vowe dot net :: The week in review

The week in review

by Volker Weber

Monday: Took the early train to Karlsruhe and already met the first DNUG participant in Darmstadt Hauptbahnhof. Then joined up with Oliver at Karlsruhe Hauptbahnhof and after a quick trip on the tram checked into the Dorint Hotel and finally the conference. This is always an incredible experience since I seem to know at least half of the people there. Think: Coming home. I went to Bob's first session and picked up the lens he had brought over. Bob had not yet warmed up his presentation skills, and the session went along with lots of small anecdotes and a few trick questions. ;-) In the afternoon I attended the two hour keynote with Mike Rhodin, Craig Hayman, Ron Sebastian and Surjit Chana. This was the first time I ever listened to Surjit, and frankly, I was disappointed. Ron was excellent as ever. He is always entertaining and he demoes the stuff that the audience likes to hear. The SAP news was very well received as was the Open Document announcement. Everybody talked without tele prompter which was a nice enhancement from Lotusphere. I had a short interview with Mike after the keynote, and I have never seen him so relaxed and confident before. Neither offensive, nor defensive, just very well balanced. He was even able to give short answers. ;-) The conference day ended with a welcome reception and hardly any food, followed by a VIP dinner with excellent food. Was among the last people to leave the room and went to bed past midnight.

Tuesday: Slow start in the morning, breakfast with Marco and then went to Lothar Seiwert's presentation about work life balance. I am pretty sure that I already live what he teaches. Nevertheless, the session was informative, with a little bit too much magician wannabe. In the afternoon I moderated a track with five session by Bob Balaban, Chris Reckling, Hardy Groeger, Maureen Leland, and Rocky Oliver. While the sessions were interesting, I also had to do my day job writing up some stories for my publisher, so I could not pay that much attention. Maureen was really sweet and got good feedback on her efforts to port Domino Designer to Eclipse. All of the sessions were well received, but Rocky was having a blast. He ran 30 minutes over time in the evening, and nobody complained. Code talks. The evening ended with a nice party at a Brauhaus in Karlsruhe with Alex, Carin, Frank, Kai and Oliver. Very entertaining. Walked all the way home to the Dorint and — before I could hit the bed — noticed that vowe.net was hosed. Something broke at 1&1, and while I was trying to fix it, I broke something else.

Wednesday: In the morning I called a friend at 1&1 and he in turn called in the cavalry to fix my site. They fixed it while I was in the shower. ;-) After a late breakfast I went to the lab, talked to Heidi, Maureen, Mary Beth and Rocky. One of my take-aways: Hannover is going to fix a lot of odd things in the user interface, but not nearly enough. I would like it to be more radical. One of the things I was hoping for is simplification, and there are still too many ways to get things done. The inbox view is still way too crowded. The other thing that Lotus really should be doing is copying the Outlook way of presenting mail categorized by date as "Today, Yesterday, ...". Yes, I know this can be done, and many customers have done it, and the final product is still a year away. But I have talked to the people who actually plan the product. At noon I hopped on the train to Hamburg, where I was joined by Frank and Oliver. We had a nice chat, but then I dozed off to catch some much needed sleep. While the weather was quite warm in Karlsruhe, it was chilly in Hamburg. I had an hour to get acquainted at the Sofitel in Hamburg — my favorite hotel by quite a margin — and then we did the pre-conference check for our last hop of the Heise Security conference. All of the support staff was as professional as you can get, and we finished on time. Went to bed after a nice evening dinner with the crew and had a good night's sleep. I was very happy with the large room I had secured with a charm initiative on check-in.

Thursday: After an excellent breakfast with waffles and champagne (!) we kicked off the conference, which went very well. While the other speakers were holding their sessions I was able to hang around in the hotel. I had hoped for some nice weather for a short walk around the city center, but it was raining almost all day long. On the upside, you can hardly find a better place to spend a rainy day then this hotel. If you ever stay there, do not forget to check out the wonderful spa. My session in the afternoon went well, the audience was a little bit more reserved than in the other locations (as expected in Hamburg) but I was still able to get some good laughs. The feedback was positive, but on the other hand, have you ever have seen anybody walk up to insult the speaker. :-) Wrote two more pieces for my publisher and then closed the day with a get-together with our guests, and then finally cocktails at the bar with Joerg and Stefan. The rest of the gang went out and did not return until the early morning.

Friday: This was the day off that I had planned for. After a late breakfast, Katharina came to visit me at the hotel and we had a good two hours talk. Then Cem picked me up and took me out for lunch with Bjoern, who is about to hand over Mobile-Macs.de to Johnny. Cem and Bjoern dropped me off at Bahnhof Dammtor where I had a good hour until the train left for Frankfurt. Currently I am on ICE 673 to Frankfurt and shall return home within two hours.

This concludes a month of travel and I am very, very happy to be home tonight. Normal posting on vowe.net shall commence after a short break.

2006-05-19 :: email :: bookmark :: digg

Comments

>> an incredible experience since I seem to know at least half of the people there

Did you recognize the person sitting next to Manfred Dillmann ?? Na, no way :-)

>> Bob had not yet warmed up his presentation skills, and the session went along with lots of small anecdotes and a few trick questions. ;-)

YOUR questions :-); To be honest. I was very disappointed with this ( Bob's ) presentation ... chit chatting about the / his history of Lotus Notes did not hit the topic of the session at all. He might have seen this in the evaluations ...

Ulrich Krause, 2006-05-19 19:25

Watching the ships roll in
And then I watch 'em roll away again, yeah

It was fun to have lunch with you and Björn, Volker!

Cem Basman, 2006-05-19 19:36

I enjoyed the evening with you too. Unfortunatly it ended very bad for me - Marco payed for his famous Whiskey Cola round ;-)

Alexander Kluge, 2006-05-19 21:31

You left out something about the size of your equipment.

FWIW, I am now finding I know about 20-25% of the DNUG audience as well (though if Manfred Dillman was there, I wish he had introduced himself...). I wish my German was not nonexistent, so I could join some of the informal evening conversations, and not just watch Wild Bill ingest three litres of beer at a time.

I believe the next time we will see each other, it will be here in the Highland Park sales office...a somewhat smaller event, but one closer to my heart. :-)

Ed Brill, 2006-05-19 22:01

Well, three liters of Erdinger isn't exactly what I would call a challenge. Try a Schuetzengarten and your headache will be worse than anything you ever encountered before.

Philipp Sury, 2006-05-20 00:32

Volker, can you elaborate on the 'SAP news', please?

Frank Koehntopp, 2006-05-20 07:12

Notes templates for mail and contacts get upgraded with calls to the SAP connector, which uses BAPI calls into R/3 for seven use cases: Time reporting into CATS, leave requests, ... Read more

Volker Weber, 2006-05-20 08:23

(BTW: the link to Mobile-Macs.de near the end of the posting doesn't work - too many https in the address.)

John Keys, 2006-05-20 18:18

John: fixed ;)

Stefan Rubner, 2006-05-20 18:41

IBM's blogs seem to be down.

Karsten W. Rohrbach, 2006-05-22 11:32