European User Group Gathers for Two Days of Learning and Networking

Day 1

The European Advantage Users Group (EAUG) met on October 13th and 14th along the River Thames at the historic Savoy Place which is home to The Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET). Stewart Love, Head of Digital Services at the IET, gave our twenty-two attendees and 11 ACS representatives a warm welcome to kick things off.

Next, Philippe van Mastrigt, Director of European Operations for AdvantageCS (ACS), presented on Publishing Industry Trends. He shared how post-COVID publishing topics are the same as they were since we last met in 2020, but the trends have changed this year with respect to:

• Continuous growth on digital subscriptions
• Change in growth factors; new growth is fragile and provides less revenue
• Audio continues to boom
• Economic struggle in industry drives a need for advertising, e-commerce, better quality journalism.
• Decline of GAFA supremacy

Philippe then handed the podium over to Dan Heffernan, Vice President, and Chief Product Manager for AdvantageCS, so he could share ACS News, Strategy, and Direction. Dan mentioned general news about the company, our new clients, recent go-lives and upgrade projects. He explained how ACS recognizes the increased complexity for users of the Advantage software and explained that a number of our roadmap projects focus on improvements in that area as well as the broadening of the capabilities Advantage offers into new areas.

Before continuing the afternoon dialogs, the entire European  User Group gathered on the Savoy Place rooftop to take in amazing views of the riverfront and paused for a group photo. 

Next up was a new session called Clients Ask Clients where we requested each company to solicit feedback from the group on a specific topic. This resulted in some engaging dialog on several topics including:

• Data purging
• Upgrading
• Automatic testing
• Sky UI
• Cider
• Bookclub enhancements

After concluding Day 1’s discussions, the group continued to become acquainted during the evening hours. We all met for dinner and drinks at The Coach, an 18th-century inn with a French bistro-pub located in Clerkenwell.

Day 2

Day 2 began with a continental breakfast at theSavoy Place and then Matt Varblow, Vice President of Engineering at AdvantageCS, took the stage to present the AdvantageCS Technology Update. His update centered around enhanced security measures, performance improvements, and the cloud. Topics examined were:

• Sky UI benefits
• Security Enhancements
• REST APIs in extensibility
• SOC 2 compliance
• Performance improvements
• Batch processing optimizations
• Order numbers and vouchers changing from string to 64-bit
• AMB table restructure
• Regression testing improvements
• Credit card integrations without using CardVault
• Linux platform for lower costs

John Sheehy, Chief Solutions Architect at AdvantageCS, concluded day two by thrilling the audience with a New Features Demo. He also showed us a breakdown of ACS development time, an overview of modification activities, and highlights of integrations.

Coming soon to your instance of Advantage:

• Business Time settings
• Book Club developments including:
• different advancement models
• a pre-paid model
• an inclusion of BCL in the Customer Activity view (SVCCTA)
• User Interface / Experience enhancements
• Agreement Restructure
• A/R by line item
• ARP UX v2.0

With another successful European User Group in the books, we hope to see you all again next year!