IdoNotes (and sleep)

Vienna as a week for us in terms of conference, work, food, drink and friends

The conference
  Another excellent conference produced by WISPubs and The View.  An excellent array of speakers on hand turned out some sessions, I myself made time to see on breaks.  I am always amazed at the knowledge that everyone carries and in very certain and specific areas.  All in attendance came prepared with tons of questions and very focused direction.  I handled a session on Sametime 7.5 which I drew much from the Real-Time Collaboration Seminar we are in the middle of touring right now (see link on left of blog).  As most has seen the interface, the growth in the ability around plug-ins and the abilities of the Sametime Gateway generated most of the questions.  The majority had already installed Sametime and were in the process of upgrade planning.  Those that had upgraded were smaller enterprise sizes, the largest was 500 persons.  We covered some of the security considerations around plug-in deployment and control over users.  Mail routing was a hot topic, both SMTP based and NRPC based.  As I mentioned in the other postings, there was some unique environments with multiple domains, firewalls, multi-company consolidations and dilemmas and just plain problems.  It seems most were inherited from previous administrators.

But let us make one thing clear.. very few discussions about companies wanting to switch to other solutions and more that were bringing Exchange over or making sure coexistence worked.  I am pleased to see growth in the Europe market and the Notes 8 showings reinvigorated many.  I was glad to see Ed and Mary Beth come over for the conference.  I actually didn't know Mary Beth had another session on Notes 8 the next day. I paid attention to the rumblings from the attendees to hear it was well received again.  Moving forward in Lotus Notes is no longer about Domino, but about total architecture solutions including Portal and the Eclipse framework.

Read about the city, food and flight experiences below by clicking.....



The city
Pictures can be found on Flickr and Yahoo.  The good news is there is a few of us using the same tag on Flickr so you can see an array of pictures under the tag Admin2006Europe.  Thanks to Susan Bulloch and Paul Calhoun so far.  As this was my first trip to Vienna, we made it a point to do the normal tourist attractions, like St Stephans cathedral.  From the pictures you can see that we went into the catacombs and all the way up the spire for an incredible view of the city.  The conference was just in time for the lighting of the plaza with the enormous chandeliers they string and hang,  The largest shopping mall in the Austria (and supposedly Europe) was right across the street from the hotel.  This led to shopping chances not many people took.  Now a few of the significant others were able to make their way to Baden to the original spa.

The food
I wanted to highlight the excellent places were found around Vienna.  While we ate at many others during the week long stay, these brought excellent food and/or service

• Lucky Chinese - hidden above an 'adult' club, the food was more than excellent as we all were able to get around a large round table and share countless dishes.  While not fancy, the attention from the apparent husband/wife owner was incredible.  You can find them in the city shopping center at Kurtner Strabe 24
• Tratorria Santo Stefano - we knew we were lucky when Lisa and I sat down, ordered ice tea and actually received it in a glass with ice.  The joke here is that the waitress could tell by accent we were Americans and knew of our love for ice in our drinks.  The restaurant had a non-smoking section (growing in popularity but hard to find from what I read).  From the basil and smooth tomato soup, to the fungi pizza and pastas, we couldn't get enough of the dishes until we stuffed ourselves.  While wandering side streets we just happened to run across it.  Dorotheergasse 3-5 or at this website.
• Fabrik - one stop away on the train some of our party had come across a local restaurant.  This is where you always seems to run into excellent food and by how crowded it was with people and large dogs, we knew we had hope.  About 12 of us ate everything from ribs that fell off before you could lift them (ok that dish wasn't me) to tons of local Viennese cuisine.  Ortsstrabe 8-10, 2331 Vosendorf  and on the web here.
• Pizza Bizi - we actually ate here twice, once lunch at their smaller restaurant and once for dinner at the large one.  Both are right on streets around St Stephans and we didn't realize there was two.  But the pizza!  Listed by Fodor's as the best slice in Vienna, we found whole pizzas to be just as good.
• Zanoni & Zanoni - I don't even know where to begin.  We had left dinner and were headed toward the Bermuda triangle bar area and ran across it.  Come to find it is known for some of the best gelato you can find. That is no understatement.  It was quite hilarious to see Andy Pedisich trying to hold himself back.  So we forced him into a sample of some of ours.  By the time I turn around he has a large double scoop of mint chocolate chip.  I almost ended with 40 different scoops but narrowed it down to caffe and tiramisu, Lisa had vanilla and caramel and I can't recall what some of the others had.

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On Saturday, December 2nd, 2006   by Chris Miller        

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