Recap: Symplectic’s First Virtual User Meeting

In these unprecedented times, organisations are being asked to make significant changes to the way they typically do business. Symplectic is not exempt from this, as our team have been working remotely during the lockdown. Every year we host user meetings in three regions around the world. In January, before the pandemic hit, we hosted an in person user meeting in Australia, however as the news began to unfold around the COVID-19 pandemic our team quickly realised that may be our final in person event for 2020.

On 16 June 2020 the Symplectic team hosted our first ever virtual user meeting. This meeting was to support our clients in the EMEA region (although we did have a few clients join from the APAC region as well!). The event was held over the course of two weeks, in two hour sessions held every other day.

On the second and third day of the conference we drilled down to more detailed sessions and gave highlights on some of our more recent product updates. For example, Sam Gibbons Frendo, Product Manager, walked clients through the latest ORCID write integration and Nick Anderson, Senior Client Success Manager, gave a brief demo of the exciting changes we have made to Discovery Module over the last year. Finally, John Fearns, Chief Technical Officer and Co-founder, ran a workshop on building dashboards (if you are an existing client you can access this tutorial on the support site here). Our client speakers, Catherine Sharp and Melissa Thorneycroft, further highlighted the impact Elements has had on their institutions. At University College London, Catherine Sharp shared their impressive adoption of the ORCID write integration – two weeks post launch 515 researchers were already using the tool!