Inside ASI-AP

I had a number of company meetings to attend today related to some potential acquisitions so I only got to see a couple of sessions, none of them before lunch. At lunch the President's Awards were announced – I blogged about this earlier.

After lunch I attended the session on add-on products to iMIS mainly to listen in on the latest from Informz. The good news is that Informz will be sending someone to the NiUG Discovery conference here later in the year. I was particularly impressed to hear that some 300 iMIS customers now use Informz for iMIS (www.InformzforiMIS.com)! They showed the new adhoc query integration and also announced the new servers they have in Canada (which overcomes the objections some customers have with US law). There was also a demo of the CSA (Customer Service Alerts) and TaskCentre integration which is remarkably simple but opens up many opportunities for automated workflow.

Next up was Amanda's session on selling to smaller fundraising organisations, something Amanda has been successful in doing for the last 12+ months. I introduced the session by giving some background on why we needed to take some action, and then Amanda spent the rest of the time outlining what she (and Jason) have been doing to win these accounts – which some of you may have heard referred to as our 20/20 program. Amanda did a fantastic job and as always delivered it with so much passion. The feedback at the end of the session from US based ASIer's was positive and I think might be the start of some groundswell to see this program being made available globally. Unfortunately this session was scheduled directly against the session on the new content management framework of iMIS 15.1 (due out later in the year) so there were only about 16 in the audience. Which was actually pretty good considering the content management session was the "must attend" session of the conference.

The last session I attended was the feedback session. There was some discussion about having AiSP's being more involved in product focus groups during the production process, which I believe is a positive step for us. I was interested to hear some of the US AiSP's seeing some delays in tech support similar to what we have seen here recently so I had a chance to talk to Rob and Donna on this afterwards. Rob is now reporting directly to Donna (previously it was Gary, and Gary reported to Donna), and this has already given Donna some more direct exposure to tech support performance; she has already got approval for a new tech support analyst. I am confident we will see this jumped on pretty quickly now.

Dinner tonight was all of the Aussies and the Pom's together across the road at the Chinese restaurant!