2010 European CWG Conference April 19 - 21, 2010 in Vienna, Austria

   The CWG 2010 European conference in Vienna April 19 to 21 – Did you have the chance to be there ?

First we really need to thank our Vienna Conference Sponsors:

It all began on the Thursday before the Monday conference.  Billows of volcano ash began flying into the air from Iceland bringing chaos over European airspace and the disrupting plans of ten of thousands of travellers all over the world..   But, first was the question "Will the Conference be held?".  Fortunately that was answered and communicated to all within a day.  The conference venue was ready and many anticipated that planes would not fly and redirected their travels.  With the question answered about having the conference then led to the question everyone was seeking an answer to " How many of the 130+ registered CWG conference participants would show up?".  conference in Vienna?

In the end, the remarkable number of 70 on day one and 75 on day two managed to find their way from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Italy and Denmark via train or car to the “Imperial Riding School” hotel and its fantastic conference facilities. For the 50+ others outside of Europe who couldn’t make it to the conference, the organisation team  managed to set up a 100% virtual conference. This was possible because of the hotel’s excellent response to the emergency with technical equipment and by using a professional web conference tool that was sponsored by SAP.  So one of the most remarkable conferences in the CWG history was on its way.  

The attendees could look forward to three days full of interesting presentations from customers, partners and SAP.  The "Meet and Greet" session on Sunday evening was still attended by about 50 people and fun was had by all.  

The conference setup began with a quickly revised presentation schedule since some presenters could not attend on the first day general assembly. Even the President's address was a remote presentation.  But, there were some very informative presentations from three customers; Phoenix Contacts, Siemens HealthCare and MHZ Hactel.  There were updates from Marcus Behrens on SAP Development update and outlook, and Harald Vogel with  Integrated Product Development Program for PLM 7.01.  There was an update on the CWG Sandbox and an update on new activities of 7 new CWG Chapters with an update from Australia and the USA.   A new empahsis is being placed on Special Interest and Influencing Group beginning in 2010 and that was presented by the new CWG VP Bill Dorow.

All the presentations on DAy 2 were really interesting and the problem for the day was selecting which presentation to attend and as always there weretwo presentations that were being presented simulaneously.  We saw a division into three tracks and a fourth track with SAP Usability Testing.  There was an SAP Track, the Best Practices and PartnerTracks were combined and a Remote Presentations Track was quickly setup to accommodate remote presentations for most of the day. 

The SAP track was highlighted by Albert Haags talk about Declarative Modeling Revisited, March Behrens review of UI Design for the SAP Configurator, Extending SAP Configuration and an update from Steve Lenz on SAP Custom Development.   The Best Practices Track was highlighted with presentations from Configit, encoway, Sybit, Orisa and WebXcerpt illustrating some innovative techniques and tools.  These included Extending KMATS with SMATS, Testing configurations - basics and foundations, ConfigModeler and VClipse, and 5 more. 

The Remote Track has some issues with the sound and the presentation images not in synch, but there were 9 presentations including Best Practices in VC Pricing with Phil Martin from Australia, Graphical Configuration from SAP, VC Testing, Adding Governance to VC Changes, there were three different presentations on UI, Graphical Configuration, 3D visualization and Karlheinz Agsteiner of SAP presented New features of the PME-VC and New VC UI and Graphical Maintenance of Dependancices.  The day was full and some of the presentations were made in the middle of the night from the source.  

One of the key features of this conference was to make time for networking so that a member had the opportunity to meet product managers and solution managers from SAP and meet the partners that focus on SAP VC and IPC. 

The general assembly track was on day 3. There was a mix of on site and remote presentations with remote presenters from the US, Australia, France and Germany.   There were again presentations from FGWilson on CRM upgrade from 4.0 to 7.0, Overview of Variant Configurator by Barry Walton and a SAP presentation on Best of Breed Configurator with SAP and one of the most popular sessions in our conferences is the "Ask the Expert" with questions from the audience. 

The conference program, all presentations and the recordings of the presentations are available to CWG members on the document share.  Despite the obstacles nature had put in our ways, the conference was a success and the attendees felt glad that they had come there.

The next conference will be in North America at the Marco Island, Florida October 3 - 6th.   We hope to see you there.