Last Wednesday it was the first event of the French Citrix User Group Community. If I trust the different feedbacks, everyone enjoyed and asked for a new one: we are working on it! What I’d like to share here is my experience: becoming a “myCUGC” leader for the French group behind the scenes.
We have been talking about creating something in France since almost the beginning of the CUGC program in May 2015. Talking is easy, implementing is another thing! We all have a lot of work and it’s hard to find time.
The French community exists since a long time ago:
- DocForum (docforum.fr) created by Frederic Serriere and Renaud Devers
- Expert Club hosted and managed by Citrix France
- The “Club des utilisateurs Citrix” (club-citrix.com) managed by Bruno Garguet-Duport
- Some French Citrix Expert Group meetups (meetup.com/French-Citrix-Experts-Group/) created by Julien Stanojevic
- A lot of blogs (including mine ;))
The idea was to converge to the CUGC standards. The “Club des Utilisateurs” has tried to join the program but as they want to be only a customer group (without Citrix partners), the CUGC refused that. A lot of discussions followed with the myCUGC team, the “Club des Utilisateurs” board and the Citrix France team and we defined a first meeting for the 13th of September to discuss about this matter.
During the meeting we agreed that we need to create a new association and we decided to announce our first event for the 9th of November. The agenda has been filled out quickly as we have a lot of content to share.
Organizing an event is not something easy and hopefully we have been helped for the first one. I really appreciate the help of:
- Citrix France – To find a place to host our event
- myCUGC – To find a sponsor
- Club des Utilisateurs – For creating the logo, hosting the registration page, the communication with the registered users
- ControlUp – For sponsoring our event, bringing some goodies and a great speaker to present the product
- Stephane Thirion (archy.net) – For the time he spent in the organization of the event
The association is now created and we are working on our second event. This time we want to be self-sufficient as we have more time to prepare and we need to prove that the community rocks!
The current board of the French Citrix User Group Community is:
- Samuel LEGRAND (me :))
- Stéphane THIRION
We’ll need help to maintain the level of the events, so we’ll ask the community to:
- Participate
- During the event
- Online on myCUGC.org
- Share their knowledge by presenting during the next events
I’m really proud of the Citrix French Community and I hope that the FCUGC will be a great place for its growing.