This weekend saw the climax of the CIMA Global Business Challenge 2011 as the finals took place over two days in Chengdu, China with teams from 17 regions worldwide competing to be named champions in this showcase of aspiring business talent. In turn, CIMA provided realtime coverage of the event using social media with staff co-ordinating via web and mobile in China and London.

This week saw the issues and opportunities raised by Enterprise 2.0 land squarely in the field of vision of management accountants as CIMA's Enterprise Web 2.0 event took place at the Microsoft London offices. Leading experts and practitioners in the enterprise 2.0 and cloud accounting space shared insights, and new research into the topic was unveiled.

With the benefit of hindsight – looking back to when CIMAsphere launched in July 2009 – it’s clear that predicting the success of a group on an online community like this is more of an art than a science. Some common group building blocks are reliable predictors though. One such building block centres on the etiquette of being a good host.

Welcome to our new regular item on CIMAsphere where we celebrate those group leaders who have played an active part in making CIMAsphere a vibrant, active community. There are over 50 groups on CIMAsphere - many of them student and member-run - and some are really buzzing.

CIMA staff are currently live-tweeting WCOA - the World Congress of Accountants which has just started in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia running 8-11th November. Follow their updates here, and please feel free to send in any questions or comments you have...

CIMAsphere is opening up to the public to read and join soon [UPDATE: we launched publicly on 13th July], so when you're contributing to the community it's worth thinking about how that content reflects back upon you, both now and in the future...

Welcome to CIMA’s new online community - CIMAsphere. We’ve been busy behind the scenes these last few months building the community and thinking through ways to make it relevant and useful. But enough about us, because CIMAsphere is all about you.

If you look around CIMAsphere you’ll see there are a lot of areas for CIMA students and members to congregate in, explore and discuss the very specialised (and more general!) things that make up the management accountant’s world. If you feel there’s anything missing, let us know.