The CollegeNET CONNECT User Conference happened in July at the Nines Hotel in downtown Portland, and the room block filled up before the event even started. Whether this was your first CONNECT or your fifth, the reasons people keep coming back are the same: the chance to compare notes with schedulers from other campuses, learn directly from the people who build Series25, get a real look at what's coming next, and spend a few days having fun on unique, beautiful excursions.
Comparing Notes with Peers is One of the Greatest Values
The conversations between sessions and in panel and roundtable discussions are what many longtime attendees value most about the user conference. Academic schedulers traded notes on how they're running Schedule25 Optimizer and the Series25 LYNX Interface at their own institutions. Event planners talked through 25Live workflows they'd built, and rebuilt, over the years, and heard how a colleague at another university had solved the same problem differently. Some of you were at your first CONNECT this year. Plenty more have been coming for years and still walked away with something new, sometimes just from a peer institution that mentioned it in passing.
"I've really appreciated the fluidity of 25Live from CollegeNET, and the fact that they have this conference every year where we can all come together, all the users, and banter around ideas and new implementations that we'd like to see, and that CollegeNET actually considers them and implements them."
— Ashlyn Fox, Indiana University Bloomington
Learning From the CollegeNET Experts
Pre-conference classes on Monday and Tuesday covered LYNX fundamentals, X25, and a full two-day Functional Administration Boot Camp, along with other sessions led by experienced trainer/consultants. These sessions gave attendees direct access to expert knowledge from people who work with Series25 every day and could answer their every question.
The hands-on lab workshops gave attendees a chance to work through real scenarios instead of just watching a demo. Labs covered building email and task scenarios, working in Publisher, digging into X25 Analytics, running occurrence-based reports, and setting up location waitlisting. Attendees left several of these sessions with configurations and ideas they could take straight back to their own 25Live instance and put to use. Additionally, the CollegeNET employee-led presentations gave real insights into usage scenarios from the people who help build and support Series25 tools for you.
What's New and What's Next
"The way Connect25 builds into 25Live, which is our event scheduling system, it makes everything just that much easier, and everything is in one place."
— Justin Ellis, Norfolk State University
Wednesday's keynote, "New and Upcoming," covered what's shipping now, what's still ahead, and how customer feedback shaped both. The new Connect25 student engagement platform was the clear standout of the week. The session dedicated to it filled up, and the booth stayed busy for all three days. The conversations at both places followed a pattern: schedulers tired of asking requesters to enter the same information twice, interested in a front end built specifically to fix that.
Beyond Connect25, the keynote ran through a long list of work already shipped this year that Series25 customers are excited to use, including:
• Location waitlisting: the single most-requested item on Feature Upvote with 240 votes, letting people see their place in line and join a queue when a room they want is already booked
• Document management: new layout options, reusable sub-reports, and the ability to run occurrence-scoped reports against a whole search instead of one event at a time
• Contact search: fully searchable for the first time, with keyword, advanced, and SeriesQL options covering 78 votes worth of requests
• Academic grid: a new live meeting pattern grid that lets schedulers drag sections into open rooms, with conflicts, undersized locations, and missing features flagged in real time
• Mobile app: a native app for iOS and Android with push notifications and full scheduling access from a phone
Looking further ahead, customers also got a sneak peek at some exciting new features and functionality coming soon.
Excursions and Time Together
CONNECT isn't only about sitting in sessions and chatting up new friends. This year's excursions included two Oregon Wine Country tours through the Willamette Valley, two Columbia Gorge waterfall tours past Multnomah Falls, and a Portland Fire WNBA game at the Moda Center.
The wine tours were worth the trip on their own, with rolling Willamette Valley hills, quiet vineyard patios, and pours that came with one of the prettiest views in Oregon wine country. The waterfall tours made five stops through the Columbia River Gorge, with Multnomah Falls as the showstopper and lunch at the historic lodge overlooking it.
For attendees who stuck around for the Portland Fire game, the Moda Center brought its own kind of energy: a packed arena, a loud crowd, and a good excuse to cheer for something other than a scheduling win. And one evening arcade outing brought together seasoned players and those who had never touched a pinball machine for a great night of gaming, with a few even walking out after besting the CollegeNET staff who brought them there.
Whatever people chose, the excursions were a great way to spend time together and actually relax, not just an add-on to the conference schedule.
What Attendees Are Saying About 25Live and Series Applications
The conference was a great opportunity to hear from customers about what they like and find most useful in all the CollegeNET applications they use every day.
"[25Live] really helped connect the campus in a way that I think was missing, because now people can see what other events are happening, how they're scheduled, see kind of who those movers and shakers are scheduling the events, know who to contact, and all of this was behind a secret veil before."
— Alexis Garcia, Rhode Island School of Design
"We work across five campuses, and all five campuses are able to utilize this system. I would say that it is the system that really brings kind of a unity to campus."
— Fidias Reyes, Georgia State University
"The thing that makes me the happiest about 25Live is to be able to bulk edit stuff. If I have a user who's left the university, to be able to switch all of their events to someone else, it's so much easier. It's a game changer."
— Bridget Dalen, Fairfield University
"Anybody that you want to can see what's happening, and I don't have to answer a phone call or a separate email to say what's going on around this building at X time. People on my campus are starting to feel more confident that 25Live is the place to go for that information."
— Lisa Goetsch, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
See You Next Year
Next year's CONNECT dates and location are coming soon and worth adding to your calendar. The sessions matter, but so does spending a few days with people who are solving the same problems you are.