ScheduALL Hosts New York User Group Meeting
Story Highlights
ScheduALL hosted their annual New York User Group meeting on July 21 in Manhattan. Registration was sold out in advance for this free full‐day session for ScheduALL customers, with attendance topping over 50 clients representing over 30 of America’s top broadcasters, transmission providers, and post‐production facilities.
ScheduALL takes a unique approach to User Group meetings by hosting these events themselves around the world each year, directly providing their customers the opportunity to network and share ideas, concepts and solutions with each other. A key strength to each event’s success are the client presenters, which in New York included Fox News, SES, and others. Each speaker provided the group details of how their facilities use ScheduALL in their daily operations, in ways that are particularly unique and beneficial to their organizations.
The meeting, led by the ScheduALL Vice President of Strategic Solutions, Joel A. Nirenberg, offered first‐hand insight about current products and the road map of future plans and enhancements. In addition to the guest speaker presentations, the meeting included a dynamic discussion and demonstration of ScheduALL ConnectorTM, a product on which many of the clients in the room rely for their provisioning requirements. Connector is a powerful OU self‐provisioning platform that brings together ScheduALL’s large global population of users across more than 50 countries using ScheduALL to manage their resource inventory.
“Having a robust and integrated scheduling system is vital to SES as we transition from a largely video‐ only environment to an on‐demand IP and mobility environment,” says Arnie Christianson, SES Senior Manager, OU Technical Sales and speaker at the User Group. “We need to provide our clients with the flexibility to book services when they want, where they want, using tools that allow them to interface directly with our internal scheduling system. New ScheduALL products like Connector allow us to service these needs and maintain efficient workflows throughout the Occasional Use ecosystem. Data and mobility solutions are expanding rapidly, and ScheduALL has allowed SES to keep pace with ever‐ growing demands for non‐standard, real‐time bandwidth products and services.”
Client‐to‐client networking is one of the many advantages in which attendees partake during these User Group meetings. Many of those attending commented that the direct conversations with other users provided valuable insight into new ways in which ScheduALL can work for them.
“The User Group gave me a wealth of new information and proved to be an excellent networking event,” first‐time attendee, Craig Lau, Vice President of Technology for NBC Olympics commented. “The detailed look at the product roadmap undoubtedly helps with business planning as we get ready to embark on the 2016 Olympic Games, our eighth consecutive Olympic Games with ScheduALL.”
One key item of interest to many of the attendees was the unveiling of new product functionality around transmission “joins”: the ability for customers to have visibility into (and join) broadcast feeds already established to which they have rights. This upcoming functionality about to be released in Connector as well as ScheduALL award‐winning Portal self‐provisioning product created a great deal of excitement, particularly amongst ScheduALL customers involved in sports and news broadcasting.
“Our User Group meetings are unquestionably our most important and exciting events of the year for us. At ScheduALL we have always felt that many of our best ideas for product innovation come from the collaborative discussions at the events,” Nirenberg says. “We’re always grateful for the high-level attendance from so many of the most important organizations in our industry, because it provides such a valuable opportunity, not only for our customers to learn from us and each other, but also for them to help us shape our ongoing product roadmap.”
In 2015, ScheduALL will host two more User Group meetings: in Sydney, Australia on September 29th, and in London, England in November. For more information about future User Group Meetings, and other additional events with ScheduALL, visit www.scheduall.com/events.
