Collaborate Days 1 and 2

So, I blogged Sunday’s events up to the ACE Dinner, organized by Vikki Lira and held at Panzano in downtown Denver.

Paul and I were graciously invited to mix and mingle with the ACEs and ACE Directors. Dan, Matt, Ameed and Floyd were all there. Plus, I got to meet Bex, Linda, Steven, John, George, Debra and Steve. Here’s a photo Floyd snapped of our table with his iPhone.

Sorry if I missed you there. Thanks to Vikki and Justin for inviting us.

Steve and I chatted about the newly released Knowledge Factory which will house official OAUG content and serve as a professional/social network for OAUG members. Looking ahead, we’re working with OpenSocial (teasing a post from Rich), which should make it easy for OAUG members to cross-pollenated content between Mix and the Knowledge Factory. I’m looking forward to working with Steve, Floyd and others to make this a reality.

Overall, an awesome dinner. As much as I enjoy virtual interactions, it’s great to have a good, old-fashioned face-to-face chat with people.

Monday kicked off the sessions, and ours (well, Paul’s) was early in the morning. Actually, before we headed into the session, we bumped into Paul and Rich’s old PeopleSoft cronies, Chris Heller and Larry Grey of Grey Sparling Solutions. It’s always a trip for me to hear PeopleSoft veterans talk about the old days.

Paul’s session, “Oracle and Web 2.0” had about 40 attendees. It went well, and we were psyched to be able to demo Connect and Mix, despite questions about network access and VPN concerns up to the very last minute before the session began.

Connect was a bit slow over VPN, and something was blocking Javascript because a few AJAX areas were totally non-functional. Still, the demo was compelling, and the message was pretty well-received.

After the session, I got to meet Jim Marion, the guy Rich replaced himself with in demo services. Jim’s a really bright guy, and I wanted to chat longer.

However, a guy I hadn’t seen in 12 years just so happened to wander into our session and was shocked to see me there. Imagine my surprise. I started at Oracle with this guy, each of us right out of college. We joined Oracle’s college hire bootcamp for sales consultants, which is about six intensive months of training at HQ.

Anyway, I’d lost touch with him years ago, so it was a bit shocking to see him in the flesh. Turns out, he’s in Denver at KPMG. This isn’t the first time this happened to me at a conference.

At OpenWorld 2006, a guy I went to consulting bootcamp with in 1998 bumped into me at a session. Oracle makes for a small world, and it gets into your DNA.

Anyway, after another session, Paul and I had lunch with Jeff Nolan, who heads up NewsGator’s new SaaS division, and Walker Fenton, who leads the Syndication Services division. Best known for their (now free) feed readers, NewsGator is doing a lot of new and different things within enterprises.

I always enjoy chatting with passionate folks about technology, and these two have some great ideas that are developing quickly.

Unfortunately, I had to head out last night, but if you’re interested, Floyd has a photostream of the activity, which goes on all week. You can find numerous blog posts on the festivities too over at Eddie’s OraNA.

Now back to work and your regularly-scheduled programming.