In fact my week of travels and great meetings started on Wednesday March 12, with 3 Days coaching on customer site in Geneva. Working with customers on a concrete XPages project and guide them to make it first time right is always inspiring. And if there is a Java crack in the project team, you should be well prepared. But its lot of fun and the challenge is to open your ears and learn.

The same is with conferences. I had great meetings with the community. But the best thing was to see how important OpenNTF has become to the community. But there is one thing I want to share. We contributed POI4XPages to OpenNTF because I belive that this project can make the difference. We have become feedback around the globe via mail, but its an incredible feeling, when somebody stand in front of you and says “Thank you for POI4XPages, I use it daily”.

I think the IBM Collaboration Community is something special. Take a look at this great picture from Oliver Heinz (@oliheinz):

Speakers, IBM Champions and IBMers traveling from engage.ug to bccon.de and have a picnic stop. Its raining, it’s wet and cold, but we had a lot of fun! Would you expect this?

But what have I learned on engage.ug and bccon.de:

1. All want to play with this new child called IBM Mail.next
2. XPages App Dev is an absolute hot topic in europe! The App Dev sessions where really good visited
3. Developers are now ready to go to the #free1352 path
4. We have to work with the Domino Admins that they do understand, why OpenNTF Essentials will not harm their servers

And I cant wait unitl April, to start play with my new project called “Patterns for automated build and testing with Jenkins, Maven and Selenium”