I am impressed by people in these difficult times and their ability to stay strong and positive. Everyone is being so incredibly inventive in finding solutions to our current challenges. 

As you may know we ran our SAC event on the 18th March as a full day web meeting. We got one of our best event evaluations ever from the participants which shows web meetings are, under these circumstances, a fully acceptable replacement to Face 2 Face meetings. 

We have been receiving lots of interesting ideas for web meetings from partners and members. Keep an eye out for upcoming meetings and you will find treasures on our events calendar you would not have found in normal times. 

We also forward selected "ready made" web-meetings to you from partners and SAP.  I'm impressed by the speed of inovation shown by the market in these times in coming up with so many new ideas for web meetings that we now need to be selective in what we can present.

There are new web initiatives like Expert Corners, Discussions etc not all successful but interesting as these are activities which you normally only see as part of an agenda when people meet Face 2 Face. We are all learning from each other in this area and the expertise in the area of remote "networking" is developing fast.

In meetings I see a desire to share the picture of the computer camera. In a meeting a person says, yes I will share and then asks others to share. I'm sitting all alone at home and need to see humans now and then.  If the situation continues there will soon be innovations in the camera sharing area. I also notice our network infrastructure providors are able to provide a bandwidth which is able to handle the explosion in traffic. However, use of the camera seems to reduce sound quality so we still recommend our participants to switch the camera off.

There is also a willingness to support each other and you see examples in the articles from Zalaris and Sariba this week.

Well timed is our offer of new PLM (Product Lifecykle Management) webinars which we started to work on with Franks Spiegel in SAP several weeks ago. There are also lots of interesting and specific technical webinars especially in the area of integration and SAP Cloud Platform. These are a result of the  integration inititives we have made and the collaboration with SAP which started last year with a 2 day technical Cloud Platform event. By the way, I'm just back from a very interesting Retail Expert Session from SAP, delivered of course, remotely!

Let's hope we can get back to normal before not to long as I miss the personal contact, as I'm sure you do and a little partying with friends now and then  🥳

Take care and stay well - I look forward to meet you in person  

Contact info to me e-mail em@sbn.no and phone local norway 922 525 39 or international +46 70 569 78 08