Over 150 users and resellers from all over the Middle East attended the 2nd Annual Laserfiche International Conference, held this year at the seaside Movenpick Hotel and Resort in Beirut, Lebanon.

The big change from last year’s Conference in Cairo, Egypt, was the inclusion of users from all over the Middle East and North Africa, including Lebanon’s Fransabank and Egypt’s Orascom Construction. In fact, users enthusiastically out-numbered resellers two-to-one.

The Conference’s two days were packed with knowledge sharing and tips and tricks from Laserfiche staff members and host BMB sal, who taught classes on everything from “Sailing to Success” and “Integrating Laserfiche With SharePoint” to “Defining and Programming Business Processes” and “Introducing Rio and Avante.”

Two tracks with over twenty classes kept users busy learning about Laserfiche 8, which will soon be released in its Arabic language version. Says BMB Regional Manager Nizar Ghannam, “We thought the second day would be just for resellers, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that users ended up coming back for even more classes.”

“I attended the conference with nine other people from my company,” says Tony Torbey, PMO Manager of MTC Touch in Lebanon. “The conference was a big success. I was well-introduced to the new version of Laserfiche, and was amazed to have two tracks of training per day, so we could choose which classes to attend, based on our fields of interest.

“I was very keen to learn about the technical aspects of Laserfiche, which I got,” he adds. “Not to mention that the conference was also extremely well-organized. I’ll definitely be attending next year.”

The atmosphere was focused, but had room for inspiration: after a Rio class, Laserfiche Founder and CEO Nien-Ling Wacker, who was originally only sitting in on the class, gave an impromptu presentation on the new ECM system and fielded questions from users. During lunch and class breaks, Nien-Ling also spent time socializing with the international user community, answering their questions and sharing her insights on best practices.

At the International Conference, the following users were recognized with Visionary Awards:

• Creditcard Services Company sal
• The Municipality of Dubai
• Fransabank
• Murray & Roberts
• Orascom Construction Industries
• Saudi Arabian Airlines
• Security Forces Hospital Program

Reaction from users was so positive that next year’s steering committee is already planning to double the amount of hands-on training by adding a third track of classes.

“After the success of this year’s conference, we’re definitely looking forward to next year’s,” says Laserfiche EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Regional Manager Sean Tang. “Each year, the International Conference gets better and better, thanks to our strong international user community. Next year, we look forward to welcoming even more international users from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Region.”

Tags: international

Posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 11:19 am under UserNews. You can comment on this post.