Only Swiss and Germans will understand the joke in the title.
The yearly Snoug SR event finished with a lot of news … we all already know. Except probably for the news about Sametime Next. Pretty cool that thingy, if you ask me. Video chat on the web client? Not bad at all. Otherwise it was the same old story for the Connect 2013 part. Nothing new there. Any news about marketing? No, and I did not dare to ask. On the other hand, I did ask the head of sales for the Alps region about a more small company friendly licensing scheme for the Connections VMs … he did not know but he promised to follow up. Since he did not ask for my name or my business card, hell probably freezes over until I hear something. Have to torture somebody else for an answer.
By far the best contribution was the one from Sika. They have deployed Connections in a way, that sounded more like an accident. No formal budget. The driving person is from marketing and he can be very proud of the achievement. They started with just 5 persons and today there are over 2000 on it. They use Connections out of the box and are pretty happy, it seems.
He made some interesting points. First lessons learned:
- Don’t call the first deployment „Pilot“. People will be reluctant to participate. Go for real from the start. Any content counts
- Most of the support was self service. They underestimated the training needs
- One technical glitch. They did not have the same password as for Notes
Success factors:
- Top management support
- Chose community leaders wisely
- Use common sense for the rules and not too many of the later
- Story telling. Success stories are better than statistics about klicks or whatever a bean counter can count.
- DON’T LEAVE IT TO THE IT DEPARTEMENT.
The last point is very, very important. I met again that very frustrated guy from that famous bank, which deployed it without any content or useful help. Since users did not find anything interesting from the start, they never adopted it. Now management thinks it’s crap and they will deploy MySpace. One just hopes they learned anything. Probably not.
Bankers! Should I say more?
I said it before and even if nobody wants to hear it. IBM Docs is damn cool. I want that.
I do wonder, if I should move to the Smart Cloud. It’s not even very expensive. A lot less than Office 365 which I did not like when I tested it. Probably I am just biased towards anything that comes from Microsoft (while I don’t think the Windows 8 desktop is such a bad idea).
Since the Snoug event at Givaudan two years ago, I compare every time the catering with that of Givaudan (see, I am drooling again). This time, so lala. The buffet was nice to look at and we had seats. The appetizers were plenty and all right. Nothing special. The roast beef was hard, the crostini cold and a bit soggy. My main course looked good and tasted bad. That food was for tourists. It was really lousy. The cook wanted to do something special but lacks the know how. Deserts were OK again. A bit on the heavy side. Nope, no chance against Givaudan.
If you are interested in deploying Domino 9 on Ubuntu, come back later. I met Christian Boss from Camille Bloch again and he agreed to send me his how-to. I will test it and than you guys can have it, too.