Report from the booth at IBM ConnectED 2015

Posted by:

I know you're all dying to hear what went on at IBM ConnectED so here is my take!

We flew down on Thursday before Connected to have some time to prepare and to meet-up with customers and friends. Our hotel was not Disney this time and it felt somewhat strange, but also positive. As always, American hotel rooms are so large that Mats Ekman said that we could easily fit all 10 of us in the same room if needed.

Friday and Saturday flew by with shopping, sightseeing, meetings and preparations for the upcoming conference week. We enjoyed large American breakfasts with everything included, a good steak dinner, a delicious lobster dinner, numerous pizza slices, pool time, lots of good discussions, and most of all the ever shining Florida sun. We all concluded that this was going to be a great week!

On Saturday night we hosted our annual Infoware Collaboration Reception at Texas de Brazil. The event is a perfect way to start off the conference and to welcome customers and resellers from all over the world. This time for the 10th year in a row! We had a fabulous evening with friends, good food, lovely desserts, laughter and fun. We are also happy that we can connect our customers with each other in a steadily growing network. It always feels very good to welcome everybody to us.

And Sunday! A day of sessions and booth preparations. 7 of us are here to focus on covering all the session tracks and to gather knowledge about all the latest from IBM and other business partners. So they were off to different kind of sessions. Me, on the other hand, Daniel Svanström and Fredrik Söderquist, were busy in our booth in TechnOasis getting everything ready for the evening’s Welcome Reception. We checked our demo environments, the leads scanner and of course our t-shirts!

Every year our t-shirts make a bit of a buzz among the visitors, and also this year! The word is spreading. "Aaww, you guys have the coolest t-shirt!". "I want one of those!" and so on. Some visitors dress up wearing our shirts and our message is visible here and there. Our kick ass ninja warrior that guards all our customer’s environments and also let’s everybody know that we offer the best solutions for every IBM customer!

Infoware is exhibitors and sponsors of IBM ConnectED for the 10th time in a row! That’s something! Infoware is a true blue IBM Premier Business Partner, and has social business as one of our main areas. This year we focus wholeheartedly to promote DomainPatrol Social, our administrating tool for IBM Connections.

Luckily we got ready in time, since the TechnOasis filled up to the brim at precisely 18:30! We realized quite soon that the rumors we heard were right. The organizers had expected around 1,500 attendees, but at least 1,000 more has registered. Excellent news! This resulted in a packed TechnOasis, and also a more intimate feel of the whole conference. The atmosphere was full of expectations and everybody had happy faces.

So the reception! Refreshments were served and it was busy in the booth right away! Our well-oiled machinery chugged off and we did demo after demo. We talked about our new release, social business and a new way to work according to Infoware etc. We noticed immediately that almost every visitor were using IBM Connections one way or another. A positive trend! And of course good for us, since our tool cover the needs of an organization using IBM Connections.

We worked hard! And after opening in the TechnOasis, the Welcome Reception continued outside on the Swan Lake terrace with food, drinks and DJs who played far too modern music according to Mats Feretti. 🙂

The next day after breakfast: OGS! Exciting! What would happen? How will this conference turn out? It was big expectations in the air and good music was playing when all the people were gathered. Jeff Schick opened with a bang. Talked about taking on Google and Dropbox. About the collaboration with Apple. Go IBM! Scott Probes did a live demo IBM Verse! Very cool. Scott smiled like a kid on Christmas Eve on stage. And we smiled with him! The whole concept of IBM Verse is "A New Way to Work". IBM Verse will work for you, and not vice versa. The mail has jumped to the next step and is now a tool to sort, categorize and prioritize all the information flowing over you on a normal working day. He also showed cool Watson features. The look of Verse is totally fabulous and I for one cannot wait until I can try and use it! Then Luiz Benitez showed us the new Connections interface which seamlessly waves into Verse in a very nice way.

The week went on in similar fashion. Three whole more days in the booth with non-stop networking and connecting with new and new friends. We decided that every member of our booth crew needs to have the same amount of tattoos as Fredrik. Well, we’ll see about that.

We caught up with our resellers that attended the conference too. Very good to show them our new release of our product and talk business, but also just to spend time together over a beer or two.

I also took the opportunity to meet my friends from Social Connections! Both Lars Samuelsson, Brian O’Neill, Jan Waldman and new friend Doug Morrison. All happy faces!

Notes/Domino turns 25 this year, which raised some attention during the week. Small happenings popped up here and there at the conference to celebrate the youngster. For example bubbly champagne, cakes, and not to forget temporary tattoos handed out by Matt Newman. We all got branded!

The evenings was of course a great deal of fun too! Every night we had something to look forward to. One small disappointing thing though was that there was no theme park booked for the ConnectED Party this year. I who, love roller coasters over than many, many other things had to settle for some drinks and food at the Dolphin Hotel instead. Although, there WAS indeed a very short ConnectED Party, with food and drinks in the Atlantic Hall at Dolphin. After we had eaten, we thought it was time to start the party! We went up on the huge empty dance floor and started dancing, and soon the dance floor filled up with others. 🙂 It’s always like this!

The week went on and soon it was Wednesday, and time for the Closing Session. Somewhat tired we went into the darkness of the session room to hear IBM say thank you and goodbye for a fantastic conference week! And we agree.

Last night with the gang. The week has been long and full of hard work, rest = zero, so we decide to do something simple and just for us at Infoware. A short trip down to Downtown Disney and a burger at the House of Blues. Great place with the music scene and American good food. We had a long table where we could take a break and rest and have a good time together. When the clock was 0:00, I was at home in the room, received a glass of whiskey from a colleague and started packing my bags. #yawn

Then it was over .. the end? 🙁 The feeling when we close the booth and say goodbye to all our friends and acquaintances cannot be described. I strolled by the Dolphin fountain and listened to its noise one last time and then went out waiting taxi to take us to the hotel. For several months I have breathed #ibmconnected with all the planning and hard work. And now it's over? Impossible. But there is also joy. An incredibly joy that has spread among us throughout the week. The buzz to have scooped a number of leads, talking to "everyone", said hello to "everyone". The IBM ConnectEd Community is not like others. It’s magical and captivating. And once you have walked over the bridge between Swan and Dolphin, you know you want to do it again and again and again. Because the reward for all the hours you invested is amazing!

0

New members of the Infoware crew

Posted by:

We have had a fabulous year at Infoware, and to keep up our excellence and competence, we are always searching for new co-workers for the Infoware team. Latest addition to our crew is project leader Sofia Olsson (formerly Stockholm County Council) and developer Jenny Jutterström (formerly Bombardier).

We welcome both and hope they soon will feel at home!

 

0

Tomas on ConnectED2015.

Posted by:

There has been many sessions where IBM Verse has been presented. IBM Verse is a new and more effective way of working with your emails and calendar. It gathers information from the mailfile nsf and displays it on a intuitive console in the web browser. In the console you can filter the information in just a few clicks. The search capabilities are really powerful.

IBM Verse will be available for cloud customers in the first quarter this year. They say that it will be available for on premise customers later this year. There are a lot of integration with IBM Connections in IBM Verse. So the customers with IBM Connections will get the most benefit of IBM Verse. At the moment there are a lot to be solved on how to deploy this on premise. What components do you need to install and how?

The feature I like best is the calendar bar that is always displayed in the bottom of the page.

All the attendants of ConnectED2015 will be invited to test IBM Verse and I'm looking forward to start testing all the new features.

There have been a lot of sessions about the cloud. There are a lot of things to consider before you move to the cloud. Should I go for fully hosted or hybrid? Is my internet connection prepared for the increased load this will generate? What features are included in the cloud offer? How do I provision users? This is where we can help our customers.

My favorite session so far:
BP104 IBM Notes Traveler Daily Business: Administration, Monitoring and Support presented by René Winkelmeyer, midpoints GmbH.

0

Mid week impressions from a ConnectED rookie

Posted by:

As a ConnectED rookie I didn’t really know what to expect on my trip to Orlando.
Due to Infowares LotusSphere/Connect tradition I’ve heard a huge amount of stories (or in some legends) about the things that could happen and the steaks/lobsters that would be eaten between the moment the airplane leaves the airport until you pick up your bag at the bagage claim about a week later.

So, what’s my mid week verdict?
Unfortunately, we miss out on the theme park visit, and gazing at the rollercoasters while in the taxi is the closest i’ll get to them this visit.

On the bright side, our dinner at Texas de Brazil was a great success with a lot of nice people joining us for a very tasty dinner (that place sure knows how to prepare a steak) and of course there has been a lot of interesting sessions. My favorite sessions so far are

Yes! You CAN Use Those Cool New Frameworks in Your Mobile Domino Apps! by Theo Heselmans

Facing Our Creativity Crisis by Louis Richardson #CCrisis

Understanding Social Software Adoption and Impact by
Laura Rodriguez

There will probably be more blog entries from me and/or my colleagues before the end of the week, so get back in a day or two for more content

0

Focus: the German market

Posted by:

We have experienced increased demand for our product DomainPatrol Social globally, which we of course are very happy about. To meet this interest we are doing a number of activities and promotions this year. First off, we are teaming up with one of our German partners Stefan Gebhardt at FSS, releasing a new webpage about DomainPatrol Social. Completely in German.

Now we can come closer to the German customers with first hand information and dialogue in your own language if needed. We think it's important that every customer fully shall appreciate the benefits and winnings of DomainPatrol Social, and we feel that we now are one step closer to that.

https://www.domainpatrolsocial.de/

DomainPatrol Social

 

1
Page 6 of 6 «...23456