Today was an event, I was looking forward to. SNOUG-SR (Swiss Notes User Group Swiss Romand) had it’s second reunion in 2010 today. Guess what, it was great. Why?
The location: We where all invited to Camille Bloch. One of the most famous chocolate makers in Switzerland. Ragusa, Torino are their its main brands. It is a small company with 100 to 200 employees – depending on the season.
In the begining, Michael Snijders, head of IT, introduced us to the history of Camille Bloch. Apart from the fact, that Monsieur Camille Bloch set up this company in the Bernese Jura, where most of you wouldn’t want to be buried, they have quite an interesting IT history. They bought their first IBM system 1948. This is not a typo. They have been IBM customers for 62 years. I don’t think that there many companies, that have an „IT“ history that long and we are talking about an SMB. Today they are using Notes, Traveler, Sametime and Quickr. If possible always the latest release. They are looking into Alloy and UC.
Their Domino servers run on Ubuntu. I asked Christophe Boss, the main Domino admin (I wonder what nick name he has in the company), why they use an unsupported plattform. His answer:“ I am the support!“ For Camille Bloch, Ubuntu is the most cost effective solution. It looks like it runs great. Boss talked about a few issues in the beginning, but he solved them all. (yes, I will pester him, until he gives me the documentation). Now they are thinking about moving Traveller and Quickr to Linux, too.
After the introduction Snijders showed us a Box. An original Notes 3 box with the floppy disks still in their little sealed plastic sachet (If you don’t know what floppies are, ask your grannie).
After the intro, we had a very interesting speach about the Notes NRPC Parser by Andrew Magermann.
And then came the part, everybody came for, a tour of the company with „degustation“ in the end.
After the Lunch we had for 12 bucks at Camille Bloch, we talked about other interesting stuff. Teamstudio showed of some of their products and IBM SR had some very interesting news about the IBM/Lotus road map. They showed the latest screenshots of project Vulcan and if that is the future of Notes, I feel a bit better. It is cool. I mean not just cool. Cool cool. And if until then, that dreadful campaign „Lotus weiss“ is over and forgotten, Lotus actually has a chance to be on the map again (in case of getting a marketing campaing going that deserves that name).
„THE BOSS“ showed us the Snapps QuickR app for his iPad. Now I need an iPad … oh, and QuickR, too.
The Snoug Team: The SNOUG SR reunions are always free. Everybody just does it for the fun of it. During lunch we found out, that this was anyway the most cost effective way to do it.
I have to thank the SNOUG team for the wonderful idea to go to Courtelary and when I drove back and I could see the tipps of Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau in the light of the sinking sun. Just a great day.