Well, I'm back in Seattle (oddly the sunniest place this week between San Diego, San Francisco and here...). But we had a phenomenal experience with our customers and the other attendees at YouCon '08.

First a couple of informal "awards"

Best use of props in a presentation Award -- Tom Bannon and his team from Chase Paymentech (who would've known that hardhats could do all that?)

Longest Trip Award -- Charl Morkel from Blue Nova, a Daptiv implementation and consulting partner from Australia. 

Biggest Secret But Not A Secret Award -- Daptiv Connect, our new Integration Service 

We really wanted to accomplish 3 things with YouCon this year:

1. Provide an opportunity for our customers to network and share ideas
2. Interact ourselves with people in our customer community from around the world
3. Share our plans and vision, and solicit feedback on how we can do better 

I think we accomplished all three.  For those of you who couldn't be there here's a quick summary of the announcements we made, and a little bit about what it was like:

Daptiv's Year in Review for 2007-- Jeff Pancottine opened the event, and talked about our our business performance and key investment areas for last year.  In a nutshell: in 2007 we have more customers, higher bookings, higher revenues, and we made significant investments in world class infrastructure to deliver our on-demand solutions.

Our Vision for Collaborative Business Apps and Managing Work in the Enterprise was shared by Christian Smith.  He discussed many strategies and themes we've developed over the past several months that are driving our product release plans including our recognition that combining the structure of project management and the freedom and agility of good collaboration tools makes a more compelling whole than either apart.  He also shared the vision we have for helping our customers manage their WORK which of course will include projects, but also many activities that might not fit that formal definition.  Another key theme discussed by Christian was the importance of visibility and how our vision for work intelligence is part of that objective of better managing work for business results.  Those of you who have already dived into using the Work Intelligence capabilities in our Fall Edition 07 service are probably starting to figure that out.

Daptiv Product Roadmap -- was shared by Eric Bergman from Daptiv, and highlighted things such as our plans for delivering Daptiv PPM in new languages in 2008, where we're taking our services in the future to offer more flexibility, new capabilities for creating more collaborative business applications, and also how we're changing and enhancing the experience around certain core features of our PPM service in the next year.

Introducing...The Daptiv Greenhouse! -- Nicole Shaw, a solution designer at Daptiv, introduced the Greenhouse.  The Daptiv Greenhouse is part of this community site, and is our new forum and tool for gathering innovative ideas and product suggestions from our community.  The Greenhouse is part of our commitment to collaborating with you on what we bring to market, and will provide you with visibility into what your peers think, and how we plan to respond in terms of new product releases.  The Greenhouse will be in beta for the next two months, and we invited our YouCon attendees to join.  We will share more information around this with everyone after our beta period.

Daptiv Connect -- in San Diego at YouCon we introduced our new innovation service called Daptiv Connect.   Chris Broyles, our VP of professional services along with Greg Moerbe from Pervasive Software with whom we've partnered to create and deliver Daptiv Connect, explained the link between visibility into information and the various approaches to bringing that data into your environment.  A challenge for always, our new Daptiv Connect service provides a simpler, more maintable way to think about integration, and promises to bring real benefits when combined with the Work Intelligence features for dashboarding, analysis and reporting that we introduced with the Fall Edition of Daptiv PPM.  Daptiv Connect promises an approach to integrating both SaaS to SaaS and SaaS to on-premise systems that is maintable and flexible compared with brittle custom integration approaches.  Look for more information on Daptiv Connect in the days to come.  It is available today and we demonstrated our first packaged integration between Daptiv PPM and Salesforce.com.

Anthony Williams, Co-Author of the zeitgeist book of 2007, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, opened the second day of YouCon with a keynote address to our attendees.  Anthony's mix of examples from durable goods companies, consumer products companies, financial companies and the technology sector along with his demographic research findings on the way the next generation of workers is wired were revelatory for our attendees and we got a hugely positive response to his talk.

I must say that a real highlight of YouCon this year was the customer showcases presented by Darlene Fladager from MIT, David Ludwig from Dell Financial Services, and Tom Bannon, Tony Gamboa and Addie Monson from Chase Paymentech. There's nothing like hearing it from people who use our service everyday to manage their business, and each of these way really interesting in ways as different as their organizations.  My thanks to each of them, it is quite striking and really rewarding to see our service adapted and focused on these real world challenges in business and in academia.  The other attendees were rapt in each of these presentations.

 So there it is for those of you who couldn't join us.  Hope to see you next time...