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BASIS Tours Canada
TechCon2004 Held in New Orleans
TechCon2005 Europe Held in Düsseldorf
PDF Format
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Laurence Guiney
Account Manager |
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lying in the opposite direction of the migrating Canadian geese, Nico Spence and Laurence Guiney traveled
last September to the Great White North. There, they teamed with BASIS' Canadian distributor, Descore, Inc., to participate in a three-city tour of their semiannual Solutions Showcase.
The French Canadian city of Montreal hosted the first Showcase. Two of Descore's larger customers attended this Showcase and
are currently in the initial stages of migrating to BBj®. Some customers were so anxious to get started that they arrived
before the scheduled 9:00 A.M. start time. This trend to arrive early continued throughout the other locations as well.
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Dave Foster (left) hosting the Montreal
Solutions Showcase
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After a scenic ride aboard VIA Rail Canada through the changing colors of the countryside foliage, the BASIS travelers arrived
in the thriving metropolis of Toronto. The combination of the unseasonably warm weather with very informative sessions that
revealed a clear look into the future, made a most memorable Solutions Showcase.
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Nico Spence shares insights at the Toronto
Solutions Showcase.
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Next, Laurence and Nico traveled to Vancouver, one of North America's most attractive cities. The Vancouver schedule allowed
Nico and Laurence to take in some local sites - the aquarium and a golf course or two. This was a great way to prep for
presenting the last Showcase of the week. Jim Douglas, BASIS Software Engineer, joined the duo and was especially effective at
quenching the developers' deep thirst for engineering knowledge! This opportunity to talk with a BASIS engineer was just one
of the many highlights of this Showcase. More about the actual Solutions Showcase.
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Vancouver skyline (top) and the Solutions
Showcase (bottom).
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Descore formatted the Showcase to facilitate interaction between the attendees and BASIS and Descore staff so the attendees
could freely ask questions pertinent to their own businesses. Nico and Laurence savored the interaction with the BASIS
developers and received positive feedback.
In all three cities, customers were most interested and excited about the new data encryption features of the BASIS DBMS
available for PRO/5®, Visual PRO/5® and BBj. They also asked about the new features in BBj – the optimized SQL engine, the
introduction of Binary Large Object (BLOB) fields, connection pooling, BBjInputD, and the silent install ability for UNIX.
Customers also showed a great deal of excitement about the new BBj product. BBj 5.0 includes even more enhancements to the SQL
engine plus the introduction of the new SYSGUI subsystem.
Nico demonstrated the latest version of the BASIS Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and showed developers how to use it
as their single development environment for both PRO/5 and BBj. See BASIS IDE Features in
the online documentation to learn more about the recent enhancements.
In addition, Nico demonstrated how easily a developer could move existing tokenized code to a more modern text source code
repository, thereby enabling the use of the built-in source code control client in the BASIS IDE, without having to change any
of the tokenized program names.
Overall, the Canadian tour was very successful with an excellent turnout. In total, nearly 100 people attended the three
sessions and learned about the latest developments in BBx® technology.
–Laurence Guiney
TechCon2004 Held in New Orleans
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Peggy Lewis
Chief Operating Officer |
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his past November, BASIS presented TechCon2004 in New Orleans, Louisiana, where streetcars, mimes, jazz musicians, and Cajun
food mixed with BLOBs, encryption, debuggers, and improved garbage collection. Security was a strong focus during the sessions
and even during Monday night's banquet when a professional pickpocket "plucked people's possessions" and entertained our
audience. Nearly 120 people, from ten countries and over twenty-three different industries, attended the conference. And from
what I could tell, all had a good time.
New Orleans is the kind of place where you can entertain yourself by simply walking down the street. The Doubletree Hotel,
official host of TechCon2004, is located across the street from the only casino in town, one block from the riverfront, and at
the edge of the French Quarter. When they were not attending the conference, many BBx developers cruised the French Quarter in
pursuit of the New Orleans nightlife. Not to be outdone, several members of the BASIS crew engaged in the Bourbon Street
tradition of collecting their own impressive array of Mardi Gras beads.
Several of our customers presented their software development achievements and showed how they jazzed up their applications
with the latest BBx features. While all these customers shared new and innovative ideas, two were especially notable. Mike
Quagliarello, from EMQUE Consultants, Inc., demonstrated the ability to send sensitive payroll data from the field to the home
office using a pocket PC phone. His application is commercial construction, so remote wireless access is essential. In
addition to sending and receiving secure data, Mike's demonstrations included sending a photo of our own Dr. Kevin King,
enhanced with horns and hair, from his handheld PDA. I'm not sure if the oohs and aahs were in response to the technology
applied, or if they just thought Kevin looked better in the 'after' shot shown below. Either way, it was a crowd pleaser.
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Receiving and editing over wireless PDA
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Don Scattergood, from MARK SYSTEMS, told about their increasing
revenues by changing to 'annuity/utility' pricing and modernizing their application. They rewrote their character application
in Visual PRO/5 and will move to BBj in 2005. The homebuilder industry now recognizes their application as the technical
leader. The annuity pricing gives their customers lower start-up costs while building MARK SYSTEMS a perpetual revenue stream.
These changes brought his company from the brink in 1997, to consistent annual 30% growth in revenues. It seems that the idea
of recurring revenues, tied to steady improvements in the application, is catching on as a good VAR business model. (Editor's
note: read more about MARK SYSTEMS revenue stream in this issue.)
According to our feedback, the opportunity to network with other developers is an important part of our conferences. While we
value the chance to get face-to-face with many developers at one time, apparently you also value the peer-to-peer exchange. In
addition, your feedback indicated that you enjoyed the venue, so we booked TechCon2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 7-9, 2006
at the brand new Marriott Renaissance Las Vegas Hotel. The razzle-dazzle of Vegas is just a few blocks away, but the ambience
inside is like any four-star hotel. The Renaissance is elegant, modern, wired for technology, and you can't hear a slot
machine anywhere. Please make plans to join us!
–Peggy Lewis
TechCon2005 Europe Held in Düsseldorf
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Kevin King
Chief Information Officer |
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he recent TechCon2005 Europe set a new standard forthe BASIS community. For the first time, the conference
offered real-time translation from English to German and German to English, depending on the speaker's language preference.
Boasting the largest turnouts in the history of the conference, TechCon2005 Europe buzzed with excitement as two speakers,
Stephan Knobloch of KMK, and Peter Pausewag of Midata, inspired the crowd. Stephan presented standards for going GUI, gleened from his experiences with
their wine industry application. Peter demonstrated their auto industry application now modernized and running in the latest
BBx generation. From their different perspectives, both presenters revealed how BBj enabled their organizations to capitalize
on their legacy code with the added sizzle of a modern cross-platform graphical interface.
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Real-time translation during European presentation.
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TechCon2005 Europe followed the familiar format of presenting six technical sessions facilitated by two BASIS engineers. With
George Hight (CEO) at the helm, Kevin King (CIO) and Nico Spence (CMO) emceed the sessions, while Nick Decker (Engineering
Supervisor) and Brian Hipple (QA Supervisor) did the lion's share of the work. These sessions contained live demos, source
code explanations, and interactive discussions with the participants. The attendees punctuated the presentations with applause
and table knocking that made the BASIS team feel appreciated and confident that these new BBj 5.0 features received the
approval of the assembled programming community.
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Peter Pausewang presents a technical session.
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–Dr. Kevin King
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