Dear Atlanta Sitecore User Group, 

After such a long time apart, we finally got back together on August 24. We had pizza and wine, we shared stories, we laughed – it was exactly as I hoped it would be. 

ASUG, you are important to me for several reasons. First and foremost is community. We have a sizable, tenured, and accomplished Sitecore community here in the Atlanta area. Our group contains a healthy mix of clients, partners, and Sitecore employees, including several current and former Sitecore MVPs. ASUG, you bring together strong minds who are eager to collaborate and engineer new ideas in a relaxed environment. Can you think of anything better? 

Secondly, you provide opportunities for presentations. These grow the strength of Sitecore MVPs and allow the group to learn about concepts that they may not have heard about otherwise. Speaking at a SUG is a great chance for someone to add to their Sitecore MVP application, so your mere existence provides that for our Atlanta community. At the August SUG, we got to learn about the Component Builder in XM Cloud and get some technical tips and tricks for XM Cloud implementations. These sessions build momentum and excitement about future products and warn us about some “gotchas” from partners before others go through similar exercises. 

Learning about Components in XM Cloud and seeing it in a live demo was awesome. Brandon Bruno created a new headless hero component on the fly based on the Sitecore.com hero. This easy-to-use, drag-and-drop component builder is a truly innovative part of XM Cloud. There were a lot of great questions and discussion. It was difficult not to get too in the weeds; we could have talked about Components for the entire SUG. Having Sitecore employees attend and share insights is one of my favorite parts of ASUG. 

Also at our August meeting, I got the opportunity to present our newly refreshed values and mission statement. Our mission moving forward is “to foster an open, collaborative environment within the local Atlanta community whose chief goal is sharing knowledge of and experience with the Sitecore platform.” This was created based on values such as community, balance, fun, in-person, and partner-agnostic. Basing our group on these values should ensure that our relationship remains solid for a long time. 

ASUG, I am looking forward to this being a long-term relationship. I hope that we can continually get feedback from the community to make our relationship the best it can possibly be. Our next **** is coming up in November at the same location, and I can’t wait.

****,

Emily