That was a real shock for me, when I got the first rumours and later on the confirmations, that there will be no BrainShare next year in Salt Lake City. For me Brainshare was a personal MUST HAVE event. I would have paid private money and would have take holidays to attend Brainshare. So from an emotional point this is hurting me privately. But leaving the emotional area and thinking about it in a professional way: I think Novell had to take this hard decision.

My Christmas this year started pretty early. End of November I got - for the first time in my life - a new car, which was not produced in Germany. Since about 23 years I do have a drivers license (continuously) and I have had cars from Opel, Volkswagen, BMW and Audi.This time I decided to move away from these German vendors. I saw an advertisement in the German television about a new car called Skoda Superb, produced in Czech Republic. The advertisement made me very interested in the car, so finally I went to a local dealer and he gave me a presentation of that car. After about 20 minutes (it takes a little bit to see all the benefits and nice things of this car) the dealer did ask me, if I would like to do a test drive.

Today I saw a great comment on coolsolutions, which I would like to share with all of you:

 

If you have had the experience of being an admin for GroupWise, Exchange, and Notes, as I have, you would know that GW beats them both hands down. My last position (for 6 years) had Exchange 5.x-2000 (which forced us to implement AD - what a nightmare when you are used to a real directory\meta-directory like NDS/eDirectory), and it had critical calls opened at least twice a month. Downtime averaged >48 hrs/month.

My latest blogentry has been published through Novell coolsolutions newsletter. One person posted his comment on this and I want to share this with you: I have been working with GroupWise for about two years now. Prior to that I was primarily in Exchange environments with a year stint at a Lotus Notes site. (It was the Itty Bitty Machine company, and they HAD to run Notes - they owned what used to be Lotus.)

 

Anyway, I am one of 4 people who manage, from top to bottom, GW here. By that I mean client issues to Post Office/Domain/server issues. We recently upgraded from 7.0.2 to 7.0.3 and did a top-down rebuild, as one example. For 30 domains and 48 POs. Did I mention we have about 17,000 email users?

On Friday evening I visited a birthday party in the Netherlands. My very good friend - Roel "the guitar-man" - was celebrating his birthday. Great party, thanks Roel. On that party I had a chat with some people working for a dutch organization with a few hundred users (about 400). They have switched over from GroupWise to Exchange, because of some missing integration of products, which are important to them. This is the one and only reason, why they (had to) change. But I was very shocked, when I heard about the total costs for the migration.

At GWAVACon EMEA last week I heard a very nice and true story from a very interesting person. I did ask him, if I could publish this story and he gave me the OK for that, but he did not really want his name to be published. However many people at least in Europe know this person, he is the one, who is always registering first! Of course he has been the first to register for the Open Horizons EMEA Summit in November as well..... So looking forward to see you there again, Mr........ But now lets focus on this true story.

I´m travelling to and through the Netherlands on a regular basis, e.g. to have Open Horizons meetings with Erno and Paul or to visit customers and partners or to attend the local meetings of the very successful GroupWise User Group in the Netherlands. What I hate most about the Netherlands are the incredible traffic jams. Therefore my favorite dutch word is "filevrij" (in english this means no traffic jams). On my last trip in the Netherlands, where I had to spend some time in one bigger traffic jam, I was thinking about different things and then one logical association went into my mind. Filevrij = GroupWise.

The numbers 0815 are very well known in the german speaking area, maybe only in Germany. The term is based on a very popular german novel about a german soldier during the second world war. The title 0815 is originally a name for a german maschine gun, which was used in the second world war. Right now 0815 in Germany means something like "low standard" or "nothing special".