This week I was privileged to be invited to attend the inaugural ACA Summit at AppSense HQ in Daresbury. The stated goal of the AppSense Community Advisor program (ACA) is to "recognize exceptional community leaders from around the world...to build a global technical community of experts in the Enterprise Consumerization market". It is intended to work along the same lines as Citrix's CTP and Microsoft's MVP programs, and I was quite honoured to sit around the table with a group of recognized independent experts in the AppSense field, amongst them CTPs and MVPs. It just goes to show a little blogging can go a long way, I suppose!
It's important (for me, anyway) to note that being part of the ACA program doesn't in any way affect my status as being independent and fairly vendor agnostic (the irony of my blog title and Twitter moniker aside). I'd like to say that if AppSense put a product or feature out that I feel doesn't bring anything of value to the table I wouldn't hesitate to point out my opinion. But what the ACA does bring, especially in those sort of scenarios, is a close engagement with the guys who actually design, market and direct the product lines, and an ability (hopefully!) to channel the product a bit in ways that actually make a difference in the real-world scenarios that we face on a regular basis. It was interesting to hear from Keith Turnbull who was involved in the CTP program in its early days talking about lessons learned from those experiences.
I have to say that I found all of the AppSense staff really genuinely passionate about the products that are currently available and the plans they have for the future. It was nice to get a feel for the way the existing product lines actually developed and to see how they were making plans to align them for future developments. I think there's sometimes a tendency for software vendors to try and invent problems to fit with the solutions they have available, but some of AppSense's newer products - particularly DataNow - seem to be dealing with real-world issues that are touched on by IT departments in a lot of the environments I work in. Seeing the features of DataNow in use has definitely given me a bit of impetus to finally finish the posts I've been intending to publish on it for a while now.
It was also good to get involved in discussions with guys who work in different customer environments from the ones I generally find myself in and hear how they were using AppSense to tailor solutions to particular problems. Aaron Parker gave us an overview of the "lite" configuration he put together and which is hosted on his blog (intended to be implemented without the need to stand up a Personalization Server infrastructure for POC situations), and I was a bit embarrassed to realize I'd actually failed to realize the point of it when I first read his article :-0
Another very interesting side of the event was seeing the plans being made for improvement of the actual AppSense console interface. Because I'm so familiar with it I'd actually forgotten how unintuitive the consoles can actually be to a user who is coming across them for the first few times. I think AppSense's UI has suffered in that it is generally meant to be used by technical people, but just because techies will be using it doesn't mean that it should be acceptable if it is clunky or illogical in its presentation. If the consoles evolve in the way AppSense are imagining they should, I can see a lot of users being won over.
Yet another part of this that stuck in my memory (I am sure all the other ACAs noticed that I don't bother to take notes, either electronically or on paper) was the fact that almost 10% of AppSense's total staff are involved in QA. The guys I spoke to in this area were looking for feedback from the trenches about how to improve their processes and I had to admit that given the diversity of platforms and applications that their software runs on or alongside, they still seemed to be quite optimistic that they could continue to do it better and more comprehensively. A lot of QA and testing guys I had previously spoken to from other companies often seemed to be quite resigned and/or potentially suicidal, so it was nice to see them fairly upbeat for a change :-)
So hopefully the ACA program will, amongst other things, allow us to enable users and administrators dealing with the software on a day-to-day basis to channel their experiences back more effectively to the people who develop it, as well as allowing the software developers to reach out into the technical community and get feedback on their features and future plans. But most importantly, it gives us an opportunity to add to the knowledge we already possess and share this knowledge in a way that benefits both AppSense and their customers. It's been a very rewarding couple of days and I have plenty of material to cover in my next few blog posts which should hopefully explore a few new avenues in the Management Suite and the other products that AppSense are slowly but surely bringing to market. I'd just like to thank Benny Tritsch, Keith Turnbull and all the staff at AppSense for introducing the ACA program and for being so hospitable during our visit. And on a personal note, it's been quite humbling to sit amongst a gathering of AppSense gurus and exchange thoughts and ideas. For someone who just started blogging to keep himself out of hotel bars Mondays through Thursdays, I certainly seem to have come quite a lot further with this than I expected to when I put up my first post!