By Richard Bishop
Vivit Board President

I’d like to wish all of our members a very Happy New Year from Vivit. We are already looking forward to our first full year as the Micro Focus user group following the 2017 merger between HPE Software and Micro Focus.

2018
The new year is likely to bring more opportunities for Vivit as we work closely with existing Micro Focus communities and build new relationships between Vivit members and Micro Focus. We’ve already started talks with user groups representing SUSE, Attachmate and Novell and look forward to close working relationships with these areas of the Micro Focus business.

In the meantime, it is “business as usual” for Vivit. Our existing relationships with the former HPE Software ADM and ITOM business units are showing growth in members around the world, and we now have more than 41,000 members in over 150 countries. We will continue to offer local user group meetings as well as global webinars to keep you informed and educated about changes in the world of Micro Focus software.

SIG Talks #VivitSIGTalk
In my review of 2017, I described how Vivit is reinventing itself to meet the demands of our expanding user community. As well as the usual webinars and local user group meetings, we recently introduced SIG Talks. As we’ve grown, members have told us that although they value face to face meetings when possible, it is often easier to view webinars than travel to remote meetings. Unfortunately, traditional webinars are a less immersive experience than face to face meetings. To counter this, we’ve introduced SIG Talks. These monthly events are designed to encourage more interaction and Q&A than traditional webinars, and we’d like members to help us to choose suitable content. An imminent upgrade to our webinar platform means that soon we’ll be able to switch between video discussions and live product demos. This will help us to bring the “live” meeting experience to remote viewers. The schedule for 2018 SIG Talks as well as links to recorded content is on the Vivit website, please take a look and let us know what you think.

SIG Talks involve 3 or 4 short presentations (less than 15 minutes each) with an opportunity for Q&A. These short presentations will be available for download so they can be used to provoke discussions at your local user meetings or even in your place of work.

So far we have SIG Talks planned for our ADM-focussed special interest groups, and we’re working on a series of ITOM SIG Talks. Over time, we expect to develop SIG Talks for Lifecycle planning, Big Data and Business Intelligence as well as software development. Please let us know if you have any ideas for SIG talks; we’re keen to hear from you with ideas for SIG Talk sessions as well as offers of help. If you’d like to help out by providing a short demo or discussion topic, please let us know.

Be sure to join a #VivitSIGTalk in 2018!

Micro Focus conferences
Vivit has always attended Micro Focus conferences when possible to meet members as well as our colleagues at Micro Focus, and 2018 will be no different. Last year we attended the EMEA Customer Forum in Dublin, ITOM Summit in Dallas , ADM Customer Forum – NYC, ADM Customer Forum – Las Vegas, and Protect Conference in Washington DC . I also attended the Discover the New event in London where it was great to hear the vision for Micro Focus directly from Chris Hsu.

If you have a customer story to share with the community, be sure to contact us at info@vivit-worldwide.org.

If you’d like to share your experiences of Micro Focus software, share best practices, or get involved in our new SIG Talk sessions, please register for our speaker’s bureau. Whether you’re a seasoned conference speaker or a “newbie”, we’d love to hear from you if you have a story to tell.