Excellent TSANet meetings during May in APAC region with excellent interaction between attendees. Included technical meetings and mgmt sessions. The following four speakers all spoke on the topic of customer problem resolution tools:

• Martin Bowesman from EMC spoke about Art of ?Data Collection & Analysis? and the tools which he largely authored.
• Mahbubur Rahman from Symantec explained the tools they use to help customers, both self-help and Engineer-assist.
• Keith Miller from Red Hat both entertained and educated us about customer problem resolution in the Open Software environment.
• Janeeta Ford from Business Object talked about the tools they have and how they use them to help customers.
• Alan Honeyman from TSANet presented the Introduction To TSANet

At the wrap-up discussion, attendees indicated they wanted to learn more about the topic of ?Directions in Storage?  (very new technology) and would like to see presentations from any of the following:

• Storage Vendors ? IBM, HP, HDS, EMC
• OpSys Vendors ? Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Sun, HP
• Application Vendors ? Symantec (Veritas) CA
• Database Vendors ? Oracle, IBM

The team also liked the idea of implanting a person from one member?s support team into the support team for the member whose product they specialize in for a day.  When they present, they will be asked to do a slide on their experience.

A number of topics were suggested which would be more suited to the management roundtable discussion ? from these we will ask the membership to vote for their preference:

• ITIL
• Privacy issues in general and the impact on TSANet interactions
• Organisational change and the impact on staff ? how to do a better job (?Righthandling in Rightsizing?)

Stuart Strathdee of Microsoft volunteered to host the next meetings at their North Ryde complex, likely sometime in November.

Attendees proposed new open groups ProcActive, CritSit, Training and Knowledge Sharing. Much discussion followed with review of advantages and disadvantages of these groups.

In the roundtable, each member explained their Asia-Pac support structure and discussed their call-handling process and system and included much interactive discussion.