Monday, July 2, 2012

User Conference Recap



It's been one week since our User Conference wrapped up, and we're happy to say that we set a new attendance record with this one. Thank you to all who attended, and for those who were not able to attend, here's what you missed:

  • We had some great presentations from customers and staff alike on topics such as "Effective Assessment and Accreditation Using Veera", "Dealing with Common Modeling Issues", "Using Veer to Compile Survey Data from Multiple Sources", "Pivoting Away from Excel", "Predictive Modeling as Proactive Retention Strategy", and "Automating IPEDS". Thanks again to all who presented. 
  • Some of the feedback we got indicated that our customers would like more opportunities to talk to one another and exchange ideas and feedback concerning projects they're working on. We agree! To that end, we've set up a few networking groups on LinkedIn organized by subject to facilitate those exchanges. The direct links to these networks, by department, are:
  • We got a lot of feedback about things that we can add to our products to make them work better for you. If you have anything to add - suggestions, enhancements, or things we can be doing better - please email me and I'll make sure your ideas get to the right person. 
  • At the end of the conference, Mike Laracy, our Founder, President, and CEO, talked a little bit about product enhancements and changes on the horizon. We will be detailing these more as they come out on our blog, but here are some of the most important changes:
    • We'll be adding a conditional stop in Veera so that you can choose to stop a job based on a condition you set (for example, if you don't find any matches in a merge).
    • You'll be able to un-dock data views and individual jobs in Veera so that you can work on dual screens and easily see both your data and jobs at the same time.
    • We'll be adding in a 'Variable Reduction' feature, which will filter your variable set down to just those variables which are predictive (similar to the Automated Mining tab in Analytics). This allows you to focus on a smaller dataset consisting of predictive variables only. 
    • We saved the best for last: one of the things we're most excited about is a users-only Veera Collaborative Cloud. Our users will be able to share jobs with each other by saving and downloading them to and from the cloud. So, if you have a report that you think other institutions would benefit from using, you'll be able to upload that report to share with them. Similarly, if there's a particular report or output that you're hoping to achieve, before creating it by hand, you can see if anyone else has already created a similar job. We hope that the Collaborative Cloud will allow all of our customers to be as efficient as possible, and that the exchange of ideas will compound the speed of growth for all of the institutions we work with. 
-Caitlin Garrett, Statistical Analyst at Rapid Insight

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