2013 was also the year that we brought back the "Eclipse Users Group Conference".  Due to the response that too will be done again in 2014 and will be greatly expanded.  Last year's conference sold out during the early bird registration.  For 2014 we have partnered with a larger hotel to better accommodate more attendees and a larger vendor expo area.  Last year's conference also had 3 training tracks; in 2014 we are hoping to increase that to 5 or more separate training tracks.  So mark your calendars for September 18-19, 2014 in Atlanta.  We have also put a name to the conference now thanks to a great idea submitted by Mike Winstead. The yearly conference will be called "Encounter".  Hopefully you are able to attend and encounter training on features of Eclipse as well as new contacts to network with well after the conference is over.  

 In January 2013 we had a brain dump session with Epicor's Eclipse Product Development team and a number of Eclipse Users Group Members, also in attendance was Dr. Barry Lawrence from Texas A&M.  From that meeting Release 8.7.9 was created.  This Release will contain several enhancements to Purchasing, Inventory, and Product Maintenance.  It is scheduled to be generally available in May of this year.  The timing is perfect since Epicor's Insights Conference will feature classes on some of the new features.  There will also be quite a few ideas from the Purchasing section of the IDEAS site that will be implemented in this release as well.

 The Enhancement Committee has been very busy in 2013 and will continue through 2014.  One of the major projects they are working on right now is the review of every single idea on the IDEAS page.  Bill Wright, Eclipse Product Manager, has been reviewing each idea with the committee lead as well as Chris Bohn, Enhancement Committee Chair.  The purpose of this exercise is to make sure that Eclipse is aware of each idea out there so if they are working on a bug fix or adding a feature to that area of the system that some of the smaller ideas can get shoe horned in at the same time.  There are also several ideas that are done in a release that was programmed after the ideas were posted.  They are flagging those completed ideas and also flagging some that quite honestly cannot be done as not planned.  It is a very long tedious process with 627 ideas but it is a job that really needs to be done.