Inside ASI-AP

The Discovery conference officially kicked off this morning with a general session hosted by Bob, Spencer Elrod from NiUG, Jay and myself.

After the highly contentious opening last year in which Bob gave his opening presentation against a background of Jethro Tull rock music (someone I had never heard of!), this year was back to a regular skit.

For good or bad, Bob kicked off his presentation announcing the tennis results from our game on Monday. Bob was bragging that within 3 hours of stepping off the plane (30 hour plane trip), he thrashed me at tennis. I missed the very first part of this, so Marla came and told me, so I had to coming running into the main room, stop Bob's presentation and set the record straight. There are rumors circulating around the conference delegates that Bob actually arrived in Australia 2 days prior to our game, had some lessons and had a masseuse come in. Not only that, he talked the airline into a first class upgrade which actually gave him one of those new flat beds and he slept in a real bed on the plane for most of the trip!

After clearing up the tennis story – none of which changed the fact that I still lost the game - Bob and I continued on to announce the launch of iMIS 15, and we finished off popping open a bottle of champagne and toasting iMIS 15. We then welcomed Spencer Elrod up on stage to toast the 10th birthday of NiUG International, and Spencer announced NiUG coming to Asia-Pacific and his drive to get 20 members signed up during the conference.

Jay was then welcomed to the stage to restore some seriousness to proceedings and gave an overview of the iMIS 15 release. This included the top 15 things of iMIS 15!

The buzz around the conference in the first break was very positive, especially about iMIS 15 and the .NET announcements.

4 stream sessions then followed the opening - including 3rd party products (iEmail, PDF Mailer, Customer Service Alerts, Credit Card Reconciler), Campaign Planning, Deferred Income and Analytics. 2 hands-on workshop sessions also ran - Event definitions and GSTINC vs GST.