForce, or even some of the more technical aspects of security in Salesforce, let me know and I'll post about it.  My email address is bplum@tableausoftware.com and obviously you can comment at the bottom of this post to request a topic.

Thanks, and look for cool things here in the future.
Barry

Meeting Thursday October 25th DreamForce Review

• Help decide the agenda/sponsors for this year's meetings.
• If you attended DreamForce, come and share what you saw and learned.
• If you did not attend DreamForce, com find out which sessions to view online.
• Meet my potential co-leader for our user group.  Show him your love, buy him a beer so he will say YES.
• David VanCott the NW Customer Success Manager from Salesforce will be bringing a special guest.
• We will hold a drawing for fun prizes.

4 to 6PM at Dad Watson's in Fremont neighborhood of Seattle (click here for a link to their site/map/directions).

This is a no-host meeting but sponsors are welcome to come, schmooze, and buy us beer!

Let me know if you plan to attend!

Suzanne

smoore@kpcorp.com

Here are notes from out meeting: We met at F5, thanks to Michelle Eldgridge for hosting. Salesforce.com and ExactTarget provided box lunches. Skip O'Neill from ExactTarget presented info about email marketing. He was fabulous.

David VanCott from Salesforce.com updated us on the sfdc calendar and cracked us up by referring to a brainiac pal as a Data Therapist. Then Judy Loehr from salesforce gave some best practice tips. She relocated to Seattle from SF in December and will be a great resource for us! Barry failed to wear his kilt to the meeting (maybe in July...) We had a lot of first time attendees, I hope they felt welcomed and will come again!

Here is how to get to the breeze presentations about marketing from last year's DreamForce that Judy recommended (she referred to one as "a bit dry" then later mentioned that she was the speaker at that session). How could we not adore someone with that sense of humor?

Go to www.successforce.com / Browse by Role / Marketing Executive / Best Practice Presentations from Dreamforce. The three she recommended are: Developing Integrated Marketing Reports and Dashboards, Become An Expert: Campaign Management & Website Integration, and Open It, Read It, Buy It: Email Marketing with the AppExchange.

Judy and David told us about DreamForce and it sounds fabulous! I am already getting excited about it and we have months to go. DreamForce is September 16-19th. They also talked about the Idea Exchange. Here is a link to it, go vote on something! http://ideas.salesforce.com/

We are planning the next meeting for July. Something late afternoon so we can stick around afterwards and chat.

Here are the follow-up things I passed along, if I missed something, let me know! Judy is going to provide some info on InterWeave to Barry. David or Judy are going to pass along Rogers feedback about support for sfdc lab create AppEx products. I added 2 new members to our group for Roger.

Enjoy the sunshine while it lasts! Suz