DocuWorld 2018
May 7th through the 10th I attended this annual event which Docuware puts on for the ADP community. Beginning with the Meet and Greet ****tail party Monday right through to the last technical session on integrations Docuware put on a great show.
One of the reason for attendance was the renewal of our DSC technical certification to maintain our ADP status. Docuware was smart about this in that they split the days up between key notes and product presentations in the mornings and break-out sessions in the afternoons. That way attendees were not sitting through an entire day of one or the other. With partners from 20+ countries Docuware certainly demonstrated its true global nature.
Day 1, Tuesday morning was all about the release of Docuware version 7 (Koala) for both Cloud and On-Prem. Of course Digital Transformation, was prominent throughout all of the presentations. Jurgen Biffar, Steve Behm, Kevin Potts, Stefan Schindler, Mike Hellebuyck and Jeff Russo all added their passion for the product’s direction to the conversation. My biggest take away was the introduction of “Kinectic Solutions” which will be pre-configured instances dedicted towards specific business functionality. The first of which will be AP and HR on-boarding.
Koala boasts a huge structural change in Docuware by consolidating server services and engines to enhance performance. We were given several presentations focusing on these changes and what they mean not only for customers but for us as their partners.
Content Library now replaces Content and Thumbnail servers as well as Workflow engine. Job server from Desktop components is merged into Platform. Background Process Service now handles Instant Autoindex, Workflow Engine Tasks and former Content Server tasks just to touch on a few.
Tuesday night also featured what I thought was another smart move by Docuware. Rather than having everyone simply standing around and mingling we had Casino night. Who doesn’t like a little action after a long day of learning? Dinner and drinks were available of course, but for some reason the lines were a lot shorter than I’ve normally seen them. Hmmm, I wonder why?
All of the “money” won was turned in at the end of the night for tickets towards a drawing for 5 -6 different prizes donated by some of the vendors in attendance. Great night and lots of fun. By the way, that’s my stack in the fore-ground.
Day 2, Wednesday had us back in the main ballroom for a continuation of the General Session with presentations by Steve Behm, Thomas Schneck, Max Ertl, Dr. Michael Berger, Markus Koelmans, Stefan Schmidt with a closing by Jeff Russo. Continued focus on version 7 promoting the case for Docuware (unlike many of its competitors) is not simply a cloud or an on premise company, but in fact both. Touting the industry driven migration from ECM to Content Services (a topic for another time) the presenters made the case for Docuware as a solution for businesses of all types while focusing principally on the SMB market.
Wednesday afternoon brought additional technical sessions focused on the new version’s functionality. The presenters did a great job making the topics interesting and informative. You know, it’s all about us geeks.
Wednesday night brought the final dinner for the event. , this time by the pool. I obviously took these prior to the event as I did not want to infringe on anyone’s privacy or provide evidence of questionable behavior that may have arisen during the dinner. It has been known to happen.
Finally for Thursday, there was a demo challenge at 7:30AM by various partners. This was followed by additional sales and technical sessions which all wrapped up before lunch allowing everyone to make their flights home. Kudos also to Docuware for chartering buses for attendees to return to the airport. Saved me the $90.00 taxi ride and I think they actually got their quicker than the taxis did on the way out.
All in all another great event by Docuware. If I had one point to make I would wish for a little more time to attend some of the other, non-required sessions just to feed by head outside the normal stuff.
Special thanx to Rick Backus for this blog. If you'd like to know more about Rick, you can visit his Linkedin profile here. If you're interested in learning more about partnering with DocuWare please visit here.
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