On arrival and during our visit we noticed very tight security measures, for example with police (wo)men standing next to the road at 50 - 100 meters (!) intervals all the way from the airport to the city centre. I've not seen anything like this during my earlier visits to Sofia, as the Bulgarians always welcome their visitors with open arms, so I was a bit puzzled.

 

This year our team which traveled to Bulgaria has expanded to three people, with Justin Zandbergen (NL) and myself as two of the speakers and Herbi Lefering(DE) on behalf of GWAVA. As always Reny Karnalova was welcoming us at the airport, or at least two of us. I was unlucky, as due to the economic crises some direct flights in Europe have been cancelled, and I was forced to take an indirect AirFrance/KLM flight via Paris - Charles de Gaulle (CdG). Several other travellers like me had bought a ticket which should have left us enough time for the transfer, however we had a 10 minute delay from Amsterdam to Paris plus another long security queue at CdG (Why again? I just passed security on Schiphol?). So this resulted in an early morning run with three laptops on my back (appr. 17,5 kilo's) and 7,5 kilo's of printed materials in another bag on one arm. Although the plane to Sofia was still at the gate, our group of 5 passengers from Amsterdam was not allowed to board anymore.

 

So instead of a quiet afternoon in Sofia with some last minute preparations, I now had to wait 9 hours for the next available flight. When I finally arrived at the hotel in Sofia around 23:00 I joined Herbi and Justin in a nice little restaurant. They had used the evening to enjoy great food, and, as Herbi mentioned, excellent locally brewed beer - which is a real compliment when coming from a German. Now who says all this traveling is just fun? You wake at 4:00 AM to travel to the airport, wait at CdG for 9 hours for your connection, after arrival sleep like 4 hours to arrive at the event location around 7:30 and then need to deliver two sessions with as much enthusiasm and passion as you can find - I can tell you it's a though job.  

 

Luckily,  the audience gathered in the big room of the American University of Bulgaria appreciated the sessions delivered by Justin, Milko, Vesselin and me very much. We were also honored with the presence of thePresident of the USA, excuse me, of Novell of course, Ron Hovespian, as he joined us in his video message. It was during this message that I was wondering - was this the reason for all aforementioned security measures? Anyway, between the four of us, we've been demonstrating GroupWise 8.0, SUSE Linux Enterpise 11, Teaming and ZENworks and all of this coming out of a strong business driven focus. I myself very much the enthusiasm of Justin (only 24, one of the youngest speakers ever!) as well as Milko - his delivery in Bulgarian made it difficult for me to follow, but the response from the audience seemed very positive.

 

This event also included a World Premiere, as we presented the new "GroupWise Powerguide - Second Edition", one of our Open Horizons projects. I've been one of the people working on this new book, together with Diethmar Rimser (AT), Cobus Burgers (ZA), John Ellis (UK), Patrick Frontéri (NO) and several others. What I like is the strong focus on GroupWise as a very serious business tool, including a chaptert with several business scenarios. The book allows you and your organization to be much more effective than with any other solution in the market space. The new webpanels, the RSS support, the very much improved  contact management, the many calendar enhancements like publish and subscribe, the new vacation rule, it is all described in more than 300 pages. You can find more information about the book at www.open-horizons.net/powerguide, also about the upcoming translated versions in DE, FR, NL, PL and SE.

 

At the end of the day we gave away some very cool prizes, like a subscription to the Open Horizons magazine, a new Powerguide and more. One of the people from the Bulgarian National Bank was very happy to win a Big Discount for one of the upcoming Hands-On Summits, so we hope to see him soon at one if these events. After the event we traveled back to the hotel, however due to the same high security measures we ended up in an enormous traffic jam. Certain parts of Sofia, more or less the area around our hotel, were completely sealed off and therefore it took us more than  1,5 hours to travel a distance of 2 -3 kilometers. Anyway, it puts the Dutch traffic jams in another perspective and afterwards we enjoyed a very nice dinner again (the food and the wine are excellent in Bulgaria) and we even went to bed before midnight.

 

On Friday our team of 3 started with interviews with two local newspapers, one being Information Week. It was very interesting to discuss things like cloud computing, the recent take-over of Sun by Oracle, open standards and how Novell solutions fit into all of this. Each interview took us more than an hour and we're looking forward to see the results, although reading the text will be difficult for me, as my understanding of Cyrillic is not really good enough yet. After a very nice lunch on an outside terrace the rest of the afternoon was spend on some more business discussions, after which Herbi and Justin flew back home.

 

On Friday evening I was invited to join a party organized by several people from Escom BG, the local Novell distributor, and that turned out to be very nice event. As driving by car was no option, we walked all the way to a little restaurant just around the corner of the magnificent Opera building. More that 20 people showed up, there was good food and lots of wine, a deejay mixing golden oldies with local music and most of the people were dancing the night away. Again Bulgaria on its best, it is always a pleasure to be among these enthusiastic people, even if you don't understand anything they say, except for Reny as she acts as translator.

Join the EMEA Tour and IT in Action - There is so Much More You can Learn!

There is indeed really a lot you can learn during our events and apart from that, we also try to make these events fun for everyone involved, as you can read above. The next stop will be Wroclaw in Poland, for which already almost 100 people have registered.  Our Open Horizons community is growing rapidly and that's not so strange if you look at what we have to offer:free tools, the knowledge sharing, the exchange of experiences with peers. I would really like to thank Reny Karnalova, Vesselin Yankov and the rest of the Bulgarian team for an excellent event and a warm welcome. And from my own experience and that of Herbi and Justin, Bulgaria is a great country to visit, with freindly people, good food, wine and a lot of things to see and do. I'm sure next year we won't be bothered again with all the security measures, as this was because of the big International Energy Summit in Sofia. We hope you will join us soon at any of our events, it will be great to see you there!

 

Kind regards,

 

Erno de Korte

 

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (Registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment