The EUC Forum is a community-run group for the virtualisation and end-user computing community in the UK. We moved to the vendor-agnostic user group by combining the UK Azure Virtual Desktop and the UK Citrix User Group into the EUC Forum and what a year it’s been!
We made a lot of these changes in response to your feedback, and we want to make sure that everything we do is relevant and useful. Please do continue to let us know what you want from us in 2024.
First off, in response to feedback that post-Covid people weren’t interested in attending lots of in-person events, we reduced the number of meetings from four to three. By doing that we found that more people than ever attended the meetings, and the number of people attending each one grew massively during the year – up from 39 at the Spring Meeting to a fantastic 161 at the Winter event.
We also organised two really good social events in 2023 to give everyone the chance to come together for networking and chats over a few drinks in a relaxed setting – working closely with AVD TechFest, we hosted one of our socials in Edinburgh in September. For 2024, we will continue these formats and ensure we make these happen in different regions around the UK.
Another big change was opening up sponsorship opportunities to companies other than the big three EUC vendors, Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware. By taking this ‘vendor-agnostic’ approach we generated a lot more revenue, which means we can keep the meetings free-to-attend. By removing financial barriers to attending, we can keep our events as open and inclusive as possible.
We hope you enjoy reading our year in review, and we hope you’ll join us for one or more of our events in 2024.
Meetings
Our fun and friendly meetings hosted by our Steering Committee are the home of end user computing topics and presentations. All content is available on https://www.eucforum.tech/ and on demand via our YouTube channel – don’t forget to check out any sessions you might have missed or would like to see again.
As the EUC Forum we have come together to deliver a much broader and richer platform to discuss all things EUC. This year we had new presenters, new delegates, new sponsors, and new social events!
Speaking sessions offered a more diverse range of content and were openly contributed by community members to share individual experience and knowledge. If you would like to speak at one of our 2024 events, please submit your suggested topics via our website.
New for 2023 we invited teams from Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware to deliver presentations on what’s new in their own products – straight from the horse’s mouth!
Our absolutely packed agendas featured sessions on all things EUC from Nathaniel Comer on IT asset disposal and the circular economy, to Andreas van Wingerden on Microsoft solutions for modern app management, to Jonathan Culver on the challenges of air-gapped systems.
In November, Jake Walsh followed up our discussions from 2022 by leading a really useful session on Terraform that covered such need-to-know information as what Terraform is, how it works, and why it‘s relevant for EUC environments.
The Winter Meeting also had another first for EUC – a discussion on AI and EUC from James O’Regan. It was particularly relevant given the Open AI leadership transition process that was in progress the same week.
In his thought-provoking session, James talked about the emergence of AI and the various types developed between the Turing Test of and Chat GPT, identifying the basics: reactive, limited memory, theory of mind, and self-aware. He covered regulation, and the pros and cons of AI.
James also talked about use cases in EUC and the principles of responsible AI, that it must be remain ethical and explainable. He assured us there’s no need to panic – Skynet is not upon us just yet, but he did include a warning. The global risk register must now be updated to include mitigating the risk of extinction as a global priority on a par with societal-scale risk like pandemics and nuclear war.
Remember to BYOS! If you’ve got something to say at one of our meetings, tell us about it via our online portal. Your session can be anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes long, and next year we’d especially like to see more of things like case studies and customer journeys.
Socials
With more and more people working from home at least part of the time, we understand the need to meet up in-person and make new friends and connections. This year we organised two networking-only social events in-between our Meetings to help build the EUC community and share knowledge.
These social events are run by the user group community for the community. They offer the chance network with our colleagues, peers, and sponsors. They’re also an opportunity to collect some swag and be in with a chance of winning some awesome prizes!
The Summer social in June was held at Brewdog, Waterloo in London. We got to have lots of fast conversations and hear the latest from our Gold Sponsor Stratodesk.
In September we managed to segue nicely from a social to AVD Techfest in Edinburgh by holding our event the night before Techfest kicked off. We swapped tech tips and stories, and chatted to our Gold Sponsor Management Studio.
Sponsors
Sponsorship is incredibly important for the future of EUC Forum. There are now lots of vendors compared to just a few years ago and we’re really excited to be working with a wide range to support our meetings and community.
Our thanks to the following sponsors who so generously supported EUC Forum in 2023.
Platinum:
- Flexxible
- Liquidware
- Liquit
- Nerdio
- Rimo3
- IGEL Technology
Gold
- Stratodesk
- Management Studio
Silver
- 10ZiG
- ControlUp
If you’re a vendor in the EUC space, please do contact us for our 2024 sponsorship brochure.
Plans for 2024
We’ll keep you updated about exact dates and venues, but for now, here’s our provisional timetable for 2024. We look forward to meeting you, and perhaps even hearing your session!
- March: Meeting, London
- April: Social, London
- June: Meeting, Liverpool
- September: Social, (TBD)
- November: Meeting, London
If you would like to join or learn more about the EUC Forum, please contact us by email.
using WordPress and