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Alex Evans and I are currently in Oxford, England attending the Open Horizons Tour - UK. We will be here until Friday, October 16th. We will then travel to Berlin, Germany to participate with several more partners and Novell employees in the annual GWAVACon European Event.

These events and conferences are unique in that we get to spend a lot of one on one time with many customers and partners. We are always energized by the enthusiasm and positive vibe we get from all of the attendees. We also always seem to meet new people or partners that we were not as familiar with. Of course we usually see a lot of ISV partners at these events, but many times we meet some of our long standing reseller partners. Today we spoke with Julie from Blueloop (www.blueloop.net). They are a Silver Reseller Partner out of the UK and have been selling Novell software for years.

We have also had the opportunity to meet again with SkyCom, Messaging Architects, Redback Systems, GWAVA, Omni-TSand Salford Software. All members of our active and growing partner ecosystem.

Today we spoke about our Collaboration strategy that includes GroupWise, Teaming, Conferencing and DataSync and then Alex spent quite a while talking about mobility and ActiveSync. Alex had to disappear for a little while this afternoon while he called into the very first DataSync (Gradenko) Authorized BETA call. Of course, now that we are back in Alex's home turf - he pronounces it BEETA. I thought I understood English????

Some of the topics being covered today at the conference include: Virtualization with XEN on SLES11 by Mark Robinson, ZENworks Configuration Management by Ian Stimpson and Unified Communications for GroupWise with SkyPro by Horst Fuhrmann. Sessions are being presented by Novell employees as well as partners like Altman Technologies, ENGL Ltd. and NDS8 Ltds.

Alex and I will participate in Question and Answer hour with all of the attendees and then tomorrow will begin the Open Horizons Summit with more sessions, hands-on labs and more opportunities to speak one on one with attendees.

If you have a chance to participate in an Open Horizons or GWAVACon event - I highly recommend it. Not only will you get the technical information you may need, but you will also become a member of a community that is pushing for Novell and its products to succeed!

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.