On August 23rd I attended the Sungard Super Regional Users Group in Kansas City. The drive is a little over 3 hours so it makes for a pretty long day but I find the trip worth the effort. Sungard’s investment in their user community is much appreciated.
In addition to telling us about their long-term strategic vision for their software, the Sungard people talked about their upcoming Test Management Module scheduled to be released in 2012. The new tool will assist planners with pre-test activities, defining scope and objectives, and tracking participants. Tests are tightly integrated with the plans in LDRPS – they reside in the same folders and the application includes a button to view the associated plan.
The meeting also included a presentation from one of the Kansas City area users on dictionary audits. It is always beneficial to see what other users are doing. In some cases you learn something new, in other cases you validate what you’ve been doing with your system. A users’ group forum also invites users to assist each other. In this case, a user who attended the meeting offered to send some reports to the presenters to aid in their dictionary audit efforts.