The 4th Australian InPlace User Group was held at the Deakin city campus in Melbourne on the 26-27th of November 2013.
The User Group was superbly hosted by Jennifer Young from Charles Sturt University and Lynn Matthews from Flinders University and was very well attended with 58 representatives from all 11 Australian Universities using InPlace.
The schedule on Day 1 started with a report from all universities on the status of their deployments and future plans. This was followed by demonstrations of several new InPlace features including the recently introduced (Timesheets, enhanced preferences, customisable report and new dashboards), the soon to be released (Student mobile experience, widescreen optimisation and Student record system enhanced integration) and a review of roadmap items. The remainder of the afternoon session was devoted to break out groups for highly involved centralised management and discipline based workshops covering configurations, troubleshooting and discussions which were then presented to all attendees to summarise the findings and key learnings.
A QuantumIT funded dinner was held at a restaurant on Lygon St, Carlton after drinks at the QuantumIT office.
Day 2 began with a Development Review and open forum for the discussion of the InPlace roadmap, feature requests and development priorities. Next was a collaborative round table discussion on knowledge sharing and training which led to sessions on key issues and hot topics, these included managing deployment to new disciplines, managing and encouraging student interaction and involvement methods, communication best practice, Alert functionality, new functionality for integration with external systems namely VicPlace and ClinConnect.
The afternoon saw a collaborative session on enhancing communication between InPlace users to share information and facilitate all InPlace users to maximise the benefits of the application and finally plan for the next User Group.
A big thank you to all involved, and we are looking forward to the next Australian User Group in June 2014 and the inaugural UK and Europe InPlace User Group in January 2014.
