GWAVACon Berlin a huge success

I returned this week from GWAVACon Berlin, the Novell Collaboration Conference. The event was a spectacular success. This GWAVACon was the 9th worldwide that my team has delivered, and each one just keeps getting better.

I've called GWAVACon the Novell Collaboration Conference because it has begun to grown and expand beyond the traditional GroupWise that are its roots.

There bulk of the conference is still focused on GroupWise, but now Teaming has become part of the conference and ZENworks has been there nearly from the beginning. This moves the conference from the focus of just GroupWise to a broader discussion of collaboration.

My keynote theme, like many I've delivered in the past, was the focus on owning a word. I have talked about owning a word in this blog many times and this was an opportunity for the Novell community in Europe to hear it first hand.

Novell needs to own a word and I believe that word is "Business-Driven Linux"

Not all in the audience agreed with me. Novell has been attempting to own the word "Interoperability", something the European crowd had a tough time even saying, let alone understanding what it meant.

Volker Smid, President of EMEA, delivered the keynote on day two and did a great job of emphasizing the ownership of the word Interoperability. He is an talented and enthusiastic presenter, and the audience responded well.

Feeling Good

The thing that most people feel coming away from GWAVACon is that they now belong to something bigger. They often feel that they are alone as a GroupWise IT administrator. When they attend GWAVACon they are surrounded by hundreds of other GroupWise enthusiasts and they are not alone.

In addition, the unprecedented support from Novell makes a difference to the attendees. I use the word unprecedented because in all my 15+ years involved with GroupWise I have never seen the support from all levels of the company like I'm seeing today.

Novell Marketing Makes a Difference

Wendy Steinle, as the person responsible for managing the marketing teams for GroupWise and Teaming, has been doing an outstanding job of increasing the overall involvement of Novell in the community. It has been very effective and it is very appreciated.

Thank you Wendy for hiring great people like Travis Grandpre over GroupWise marketing and Karen Rowell over Teaming marketing. They are both new in their roles, but came to GWAVACon and make an impact to the success of the conference.

Surprise visitor

We had a surprise visitor as well at GWAVACon. Mike Morgan from Novell manages the BrainShare event every year. Mike was in Berlin for another conference and was able to spend a day with us. GWAVACon is a very small event in comparison to the thousands that Mike takes care of for a week every year. But we were proud to be able to show off our little conference and the success we have had building it into a voice of influence in the GroupWise community.

BrainShare and GWAVACon

It has been asked if GWAVACon competes with BrainShare. My answer to that is that it complements BrainShare. When asked, GWAVACon attendees tell me that they, as GroupWise administrators get to come to GWAVACon while their boss, often the head of IT, gets to go to the much bigger event of BrainShare.

This has been GWAVACon's purpose. To focus on giving the GroupWise administrator a place to come and be king for a day. And in Berlin, we treated them like Royalty.