I attended LCTY Rheinland at the Swissotel Düsseldorf / Neuss yesterday. The event was run by TimeToAct and Bit Bücker. The location was a good choice. There was plenty of room to run  25 sessions in 5 parallel tracks. The session content was well choosen and so were the speakers.

The event started at 9:00 am with a short overview and some pictures by LS2010 attendees. Then Felix Binsack from TimeToAct handed over the microphone to IBM Vice President Brent Peters. Brent started his speech in German(!).  The next 90 minutes were filled up with all the news announced at LS2010. Ron Sebastian did a fantastic job doing live demos. He said that at LS he had 13 servers in the background and is sorry for being limited to “a few VMs on two notebooks” at the moment. Despite of this he was able to do a multi-point audio conference with Samantha and even a video conference using a RADVISON video conferencing system located in Oregon(?) via his sametime client.

We also had a quick glimpse on project Vulcan. Looks really great.

The breakout sessions I attended started with an overview of “What is new in DOmino Designer”.The session speaker was Angela Blasberg from TimeToAct. She seemed a bit nervous in the beginning and had to fight with the fact to put the content of a 1 hour session into 45 minutes.

After lunch, Ed Brill entered the stage. His “Oral History of IBM Lotus Notes – The first twenty years” was fun and easy listening.

Stephan Wissel ( XPages ) was the next in row. He obviously had a lot of fun giving his presentation. I guess, the only reason why he did not continue to talk more about xPages in deep was the fact that he needed some coffee and wanted to attend Daniel Nashed’s session “CSI Domino – Diagnostic Collection and Analysis”

Daniel provided the audience with loads of useful information. You need to read his session slides once again, because you will not be able to store all this information in your brain during the session.

Again, all speakers had to struggle with the 45 minutes limitation. So it became obvious that the schedule ran out of control a leittle bit.

The last session I attended was about “DXL Roundtrip”. Angela Blasberg showed how she uses DXL to create multi language databases and how to transfershared actions from one database to another without breaking the IDs using DXL. Very valuable information.

All the speakers did a fantastic job and the sessions were high quality.

The (offical) event ended at 6:30 pm and we were invited for dinner in the hotel restaurant. We had the chance to use a cart simulator. Great idea and from what I saw, it was great fun for all who tried to keep the cart on track.

For me it was the second LCTY in the Rhine area. I can strongly recommend this event to all who were not able to go to LS. Felix, Timo and all the people behind the scene making this event possible: Job well done!!