Following the success of the Scottish Notes User Group (SNUG), we have resurrected the UK Lotus User Group with the announcement of an event on Wednesday 26th September 2007 at ComputaCenter’s Hatfield location. Registration is now open at the UKLUG web site… in fact we’re near to a capacity crowd already.

A couple of things you may notice. Firstly, SNUG appears to be a Notes user group rather than a Lotus user group. This is purely accidental, although if we named it the Scottish Lotus User Group, it would be known as SLUG. Secondly, what’s with having a Scottish user group and a UK user group (oh, and an Irish user group – more on that later)? What does this mean for SNUG?

Contrary to suggestions there was never any intention to name this new user group the “English Lotus User Group”. For starters that would annoy the Welsh customers (and we have some loyal and important customers in Wales). Does having an UK user group impact SNUG? No… SNUG members are more than welcome to attend UKLUG meetings – we have a vibrant established community in Scotland, but it’s a long way from London, so it’s important that we maintain SNUG as a sibling organisation that is part of the UK community. We have a wonderful corporate sponsor in the form of Standard Life who do a great job of driving the events and ensuring the momentum is maintained.

The Irish Lotus User Group (ILUG) – Paul Mooney of BlueWave and his band of devotees have continued to build this year-on-year, and it’s attracting people from all over Europe. Next year he’s hoping for 400 attendees. UKLUG and SNUG can learn from this and grow.

Anyway, back to UKLUG – Warren Elsmore has put in a lot of work, we have speakers from HSBC, Prudential and Scottish & Newcastle, and Mark Calleran (CIO of The Salvation Army) will be Master of Ceremonies (and discussing their own use of Lotus software). In addition to the customer speakers we have knowledge management guru David Gurteen and the chairman of OpenNTF, Vince Schuurman.

A final point… this is a free event. Due to a limit on the number of attendees we will be wait-listing people shortly. If you register and then cannot attend, please don’t let that place go to waste – let the organisers know and free up the place for someone on the wait-list.