The 2003 European Livelink User Conference, was a much bigger gathering than the previous years event. Personally it was far more stressful, as I spent the first two days completing my Livelink Developer Certification and then was one of the Breakout Session speakers on the Wednesday, so by the end of the week I was exhausted, but had learned a lot about Livelink and how people use it.

I arrived on the Sunday evening and after settling into my hotel went to the conference venue - CNIT - about ten minuites walk away to register and get my bearings before the rush on the opening day. Afterwhich I retired to my hotel room and spent some time brushing up on the Livelink SDK tool - the Builder - before starting the FastTrack Certification course on the first two days of the conference.

On the Monday I joined four other developers in the FastTrack sessions, most of whom had far more "real world" exposure to the Builder than myself. The sessions were lead by Iain Dunn from OpenText UK, who had the job of taking us through what is offically a ten day course or three day bootcamp in only two days !! We spent two very long days working through most of the Livelink 9 course books - Knowledge Fundamentals, SDK, LAPI, Modules to Manage Tables and others - in preparation for two exams on Tuesday afternoon. At the end we sat the two exams - one on Using Livelink and the other on Developing with Livelink - both lasting a mere hour each.

After completing the exams I joined the Livelink UK User Forum and met several other Livelink users from the UK as well as catching up with the OpenText staff who I had met in the past. After a quick catchup and a fleeting review of the Partner stalls I joined the other delegates to listen to a wonderful opening Keynote from Pierre Yves Gerbeau which was very funny, entertaining and covered many of his experiences.

The Wednesday was a very interesting day as I pensively awaited the results from my exams and prepared for my Breakout Session just after lunch. I spent the morning listening to the OpenText CEO - Tom Jenkins - laying our their vision for the future and then Anik Ganguly, who laid out the Livelink Product Roadmap. After this I slipped out to finalise my presentation and check that my demos worked correctly.

As I wanted to be sure my session was as well prepared as it could be and that i was at the venue on time, I missed a session I would really have like to have attended on Worflow Internals. Then it was my turn to host a Breakout Session. I was very nervous before it started, recognising some familiar faces and names in the audience, all of whom were more than capable of covering my chosen topic. In the end the session seemed to go well as far as I was concerned - although I'm still awaiting the offical feedback ;-). There was some time for some group discussion and sharing which provided some valuable insights into the problems and solutions developed of my peers.

Following my presentation I attended the first of two wonderful presentations over the course of the Conference from Shell's John Buckley - the first on Performance Measurement and the second the following day on Workflow Design. My last two sessions of the day were on UI Customisation, which covered XML Skins and Appearance - the new name for XPression - and Livelink WebServices, an architecture to allow Livelink interaction via a WebService style approach. I retired to my hotel with a lot to think about and consider. I was intending to go on the Boat Cruise, but after getting back to my hotel and changing I was running very late, so just spent the night reviewing all the new things I'd learnt.

On the final day, after depositing my luggage at the desk I spent some time reviewing the Partner Stalls before attending the final Breakout Sessions of the Conference. The first one I attended was on Livelink WebReports, a way of creating a HTML front end for Live Reports in the same way that you create a WebForm as a front end for a Form Template. I then attended my second John Buckely session on the preparing to use Livelink Workflow as part of a business solution. After this I made my way into the final keynotes and the Panel Presentation before heading off to the Eurostar to go home and reflect on all the things I learned, the new ides that i had about how I could use Livelink and to look forward to the next Livelink Europe Conference.