Welcome

The first session of the day was presented by Bill Davidson, the chief sales officer for SirsiDynix. He did mentioned that CEO Sommers left, but did not elaborate. He said the staff was said to see him go, but change is always inevitable. Nice and vague.

Now on to some numbers: 850 users are attending this conference plus 75 members of the SirsiDynix staff. SirsiDynix (SD) currently has 629 employees.

I also learned today SD is not providing any new functionality to WebCat. I would imagine that they are hoping everyone moves to iBistro or iLink in the next year or two. Also, the Workflows interface we are using is call the C client. SD plans an End Of Life for that product in mid 2008. We will need to look into the Java client instead. The Java client is available to us at no charge, but I have heard complaints from other users about it so I have not really looked into it. Plus our circulation computers currently do not meet the minimum requirements.

At the Unicorn User's Group meeting I learned that next year's conference will be in Detroit, Michigan. The organizers said that the meeting space would be larger, less expensive and closer to Canada. (In case we need to make a run for it? I don't know.)

Instead of sub releases, SD is now providing patch clusters. They are small software programs that update the server with only a few steps. These patches are quicker to run than an upgrade.

The weather is cool and sunny. The Broadmoor Hotel is very nice.