President's Report for 2009 AGM

In my third year of being ADUG President, I must admit to feeling a bit more comfortable in the role :).

Andrea Coffey has been a great support as Vice President - and her work helping people in the terrible Victorian Bush Fires earlier this year should not be forgotten. Andrea has a great gift of being able to lighten the mood, and I appreciate her help along with the rest of the Committee in managing ADUG .

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our retiring Treasurer, Mathias Burbach as he continued to provide us with efficient and well-managed finances, all year round - even when he was in Germany. He has set a hard act to follow for our new treasurer, Sue King- but Sue is very capable and I know things are in good hands since she has managed our website so well - and Peter Sanders has now taken over as webmaster.

Roger Connell has done a marvellous job in his first year as our Secretary and his first year on the Committee.

Adam Webb is still keen to take over my role as List Manager - I've been slack in getting him up to speed - and we've scheduled to get this done during September 2009.

Committee members all give up their valuable time and experience to keep ADUG running - so when you get a chance do show them that you appreciate their efforts on your behalf.

We continue our long term goal of making ADUG more AUSTRALIA WIDE. As a Committee, we have endeavoured to get Committee-members to know more of the various jobs that are done. Support of our Mailing List remains strong though a little down from this time last year - we are currently at 441 subscribers. We also need to work a bit harder to get new ADUG Members and existing/previous Members to renew. We have just started a Members Products Page and are hoping to see this grow as not only a Member Resource, but as a promotion of Delphi as well. I welcome any thoughts you have on ways we can improve ADUG and our Membership - you can email me at president's email and I will share them with the Committee.

We once again have seen a lot happening in the past year with the product we all enjoy - Delphi. We have seen Embarcadero embrace programming languages the way we have wanted for many years prior, and we have just seen the release of Delphi 2010 which has increased Productivity in the IDE and in my opinion, produced quite a snappy efficient IDE. We have also seen that Embarcadero plans to get back into Cross Platform from a single IDE that produces Native Windows, Mac and Linux Apps (I'm very keen to see the Mac support) - as well as plans for 64-bit Native Windows (which I am really looking forward to). So I think there are even more exciting times ahead and it has been good to see the Delphi Jobs still coming through our Delphi Jobs List - hopefully we will see that improve over the next 12 months. Our relationship with the local Embarcadero staff continues to remain strong, and it is good to see some of them contribute regular to our Mailing List as well as some of the US staff.

This year we held our Symposium in Sydney  and  Melbourne. Both Chapters did very well and the days were a good success. I think all those who attended enjoyed the day, and our International Speaker (David I.), as well as our local Speakers, did fine jobs. We will have some details about the 2010 Symposium in the near future, with Canberra and Melbourne as the venues, and Cary Jensen has agreed to be our international speaker - http://www.jensendatasystems.com/ .

Our Local SubCommittees continue to run their own events and this decentralised form of organisation continues to work well with ADUG . It would be great if we could see more people attending Meetings. If you have difficulties getting to meetings then contact your Chapter and let them know.

Again, I need to thank all the members of the national and local ADUG committees as they do a lot of unseen work that continues to keep the ADUG going, and I would like to thank all those who are involved in local meetings and who are regularly involved in the Mailing Lists - you all help to make ADUG the family that it is - and I look forward to seeing what the next 12 months brings.

Glenn Crouch
ADUG President