The 2005 European Livelink User Conference was as in previous years a multi venue event, with to days being in London, which was the leg of the Conference that I attended. As always it was a wonderful opportunity to see what OpenText were doing, where the company was going and to meet other customers as well as OpenText staff.

Inside the conference bag were copies of Tom Jenkins' new books on ECM, ECM Solutions and ECM Technology, the companion book to the very useful Enterprise Content Management: What You Need to Know book publicised at last years LiveLinkUp Conference. All three provide an interesting insight into the ECM space and what product OpenText in these areas. Arriving early, I was able to catch up with some of the OpenText staff that I had previously met and thank the Support Team members who were there for their assistance over the previous year. I also took the opportunity to explore the venue so that I knew where the sessions would be, especially the one I was leading later that day.

The first session of the Conference was the Keynotes from Tom Jenkins & David Glazer from OpenText, Gerard Prins from Unilever and Melissa Kimmerly from EKS. A wide variety of interesting keynotes setting the stage for the rest of the Conference. The first two providing us with some ideas of where OpenText was planning to go in the next few years and the latter two describing what they have done with OpenText's products and what the business benefits they have derived from them.

After Lunch, we moved into the first set of BreakOut sessions. I attended CAS3091: The Pink Elephant - Livelink for SAP® Solutions at Axon Global which was a good case study on the similarities of issues both on the technical and business side of IT in two very distinct companies. The next session I attended was SOL3117: The Business Case for High-Volume Document Imaging.

After a short break for coffee, I was up presenting my session - CAS3094: Maximizing Livelink Workflow at JohnsonDiversey - which was very well attended. I covered off several approaches to best practise design of Workflow implementations as well as touching on several methods of extending the existing functionality using common skillsets that organisations were likely to already have to reduce their TCO and improve their ROI for Livelink. Unfortunately the post sessions discussions were cut short due to the need for us to move onto the next session, but I was able to have conversations with several people about the session over the remainder of the conference.

The next session was for me one of my two top sessions of the entire conference - TEC3022: Livelink Performance and Monitoring - having a techincal focus, it was a nice change from the majority of the conference sessions. It provided an overview of the Monitoring Agent and Performance Analyzer tools which can assist in monitoring the performance of your Livelink implementation.

That being the final session of the opening day, we all gathered together for a few drinks prior to the evening meal, allowing an opportunity for the days proceedings to be digested and discussed by the attendees. I had the chance to meet several other customers and hear what they were using Livelink for at present adn what future plans they had for it.

The following morning, we had the final series of Keynotes, from Tony Reid, Hitachi Data Systems, Iain Andrew, Dixons and Simon Harrison from SAP. These provided another interesting mix of presentations, with the first and last focusing primarily on the wider ECM space and Iain Andrews exploring two distinct Livelink implementations that he had been involved with.

For my first breakout of the day, I attended SOL3025 - Next-Generation Collaboration which gave me my first real look at TouchPoint, a collaboration tool combining technologies such as Instant Messaging, online Meeting and web based document sharing and editing. Instead of attending the next breakout, I took the opportunity to investigate the Demo Pods area and see what products the OpenText partners were offering, there was a wide range of differing solutions on offer, from Secure Access to Data Storage and Management.

For my final sessions of the conference, I attended the CAS3194 - Leveraging your KM Investment - Lessons Learned at Kerr McGee session, which looked at how Blubaker had managed to reorganise a failing Livelink implementation and rationalise a huge number of Categories and Attributes down to a more manageable number. For my closing session, I attended TEC3133 - Livelink Capacity Planning Through Modelling & Simulation which gave me an insight into how OpenText does capacity planning and the options that a System Administrator has to resolve capacity issues.

Overall, the conference was another wonderful event, I learnt a lot, both from the sessions and from the other attendees. Personally, I would have preferred a few more sessions focussed for Administrators and Developers, as well as some more detail on the new BPM server, but as the conference was focussed towards Project Managers and Management the conference mix was understandable. I left, wanting more and looking forward to the next one.