jon's blog

Last weekend Configura celebrated its 20th anniversary. The celebrations took place at the historical village Medevi Brunn, about 10 km outside Motala, Sweden. Medevi Brunn is famous for their water, which was used as medical treatment for a couple of hundred years. Medevi Brunn was founded 1678 and was in use as a medical treatment place until 1982.

The celebration party included excellent food, a magician and music. We created a photo gallery so you who weren’t here can see it for yourselves.

Here is this year’s grand prize in the User Conference Awards Program. This year we decided to have a laptop plus an extra monitor as our grand prize. If you want to have the chance to win this top of the line computer, just follow these simple instructions that you’ll find here and submit your entry.

• Laptop Nine Series
• Display:   17” 1920x1200 WUXGA LCD Active Matrix Display
• Display 2: 24” 1920x1200 WUXGA with Height Swivel Tilt & Pivot Adjustable LCD Monitor
• Processor: Intel Core i7-960, 8Mb L3 Cache, 3.2Ghz (Desktop CPU)
• Memory: 6GB 6144MB, PC3-10660/1333Mhz DDR3 – 3SO-DIMM
• Graphics Card: Nvidia Geforce GTX 285M 1GB GDDR3
• Hard Drive 1: 160GB Intel X25-M SATA2 SSD Drive
• Optical Drive: 8X Multi-DVD+/-R/RW RAM Dual-Layer Drive
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (Discs includes 32 and 64 bit)
• Wireless: Intel Ultimate-N 802.11 A/B/G/N LAN and Bluetooth Card
• Warranty: 3 Year Ltd. Parts and Labor Warranty with 24/7 USA-Based Support
• Extras included:
• *Software and Driver CD
• *Integrated 3.0 Megapixel Web Camera With software
• *Integrated 7 in 1 Card Reader
• *Standard Black Carrying Case

You have probably seen it in different media, e-newsletters and social media sites, that we have announced the 3rd annual CET Designer^® User Conference. You will find the webpage (and the sign up form) for the user conference here, and if you are interested in what happened last year the material from that conference it is still available here.

Here are the official photos from last year, presented in a slideshow.

As you probably know, there are a lot of nice Extensions to CET Designer. For a while ago we updated the Extensions Web page and made it easier to overview. At this Web page you can read about our partners Extensions as well as our own Utility Extensions, which are free to download by the way.

So check out the new Extensions Web page, if you haven’t done it before.

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.

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.

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.

Today was the first day in Las Vegas. After having checked in at the hotel, The Palazzo, we went straight to set up the conference rooms for tomorrow's conference. Everything seems to have gone well and the technology works properly, so the conditions for tomorrow´s events are perfect.

Also I can gladly say that Molly Klimas will be guest blogging here at configura.com from the conference. You can find her blog here.

Below are a couple of today's events in pictures.

Today a group of four from Sweden arrived to the office in Grand Rapids. To get here included a lot of waiting and full flights, which meant that we had to spend the Sunday night in a hotel in Amsterdam. After some hassles we finally came all the way to the office, even if somewhat delayed.

Tomorrow we’re going on to Las Vegas and The Venetian hotel to put everything in order for the upcoming User Conference, which begins on Wednesday. There is much to be done for everyone who is there and much planning to do, but it looks like this user conference will be a success.

You will be able to follow the conference here on configura.com, so be sure to come back here the next few days.

Last week a new issue of our CET Designer newsletter (sign up for it here!) was brought to you. In this issue we had a lot of great stuff for you who are using CET Designer or if you are a Steelcase, Haworth or Teknion manufacturer.

Our main story was an article of how McCrum’s, a Teknion dealership, has invested in CET Designer and Teknion Storyboard Extension. The article describes how McCrum’s use the software as a complete solution for their sales and design process. You can read the article here, and if you would like read other stories of how CET Designer is used check out our case study archive.

And don’t forget that…

…tomorrow, Sept. 25, is last day to post entries for the CET Designer Awards Program, where you have the chance to win a new computer. Find out more about the awards program.

(UPDATED) This computer is our grand prize in our User Conference Awards Program. Last year’s success with the rendering contest gave us the idea to add two more categories: best large project design and best success story.  This means that we now have three categories, where you can win a lot of great prizes. 

This computer is put together by our specialist so you can get most out of CET Designer and as fast as possible. The computer is a high-end desktop with a 3.06 GHz Inter Core processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 graphics card and a two 20” monitors. CET Designer and Windows XP are of course pre-loaded on this computer. All of this has a retail value of $3500! The only thing you have to do to win this one is to submit to the User Conference Awards.

Below you will find more specifications of the computer:

• Monitor: SAMSUNG P2070 High glossy black 20" 2ms(GTG) Widescreen
• Graphics card: EVGA 01G-P3-1182-AR GeForce GTX 285 FTW Edition 1GB 512-bit DDR3
• PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Supported Video Card
• Video card: EVGA 01G-P3-1182-AR GeForce GTX 285 FTW Edition 1GB 512-bit DDR3PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Supported Video Card
• CORSAIR CMPSU-750HX 750W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS SILVER Certified Modular Active PFC Power
• CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TR3X6G1600C8D 
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP3

You don’t have to attend to the Conference to submit to the contest. You will find all the details about it at the User Conference webpage

After a nice summer vacation we are now back at the office and we are all determined to set full speed ahead. Some of you might already have read the Configura annual report (if not download it or order it for free), and if so you might have seen the section about the people at Configura.

Configura has received attention for its investment in the work environment and in employee development. Therefore we would like to have the presentations of employees on the web site as well.

» People at Configura: Meet Lena, Daniel, Emma and Albin.