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Re: Kindle; Re: Connect City to City Tour

Novell is currently in the middle of an aggressive city to city tour. We are meeting with customers and partners around the globe and in a city near you. Please sign-up, register, come and experience the new Novell! The Re:Connect tour allows our Novell customers the opportunity to interact with Novell employees, get product roadmap updates and participate in very active question and answer sessions

A few quotes:

"I just wanted to say thank you to all who assisted in the best Campaign and training we have ever had in South Africa since I have been here."

"We managed to have 3 x GroupWise 3 hour workshops and one full day Vibe workshop where we managed to "train" 76 partners and customers..….again we had a fantastic turn out to our Re: Launch of GW/ OES/ Vibe and Zenworks, hosted at <partner> - we had just under 80 attendees - customers and partners."

One of our Sales Engineers, Doyle Collins, presented at two of these events last week. He was in Calgary and Winnipeg and will be in St. Louis and Minneapolis this week.

From Calgary....

• Lots of people with interest in the roadmap features as we could see heads turning toward each other in acknowledgment of some good features;
• big interest again in us supporting mobile devices
• the rush is coming and they want tools - the time after the slides was well spent and very conversational. Overall - good awareness event.

From Winnipeg:

About 30 attendees; one of the first comments was not having a Novell show in over 5-6 years; the group was very pretty engaged; we mis-judged time a little bit - had to break at 6:45 to grab dinner and started back up at 7:00pm to finish GroupWise and Vibe. A few small challenges from the audiences: GroupWise doesn't have this outlook capability (Doyle sat down and proved we have it), do we compete with SharePoint (Jacques from <partner> jumped on that; we did the drawing around 7:15pm and then had some good general discussions right up until 8:00pm.

From Hartford:

• This group was very vocal; lots of comments and questions from them. Good ones, too... Not just banter. 11 out of 19 people showed up, despite a "snowstorm" in the area the night before, and surrounding area thru the day.
• a mix of consultants, academia, a few small businesses and John Futter (president of the mid-NE Novell Users Group)
• ran long, but largely due to numerous questions - the smaller the group, the more the questions
• Mark stepped up and delivered a great second 2/3 of the deck from OES on
• similar great food, good room and smooth logistics
• number one thing you were impressed by tonight - "the fact that you are here." :)

And with respect to NYC...

• 43 attendees; excellent crowd filling a spectacular venue overlooking the Freedom Tower site
• some serious players showed like <financial institution> (over 450K employees), <bank>, HP
• numerous walkup, non-registered customers - numerous school districts in this mix
• mix of STLG, Commercial and education
• numerous partners in the room including Novacoast, CIS and - great food and banter after the show with folks milling about well after 8pm; much appreciated NYC hospitality provided by Neil after the show ;)

Update from Portland:

• 29 Attendees; - good mix of commercial and govn't accounts
• 4 partners in the room - Dragonfly, Touchstone, Novacoast,
• question asked - when was last Novell event in area and a joking 10 years was replied. I questioned that but also saw 2 other heads nod in a bit of affirmation.
• After the slides were presented, we asked what is the most exciting items learned. An astounding response to Filr and we need it now or when can we beta. Other outstanding response was accepting our direction - focus back on the base for lasting relationships and excellent service.

Two positives from this event

• school district having drove over 2 hours to the event. We hosted a ZCM demo a couple weeks ago and because of high interest in what we have over <competitor>, this customer drove down to have more personal time to see ZCM and hear our story
• we visited a local newspaper company before the event to learn they only use 1 feature of ZENworks (DLU) and simply don't have bandwidth to learn or do more with it. There's heavy business pressure on making GroupWise stable so that is their number one project. After the event, they approached Chris Robbins with more interest in ZENworks and wanted to begin plans on trying to do more with it.

Indianapolis and Chicago:

In both locations we had people stay with us well past 8pm talking and asking questions. As you would expect, people were very appreciative to see Novell again and of the chance to interact with us. A few notes:

• In Chicago, during the break, we brought up the Community Chat Web page and talked about it briefly when people sat down again. Since we are trying to re:connect with our customers, this is a way to keep the conversation going

Indianapolis: 6 Partners; 17 customers
Chicago: 4 Partners; 21 customers

Novell Advertising

In addition, Novell is also doing some advertising in several large airports in the United States.

The first round of these airport ads have been up since early February and you can see them yourself in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.

Here is an example:

There is also a contest going on right now and a change to win some prizes. See more details and tweets from Wendy Steinle, Director Product Marketing.

CONTEST! Snap a pic of a Novell ad in JFK, LAX or ORD, Tweet it w/#NovellAd & earn chance to win a $50 iTunes card. Novell will pick three random winners on March 30th, 2012, and notify you with a Tweet. : )

New Webinars

Our Vibe Library team is now hosting some regular Webinars on Novell Vibe and how best to utilize this important collaboration solution.

There was the first webinar that was scheduled and executed yesterday, March 6th. The next one is March 8th.

Check out this article for more details and how to register: Webinar Kickoff: Solving Basic Business Issues with Novell Vibe

Dean

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.