Blogs

Jeremiah Owyang, a well known web strategist, writes in his blog about support communities, and how these platforms are about to change. He means that now is a time where there are a lot of opportunities to start using these communities in a way that will strengthen both the value for the users and the strength of the brand of the company that runs the community.

I think that an important thing is to see the users’ needs and create the community from those needs: “Community members first, company second”, as Owyang put it. This means that it should be easy to use and easy create content, from a user’s perspective.

By collaborating you can get ideas from other people and develop a wider knowledge about your work and possibly also increase the speed in your daily work. We are trying to see what our customers want and do things from that. Hopefully we can take advantage of the creativity you as a user of our software’s have and do something unique of it.

When you visit the download webpage for CET Designer you will now have an option where to download from. You will see a drop-down list with two alternatives: North America and Europe. Choose the one that is closest to your location. This will enhance the download speed and you will be able to get the application a lot faster.

Here's where you'll find your alternatives.

In software development one of the most difficult tasks are quality assurance (QA). The number of possible combinations of hardware and software are huge. And then we add version numbers which makes the task to escalate from hard to scary. Even if something works for one combination it does not mean that it works for the other. Wow! Something has to be done here? I am not kidding! We need to find the needle in the haystack! There are many great software developers and innovators in this world and most of them are friendly and love to do good things. I wish that 2010 deliver improved QA possibilities for our software heroes.

After a long month of working to get everything ready for the release, we are finally here!

A couple of hours ago, we released CET2.3.

We still have a lot of ideas and things to achieve but it really does feel like we are getting further and further forward every release!

Now we have to keep our focus and continue with the projects we have, There are lots of challenges ahead!

RSS feed is something really nice and it really help you to follow a lot of websites and blogs without you having to visit every single one of them to get the latest updates. Here at Configura.com we love RSS and you can find a number of different feeds here.

A new cool feature I’ve added is that you now can get the latest updates from our Newsroom directly to your mailbox. Just go to our RSS page, where you’ll find all our feeds, there is a link where you can sign up for email updates – or just follow this link and fill out your email address.

And if you haven’t understood the good thing with RSS, take a look at this video from commoncraft:

Now we are back into the daily routine after User Conference. We have a lot of interesting materials from the conference with us back home and we are working at full speed to make it available to you. The various breakout sessions were something that was appreciated of you who attended and Maureen Soules, Paul Riches and Raza Syed did a very good job. We hope to soon be able to publish videos from these sessions.

Brian Bosley did an interesting and very nice presentation of how to courage to change, Molly has written about this earlier. Brian's presentation will also be available here at configura.com. Did you find anything especially interesting or any special presentation that you would like to see? If so, just let me know and I'll see what I can do .

In the meantime, I recommend you to take some time and look at all the nice renderings that were submitted to rendering contest.
Or you can take a look at our gallery from the conference.

Joey Shimoda:

1. The technical skill, fluency, or style exhibited by a virtuoso (a person who has a special knowledge or skill in a field) or a composition.
2. An appreciation for or interest in fine objects of art.

1. Ridicule - they're laughed at or ignored for changing
2. Opposition - they encounter outright opposition to their change (most "average" people give up on change at this point)
3. Acceptance - the "non-average" bust through to acceptance - self-acceptance of change, and gaining the acceptance of others

... So we last left off with me writing a bit about yesterday's morning sessions ... so much has happened since then.

First, check out some of the conference photos on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/configura/sets/72157622364473551/ ... stay tuned because I'll be posting photos from last night's dinner (yes, pics of Swedish Punsch Toast! - should I post the video as well?!  ) and "social pages" shots of our esteemed attendees!

So, yesterday Brian Bosley gave this incredible talk at the conference. It was late in the afternoon and everyone needed a serious sugar snack, but Brian's talk practically yanked me out of my seat. I went into note-taking over-drive.

 If you don't know Brian, he's this fantastic Grand Rapids, Mich.-based speaker and trainer - but he travels all over North America and probably beyond for his work. Companies ask Brian to speak because he is so good at talking about change - how to embrace it, not fear it. Some pearls from his presentation:

"Your biggest obstacle to greatness is what you did yesterday."

"Embrace 'creative destruction' - destroy what you created yesterday to build something better tomorrow."

"The modes of change:

1. Shock - it's a way to change, but it's reactive. You're not in control. That's not good.
2. Evolution - it's still reactive but you're getting on board. The problem is, you might be trying to hop a train that's already left the station. That's not the greatest.
3. Anticipation - true creators and leaders anticipate change - indeed, they themselves may be the catalyst for change. This is where we want to be.

... which one do YOU most identify with?"

There's more - lots more. Good stuff. Wanted to give you a taste of it - more in a bit.

Live from Las Vegas,

Molly

Today is the second and final day for the user conference and we are looking forward to another exiting day with a lot of interesting presentations. Yesterday was a really good day and I think that all of us that attended the sessions and the presentations are satisfied how the day went on.

Last night we ended the day with cocktails and then dinner. Everybody seemed to have a really good time; the food was good as well as the Swedish flaggpunsch that we had. It was also nice get to talk with the user of CET Designer and get to know them a little bit better.

Here are a few photos from day one; more will be uploaded later on.

So, CET Designer folks across North America beyond ...

Configura's 2nd annual User Conference in sunny, blue-sky-beautiful Las Vegas is off to a running start at The Venetian/Palazzo - wow - unbelievably lux  and the room rate was way less than those teeny-tiny hotel rooms in Manhattan. :-) ... wish I had decided to stay through the weekend. Check out the link to this pic of the hotel http://tweetphoto.com/evbafpd0 - and we'll be posting conference pics soon on our Flickr site.

This week's MMQB had a big story about Configura (yes, reprints are tucked in our conference goody bags and the article also is at www.mmqb.com). Rob Kirkbride traveled to Sweden and around Europe, reporting back to North America about what's going on "across the pond." More stories and video of Rob's European Tour are also at www.mmqb.com and you can also see the video he took of Configura:

We had more than half of our registrants show up for the "Early Bird Power Peer" sessions - fantastic turnout. Everyone else arrives this afternoon for the official conference kickoff with CEO Johan Lyreborn welcoming all and sharing Configura's plans for some pretty cool things ... like, a user portal based on the best that social media technologies have to offer ... and, drumroll ... RevLink, the new CET Designer Revit Extension. ... See  http://www.configura.com/cet/revLink and http://www.configura.com/cet/revLink/revit for details.

So much more that I hope to blog about ... like our rendering winners ... our dinner this evening complete with the Swedish Punsch Toast (it's now a conference tradition) ... and our keynote speaker Joey Shimoda, an LA-based architect and designer of Steelcase showrooms in Santa Monica and Chicago's Merchandise Mart. He did some work for Frank Gehry. Designed the Rolex Building in Beverly Hills. High-rises in Japan. ... Yep, we'll be hearing a lot more about Joey Shimoda and his amazing work around the world. 

And you'll be hearing more from me.

Live from Las Vegas,

Molly*

*Configura's PR person/professional cheerleader! Go Configura!  (Had to add the shades b/c it is so sunny here! ;-)

Its still the middle of the night over there in Las Vegas, here its morning and full speed ahead at the Swedish office. The anticipation is building and everyone is very interested in what is happening over there. It feels very much like Christmas eve.

It still feels very hard not to have been able to come to the User Conference this year as I am just a few weeks away from being a father for the second time, but I know there will be more chances and that we have a really competent group of people there!

I really hope everyone enjoys the conference, the team that has been preparing for the conference have worked extremely hard and even behind the scenes, its hard to imagine how much effort goes into something like this. So, with that said. GOOD LUCK! and as Johan Lyreborn would say - Stay sharp!