AALAS and the TOPAZ User Symposium

National AALAS is done for another year.  TOPAZ had a very successful show, with lots of visits from existing customers and new faces.  As always the TOPAZ graph paper writing pads were popular – we met our objective of not having to bring any back to Texas!  We’re already looking forward to Denver next year.

We followed the AALAS meeting with our annual User Symposium.  This occupied two days and was held on the University of Maryland – Baltimore campus. As always it provided a great opportunity for our customers to meet, mingle and trade ideas and experiences.  This year we also talked about up-coming releases from TOPAZ, including a sneak peek at the new Protocols modules and the Breeding module (stay tuned for more on these in the coming weeks).

There were also sessions on the Veterinary Management module, TOPAZ Reporter, and Mobile Census, and other TOPAZ news.  One particular highlight was a tour of the brand new facility at UMB – it’s easily the brightest and most well arranged facility we’ve seen (and we’ve seen an awful lot).

food tour of Baltimore and a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Aquarium were the main team-building activities.  A great time was had by all, and, as always, the opportunity to network and share with peers from other institutions was perhaps the most valuable part of the meeting.

Next year we plan to host the meeting following AALAS once again, somewhere close to Denver.  We’d love to see you there!

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