DNUG announces EULUC
by Volker Weber
DNUG is Deutsche Notes User Group. EULUC is European Lotus User Club, based on Lotus Connections. I trust it does what Connections does. The claim says "Meet the experts".
That's about what I can tell you. I am not a DNUG-Member, and therefore have no access to the site. Blogs are public, the rest is not. The content appears to be German, so I am tempted to call it GLUC or DLUC. :-)
DNUG members, go forth and collaborate.
The logo plays nicely with the german word for owl: Eule.
Comments
Good looking website. The Connections design and development team really put forward the effort to make it the UI attractive out of the box. People are going to be even more impressed with the next release.
sneak previews at Lotusphere 08.
... says the product manager for Lotus Connections.
LOL...
Would love to know the licence deal behind that one, in particular how much IBM is assisting DNUG in the development, deployment and hosting of the site. I'm sure many other LUGs around the world would like something similar...
I think it was mentioned somewhere. 2 servers with adequate hardware that are maintained aside from normal work.
For the license I think that there is probably a run your own business entitlement that would allow this (if you think of DNUG as a Business Partner).
I would be interested in a comparision against products like Atlassian Confluence or Jive Softwares clearspace. Intranet pricing is quite competitive but the punishment for extranet usage, starting at 45.000$, is high for a product that promises to connect coworkers, partners and customers.
Maybe as member of the board of DNUG I can give you some background information on this.
Our intention with EULUC was to establish a platform for all people interested in Lotus technologies that is available 365 days a year (okay, in 2008 it should be 366). The whole discussion started already in May and we wanted to have it up and running at the autumn DNUG conference. It has been hard struggling for the licensing issue where Henning is right that we finally succeeded in getting it resolved with the business partner status of DNUG. Thus, however, it was very short time for preparation, but thanks to Softwerk and holistic-net plus a number of contributions from FH Gelsenkirchen, University of Paderborn and TimeToAct the platform could be launched just in time - at least in an experimental mode for the time being where we intend to change to the most recent software version within the next weeks. As user group for IBM Lotus products we obviously did not consider to use a different technology base. It is our intention to collect experiences with Lotus Connections for all of our members.
Stuart, there has been no assistance nor hosting, development or anything else from IBM other than the license. I'm afraid all other LUGs have to go the same long way themselves, if they don't want to get in touch with DNUG. DNUG is open for any kind of cooperation, just contact us.
Naturally the attendees of the DNUG conference have been the first to get access to it followed by our members. Others to follow, but we need to establish proper processes for it which we did not set up before not knowing whether we even would be able to get it up and running, make it stable, integrate with Lotus Sametime etc.
Congratulations for getting it up and running. I know it isn't easy. :-)
DNUG is open for any kind of cooperation, just contact us.
I would encourage everyone to do just that. I don't think it makes sense to setup another dozen Connections sites.
