Well, it’s been a couple of months since our last blog posting, and we have been really busy here at the CSI Headquarters in that time.  Among other things, those of us in the Sales & Marketing division have been gearing up for the Summit 2008.  Looking ahead, we have a lot of great things in store for you.  We feel that we have a very strong line-up of breakout session options and keynote speakers, and we have a great location picked out for our Conference Party.

The biggest challenge we’ve had is finding ways to improve upon the conference from last year.  For our first show, we thought it went very well, and the reviews and comments from last year’s attendees have confirmed that.  However, we did find a number of ways to improve the experience for this year’s attendees, and especially those who are returning from last year.

First, the breakout sessions are scheduled for 55 minutes instead of the full hour that they were scheduled for last year.  This will allow people more time to move between breakout rooms and to get settled in the next room.  We plan to have dedicated equipment in each room instead of having the instructors bring in their own equipment, which became an issue last year.  The sessions themselves are less about the “nuts and bolts” operation of the system (though there are still a few sessions about this) and concentrate more on ways to make the software more valuable to you in your facility.

If you do want more of a nuts and bolts approach, we are offering an optional one-day Spectrum NG Boot Camp this year for Summit attendees.  This will take place on the day after the Summit finishes, and will be an in-depth training which will cover all of the basic setup of the system.  We will start with setting up the Chart of Accounts and end the day with adding members and doing Point of Sale transactions.

We also tweaked the conference schedule a bit more by moving the Town Hall Meetings from the end of day two to the end of day one.  Last year, we had a lot of people comment that they wanted to attend the Town Hall Meetings to give feedback, network with other similar users, and request new features in the software, but they couldn’t because they had to leave to catch their flights.  By moving the Town Hall Meetings to the end of day one, we hope that more people can attend and we can find more and better ways to serve our customers.  Another thing we’re doing this year to help facilitate networking is to have “Birds of a Feather Luncheons”, in which people in similar positions will be seated together during lunch.

With all of these updates, we hope that this year’s Summit will be even better than last year’s, and that everyone who attends will have a great overall experience.  To date, we have just shy of 50 people registered for the Summit and almost 10 for the Boot Camp, so there is still plenty of room left for anyone else who would like to come.  For more information and to register, please visit our website at http://www.csisoftwareusa.com. 

I hope to see you there!

Written by, PJ Gustafson Director of Educational Services