Planning Vision - Behind the Scenes

Posted by Chelsea Schlepp

With Vision, our annual user conference, coming up in less than a month, we are well into the depths of planning.  Have you ever wondered what goes into planning our event?  Here are some highlights of what we’ve been up to during the last year and what we will be doing until April 21st. 

Choosing a date and location

Even a seemingly small task such as choosing a date falls under careful consideration.  As most of our attendees are in the finance and accounting departments, we know that the beginning of any month is a big no-no.  We also want to make sure most companies are past their year-end audits and that there are no other conflicting events during that time.  This year, we arrived at April 21st for the date.  Once the date is confirmed, we review location options.  We are holding it again at the Harris Conference Center, where we have held it for the past few years.  The conference center allows all of our attendees and vendors to be in close proximity throughout the event, which gives more time for breaks and networking with other GP users.

Deciding on the sessions

First and foremost, when we sit down to plan Vision, we review all of the session feedback that we received from the previous years.  The evaluations done at the event provide us with great insight into what our customers are interested in learning about and what they’re not.   Another way we determine session topics is to look at anything that is relevant in the Dynamics GP community at the time of our event.  Our sessions this year include a general session on the new features of GP 2016 and a session dedicated to your questions about the cloud and whether this is right for you company. 

Selecting the Sponsors

If you have attended Vision in the past, you know that we invite several Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) from the GP community to sponsor the event.  There is always a lot of interest but we have some time and space constraints, which always makes it difficult to choose.  We select ISVs that we have had good experiences with, believe clients will find useful and will add value to your GP product.  We try to rotate the list so that clients can interact with different ISVs over the years.  There are plenty of great products that can’t be showcased at the event, but everyone at Vision is a top tier ISV in our mind. 

This year's sponsors include:

Final Details

In the last couple of months before Vision, we work regularly on finalizing the details of the event to make sure it goes smoothly and provides our attendees with a full day of learning.  This time is spent on everything from making food selections to printing name tags to reviewing the sessions with our presenters to ensure everything is ready to go.

Our whole team is very excited for our upcoming conference and every year, we look forward to sharing this day with our attendees.  If you’d like more information about this year’s event, please visit our website.