October represents a change of season and focus as we prepare for 2018. I wanted to update you on specific areas we are focusing our efforts over the coming months and where we are seeing growth in our community.

COLLABORATE 18 Call for Presentations is Open

If you didn’t already know, we are accepting submissions for COLLABORATE 18 Call for Presentations through October 27, 2017. If you haven’t already submitted an abstract, please consider doing so. Also, please encourage your colleagues or customers to submit as well. Our community grows stronger with each person who shares his or her knowledge and experiences!

Quest October Board Meeting – Key Outcomes

Our Board of Directors met this past week to review outcomes of key initiatives for 2017 and to evaluate our longer-term strategies, including how some of those strategies will be incorporated into our 2018 plans. There was a significant amount of great discussion regarding the future needs of our community members, but a few I wanted to highlight are:

Quest’s Online User Experience
The Quest board continues to make strategic decisions to invest in the community’s online experience. As more of our members engage with the greater community online, we must ensure there is great value in their virtual interactions with our content and networking offerings. Our most recent virtual event, PeopleSoft International Days, saw attendees from 26 different countries engage with us through webinars. We are excited about the growing energy around our online offerings, and I encourage you to join us for Quest Experience Week, a free virtual event for Oracle Cloud, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft users November 7-9, 2018.

Expanding Audiences
As we shared with you earlier in the year that we were considering changes to the membership structure, you may have seen we recently announced changes to our membership structure. We made this decision to encourage increased participation from all Oracle users within a company. Our corporate membership now includes unlimited licenses for our member organizations. The community grows stronger with each person who engages with us, so if your organization has a corporate membership, make sure you take advantage of this opportunity to get all of your Oracle users involved with Quest!

Sharing Customer Stories

While we look forward to sharing more of our strategies for 2018 with you, we also want to celebrate our successes. In this case, we get to do both as our customer stories initiative has been very well received in our community among customers and Oracle alike. Customers say it’s been helpful to hear what others are doing and of the successes they are having with their products to help drive adoption within their own companies. Customers also say it’s beneficial to see how Oracle is committed to continued product development, especially with products that may be outside of Oracle’s corporate marketing message.

We have been connecting with many members of the community to share their story, and we want to make sure you know where to find them. View customer stories for JD Edwards and PeopleSoft on the Content Centers section of our site. As a result of our early success with this program, we will look to expand our efforts around this initiative. So, please let us know if you or other customers would like to share their story with the community. We are always looking for more member participation in this initiative.

Thank you for your continued commitment to this great community.