It was a small event in the upstairs of ‘Kings Stores‘ pub, near Liverpool Street station, but it was the beginning of a real Salesforce community in London. 23rd June 2011 at 5pm, 5 years ago today around 30 or 40 people squeezed into the upstairs room of the pub for the first London Salesforce Admin & Developer user group. Organised by Wes Nolte, Anup & Bruce the event was tagged onto the end of a Tquila company meeting (from what I remember, they did like to have their meetings in pubs). I did a talk on Talend Open Studio (a free open source ETL tool) and how to connect it to Salesforce. The great ObiWan JeffNobi (Jeff Douglas) who at the time was working for Appirio and had flown over from the US did an unforgettable talk… so good in fact I can’t remember it. Sorry Jeff! Anup did a talk on a dynamic VisualForce component.
But since then we have grown… and grown and we now have seven… yes seven London Salesforce user groups in London:
- London Salesforce Business User Group
- London Salesforce Admin User Group
- UK Non-Profit User Group
- London Salesforce Developer user group
- Women in Tech Salesforce user group
- Salesforce UK Public Sector User Group
- Pardot User group
But that’s not all also have user groups around the country from Brighton to Bristol, Cambridge to Edinburgh and now into Europe!
- Brighton User Group
- Brighton Developer User Group
- Birmingham User Group
- Cambridge User Group
- Bristol User Group
- Bristol Developer User Group
- East Midlands User Group
- Leicester User Group
- North England User Group
- Scotland User Group
- Scotland Women in Tech User Group
- Cardiff/Wales User Group (kicking off with SurfForce)
- Ireland User Group
- Ireland Non-Profit User Group
- and the Newcastle User Group maybe coming back!
Find your nearest user group here.
The first meetup wasn’t recorded but the second user group was and is still online “Team Development Strategies and Tools on the Force.com Platform“. I also managed to find a couple of the tweets from the day:
Massively successful first #forcedotcom meetup. Excellent people, excellent debates. Thanks to everyone that attended. #London rocks!
— wesnolte (@wesnolte) June 23, 2011
“@wesnolte: Excellent turnout at first ver UK #forcedotcom meet up! http://t.co/nvoMPQ2” sure is!
— Michael Gill (@AgentGill) June 23, 2011
@ the first #salesforce developer get together hosted by #tquila in london great turnout, great sessions
— RFDK (@ruskinfdk) June 23, 2011
(thanks to Mike Gill for the photos!)