Good morning, 

The 18th Annual OpenText Enterprise World conference once again brought together the world’s best to explore the future of information and the latest trends in the digital landscape. Attendees enjoyed a full week of collaboration, education and insights from experts – all while enjoying the exceptional Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee.

Monday, July 11: OpenText Partner Summit
As in previous years, OpenText Partner Summit proved to be empowering and informative. We were able to connect with partners, familiar and unfamiliar, to share success stories and best practices. We also gained insight into new developments within the Global Partner Program. OpenText continues to formalize their partner program to ensure winning outcomes, and as a result, we notice significantly tighter integration and planning. For example, business plans are now mandatory and are established to ensure the individual partner strategy is also in sync with OpenText. Clients have seen greater benefits, pricing became more transparent and overall partner numbers diminished, but time will tell if this is a temporary effect as potential partners have time to adapt. OpenText also unveiled a new Partner Portal that will soon be ready for partner trial.
 
After the Partner Summit concluded, we made our way to Broadway Street in Downtown Nashville for the annual (and always exceptional) Partner Summit Kick-Off, comprised of BBQ, live country music and even some line dancing lessons.

Tuesday, July 12: Enterprise World Day 1
The first day of Enterprise World kicked off with keynotes from Steve Murphy, OpenText President, and Mark Barrenechea, OpenText CEO & CTO. Barrenechea made two big announcements in his address: unveiling Project Bandaroo and updates to Magellan. Special guest speaker, retired Canadian Astronaut Colonel Chris Hadfield, made a moving keynote address. It was incredibly interesting to learn of his career as a test pilot and astronaut; his thoughts on innovation and the progress of technology were insightful and entertaining. 
 


On the Expo floor we saw OpenText continuing to push Suite 16. Some of the products, including Content Suite and Process Suite, have considerable enhancements, while other product changes were less dramatic with little to no user impact.
 
Our team attended several breakouts in the afternoon.

The OpenText analytic offerings that were predictably widely touted during the sessions, as well as attendees' responses, gave us an opportunity to assess how IQBG offerings work for our clients when we are involved in the implementation.
 
Furthermore, Process Suite Entity Modeling has progressed from an idea into the current release and offers the potential for faster, more efficient solutions.  IQBG and our partner Counterpoint Consulting are investigating best practices for leveraging these new capabilities beginning with the Region of Peel.
 
In the afternoon I joined Region of Peel Commissioner Gilbert Sabat on a panel titled, “Protecting Our People and Their Resources.” We shared our thoughts and experiences helping both the US Department of Interior and The Region of Peel to digitize their processes and help constituents.

Wednesday, July 13: Enterprise World Day 2
Our team spent the morning of Day 2 meeting with partners and customers on the Expo floor and attending more breakout sessions. There was a good mix of OpenText-related conference sessions and user-oriented sessions.

We were also able to review several Content Suite data migration tools including Migration Center from FME Group and Bulk Data Manager from FastMan. The FME product was robust and is a good candidate for our implementations that require repeated migrations of large volumes of files. Importantly, it allows for an interrupted migration to be restarted and continue from where it broke off. Though our own proprietary tools are a much better fit than the FastMan Data Migration tool, FastMan has another product, FastMan Permission Manager, which has potential for clients that need to audit and/or modify Content Suite permissions. We have seen this need a number of times and addressed it with far more labor-intensive custom SQL queries.

In addition, PleaseTech offers a very slick solution for collaborating on Word and Excel documents a la Google Docs. The potential to use this in our proposal preparation process is enormous and we will be seeking an evaluation copy.
 
We reviewed ShinyDocs again and continue to believe that there are client opportunities to leverage this tool and build our competency with it.
 
We also did a deep dive with KineMatik and learned about a Project Management add-in for Content Suite that would streamline Portfolio Management in a large organization. For companies like IQBG, the solution has the potential to further formalize governance. We will be evaluating the software and believe we can further develop our expertise and potentially recommend it to some of our clients.



Finally, on Wednesday evening, we gathered a group of our valued customers and partners for a “Tour of Nashville.” We had a great evening enjoying the “tourist traps” and sampling the local fare: Hattie B’s Hot Chicken. (PS: Don’t order the “Damn Hot” chicken.)

Thursday, July 14: Enterprise World Day 3
Many of IQBG and DOI clients enjoyed the evening at the Grand Ole Opry listening to groups such as Josh Turner, Crystal Gale, Dailey & Vincent Bluegrass Band and Elizabeth Cook. 



I look forward to next year’s OpenText Enterprise World in Toronto. Thank you to all who made this year such a success! 

Sincerely, 
Michael Beck
President & CEO, IQBG, Inc.