This year’s event was hosted in Coral Gables at the fabulous Biltmore Hotel. If nothing else the facility, the staff, and the food was worth the trip. But if you wanted to enjoy all that the facility had to offer you needed a couple of extra days because you didn’t want to miss any of the conference announcements or sessions.

Sunday evening started off with a welcome reception on the balcony of one of the ballrooms that overlooked the Biltmore pool.  It was a chance to get reintroduced to some old contacts or resellers that you had previously met and also a time to meet new users that had never been to the event before. Everyone was anxiously anticipating what the next couple days would bring. There was a lot of talk about the advances that were made through the previous year, while others were anxiously waiting to get their first installation off the ground.  It’s always a pleasure to deal with the BlueCielo ECM Solutions group.  The reception gives us a time to get to know them on a more personal note and gives us a chance to put a face with a voice.  Their company always makes the event much more enjoyable.  But even with all the talking going on they were very tight lipped about the surprises that were in store over the next couple of days.

Monday morning started off with Martijn Janmaat sharing the current status and future vision of BlueCielo ECM Solutions.  A big announcement was made that BlueCielo had acquired DataCore Technology.  Here’s a clip from their press release: “The merger of the two companies is part of BlueCielo's aggressive growth strategy to provide integrated ECM solutions to specific vertical markets such as energy, oil and gas, petrochemical, government, life sciences and manufacturing. The acquisition of DataCore will support BlueCielo’s plans to accelerate growth and meet customer demand in a booming market.”

Following Martijn came a brief introduction to the new InnoCielo Meridian 2007 (the replacement for AutoManager-Meridian), and the new advances that would be in this release. The product scheduled for released within the next couple of weeks, started many users discussing upgrades in their near future. With so many advances in the new product it appealed to all industries present. After that we broke for an hour lunch, but I barely had time to eat trying to talk with my reseller on how I could use some of the new enhancements.

After lunch we continued with more information on the new product, in particular the updated Global Collaboration Framework, and collaboration engineering using Microsoft SharePoint as a server.  This could be setup as either a publish site for documents or a full collaboration site. The possibilities and options should allow flexibility for any industry to take advantage of the tool.

A new feature this year was the breakout sessions.  There were four separate sessions by industry all taking place at the same time.  There were representatives from different companies explaining how they use AM-Meridian or TeamWork to their advantage within their particular industry. The industry’s that were represented this year was Life Sciences (BioPharma), Manufacturing/R&D (Tegrant Corp), Government/Universities (Institute of Technology), and Utilities (Entergy Service, Inc.). As I was only able to attend 1 session, I chose the Utilities session which brought up many ideas and some solutions to problems others companies have been trying to resolve.  Most of the time companies within the same industry all face the same problems, but there are many different approaches to finding a resolution.  There was also a resolution for a secondary backup server that gained much attention, and the company that was presenting had put the backups to the real test when Hurricane Katrina hit their primary computer center. They also brought to our attention the way that backup tapes were being created at their site.  It would take 96 hours (4 days) to completely rebuild the server. With a few changes in how the backups were being created this dropped the rebuild time to less than 8 hours.  Tips like these from someone who has already discovered and worked through the problem is enough to make my companies investment in sending me to the conference well worth the registration. Can you imagine having your Document Management tool off-line for 4 days because of a hardware failure? It could end up costing a company thousands and even more in loss productivity.

Monday night BlueCielo took 2 busses of conference attendees out to Miami’s South Beach for an informal gathering atop “The Hotel” one of South Miami’s most famous hotels, which had a terrific view of the Beach. There were also walking tours of the Art Deco district of South Beach explaining some of the rich history surrounding the area, and it’s growth through adversity and hard times to a very rich culture all it’s own.

Just think that was just the first day….

Tuesday started off with 2 separate sessions, one area had the technical side of different InnoCielo modules, the other was geared towards engineering management and using the tools to collaborate with other departments or external resources. It’s always a good idea to have a coworker with you so that for these type sessions you can cover everything and not miss any important tips for you company.  There is just too much information for one person to handle in such a short time.

Just before the closing summery by Martijn Janmaat, CyConnect International Users Group gave a brief presentation on the BlueCielo user group and their accomplishments over the past year. There was and introduction of a new Board member and a call for new members, volunteers, and board members. Through the past year with several board members changing jobs within their own companies, it has left several board member positions available.  CyConnect is your place to continue to learn about innovative ideas, what resolutions people are currently working on, and a place to share, grip, or meet other BlueCielo users.  The wish list should get started this year.  Users will have the ability to rate the idea’s giving the group some control over what will be presented to BlueCielo through the year, and possibility be included in future releases of InnoCielo.

For those that were able to attend this year, I hope you had as good a time as I did and learned what you needed to continue to excel in your jobs or with your company. For those that were not able to make the event, start planning on next year and hopefully get the information you need from CyConnect.org, your user community for BlueCielo products.

David Rogilio, Board of Directors