Can I say “Happy New Year” now that it’s February? It has been a very busy first month of 2017 in the Quest community as we gear up for another successful year. If you want to learn more about all we accomplished as a community in 2016, I encourage you to read this piece in our latest issue of Q&A Magazine. We saw growth in many key areas last year and, as a key member of our community, I want to share with you some of our goals for 2017.

Three Key Initiatives for 2017

“Content is king.” We have been saying it around the Quest office for a while now. We want to continue delivering quality content in 2017. We have excellent content in store for technical users this year, and we plan to broaden our offerings to better serve functional users as well. This will include not just best practices, but information about technology and business processes working together. We have heard countless customers talk about technology and business process alignment as a vital next step, and we hope to help more members of our community realize the potential return this mindset can bring. This will not come at a cost to the quality content we have been providing our technical audience. In fact, we believe quite the opposite: that it will help both achieve better results for their organizations.

In case you missed our prior announcements, another big win in 2016 was the launch of the Oracle Cloud Community (OC²). We have established this new user group as a means of helping customers that are entering or are currently using Oracle Cloud application products, all while continuing the same service to our on-premise customers. In 2017, we want to further establish this group as a place where employees who are responsible for their organization’s Cloud journey can explore, learn and teach one another, just as our PeopleSoft and JD Edwards users have been doing for years. We are confident that, between Quest and OC², we can enhance our members’ experience by giving them a roadmap for support, whether they remain on-premise, move to a hybrid Cloud model or transition to Cloud entirely.

Alongside growth in our content, we aim to improve the delivery of that content in 2017. This year we are taking a hard look at the digital services we offer our customer community. While we launched our new site in 2016, we want to continually improve our members’ experience when searching and consuming content, which will include exploring the expansion of the digital mediums in which members can leverage. This means listening to how customers are engaging with us and positively changing how our content is delivered across our digital toolset. We plan to not only decrease the time it takes for our users to get to content that is relevant and important for them but to more efficiently communicate when that content becomes available. Keep an eye out for how our website, other digital mediums and communications change this year and keep giving us feedback!

Ways to get Engaged

We have already started tweaking the way we share content with our community, and have seen that users are getting a great benefit from hearing the experiences of others. We have started developing more blogs, webinars, and articles based on the stories of how our customers have implemented new technology, and we want to hear from you! Check out our JD Edwards and PeopleSoft Customer Stories pages to see what others are doing, and consider sharing your story with the community – how?

If you are excited about hearing more stories from other users, then you need to get to COLLABORATE this year. COLLABORATE is at the core of our community from both an educational and networking perspective. It is at this conference that you can not only hear from customers about their experiences but make career-impacting connections with other users that can help you navigate your company’s ERP journey. I cannot stress enough the return our users get from this conference. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to register now.

Finally, if you are a Cloud user, or if you know someone in your organization that is, tell them about OC² or help us get in touch with them. We know that the more customers that engage with OC², the more the community members will benefit. That has been a proven model of success for Quest, and we are confident OC² will thrive under it as well.

I look forward to seeing you at a future Quest event.