Continue reading »]]> It is now t-minus 2 hours for attendee registration to begin at the 2011 symeast conference. Our vendors are already inside the hall and setting up their tables, the agendas are stuffed, crabs are blown up, and name badges are finished. We are really excited to begin this year and we know all of our attendees and vendors are too! Can’t wait to see you all there! If you have any questions or concerns please be sure to see a committee member at the registration booth or flag us down (we all have a committee member ribbon on our badges).

Continue reading »]]> Is everyone ready for symeast? The committee is and we are excited about this year’s conference content. The roundtables are going to prove to be the highlight of the conference with topics like failover, new hardware, help desks, release loading, collections and more. All of these sessions will be led by your peers and have some of the best Symitar professionals there to answer your questions.

The inner harbor is also going to be awesome. I’m not sure if everyone has been there or not but the location of the hyatt is going to be just as great as our location on the gulf last year in Biloxi. There is a lot of great entertainment and shopping the area that you will be able to fill your down time with too.

So with all of that we are looking forward to seeing everyone there. We also want to thank all of the credit unions sending staff to this year’s conference. We know that the economy is not making it easy for people to travel right now and to still have so many of the best Symitar professionals attending is a testament to the value that credit unions see with these user conferences.

See you in Baltimore!

Continue reading »]]> So being a techy, I have to ask who will be bringing their tablets to SymEast this year? I know I will be bringing my iPad 2 to the conference and will be tweeting and blogging throughout the entire event. I hope to see a lot of others there with similar devices this year but more importantly I want to know how you are going to be using them while at the conference. Will you be tweeting? Blogging? Recording Video? Let us know what you will be up to so we can better provide the resources you need!

Continue reading »]]> The SymEast Committee officially kicks off our planning for the 2011 conference today which will be held in Baltimore, MD! We moved the date back a little this year since we were running into scheduling problems with attendees last year. This will also help us hopefully get some warmer weather while we are at the venue.

Speaking of the venue, if you haven’t been to the inner harbor of Baltimore and SymEast 2011 will be your first time visiting you are in for a real treat. There are lots of things to see and do including a large shopping area and the Baltimore Aquarium.

We can’t wait to see you all there, please check back soon for more updates and information about the conference!

Continue reading »]]> We wanted to say welcome! and Thank you to all of our vendors and SymEast attendees vendors at the same time. It seemed like this year went by so fast, seemingly faster than last year.

So here are some really awesome things:

1. We had more attendees that in 2009! that is awesome! Without your participation we would not be able to hold these conferences!

2. Our vendor hall was completely sold out! this was excellent! We need our vendors to help support our group as well!

3. The venue! I think everyone loved the Beau Rivage and the facilities we had this year. We’re sorry about the smoke for those non-smokers out there. I know that the volume of smoke was more than we expected and it caused some issues for some folks.

Now we are on to the next conference, this one coming to the Baltimore area! The first one on the true East Coast in the past few years. We are looking to do a few other small things next year that will help some of the new comers to the conference get adjusted to the Symitar and SymEast community. Specifically we want to get the Symitar prospects together at the beginning of the conference and get to know them. We all love Symitar and the flexibility it gives us to do what is needed for our organizations and we want our prospects to understand how we can help them in adopting the system.

At the end of the day, we are all about process improvement and bringing this to you our attendees and vendors! On behalf of the 2010 SymEast committee, thank you for being part of the 2010 conference and we all look forward to seeing you in 2011!

Continue reading »]]> Hey fellow attendees, just a few conference updates to pass along:

1. We have completely sold out of our group rate room block. Trust me, we have tried to get more but the hotel simply will not give us any more. We’re sorry about that but we do hope that you will still attend! This year is going to be really fun and you’ll get to see all your Symitar pals!

2. We are getting ready to fire up the SymEast twitter account again for the conference  so get ready for some increased activity on that channel. Jonathan will be tweeting throughout the conference on what is happening.

3. We have a Facebook event page! You can visit it by going to: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=275201837388

4. Don’t forget – you have to make reservations for your shuttle trip from Gulfport International Airport! Don’t get stranded there!

Continue reading »]]> I don’t know how the rest of our SymEast regulars and fellow users are feeling about 2010, but I can tell you the SymEast Committee are all looking forward to the year ahead and showing those around us why credit unions continue to be the consumer’s best choice for servicing their financial needs. Because the SymEast Committee wants to make sure you are all prepared to face the coming year and be ready to take all of the challenges you may face head on, we have an all-star lineup for the key note at the conference.

Kathy Hooker and Ted Bilke will be making the opening remarks for the conference this year and I think we all are looking to forward to hearing from them. There are so many exciting developments from Symitar and other Credit Unions that we honestly have a hard time fitting them all into our short few days in Biloxi. Of course we are always looking for folks to present on what they have done over the past year to our other credit unions so please be sure to contact us if you have an idea.

I know I can’t wait to see all of you there and see what I can bring back to my new credit union home in New York. The committee share the same enthusiasm and we will see you in February!

Continue reading »]]> So everyone now has had the chance to digest the content of the 2009 virtual SEC conference and think about how effective it was in terms of living up to a very accessible form of trade show. I know there were many dissatisfied folks during the conference due to the numerous technical difficulties that we all experienced, but if you put those aside for a second, did the conference live up to its goals? Obviously Symitar’s goals were to keep vendor participation and client attendance up, which it seemed to do since anyone could login and view the sessions if they were part of a Credit Union. How many of those people actually attended I don’t know though and it seemed as though it was the usual crowd of dedicated Symitar clients on the chat boards throughout the conference.

I’m curious to see what other Symitar clients and vendors thought of the conference this year? I think I would still prefer the live event even with the added cost, but it would be great if we could get a discussion going around this topic.