DOAG 2016

I sat down this evening to write about UKOUG and realised I hadn't blogged about DOAG 2016.

As I say every year I have venue envy at DOAG, but that aside I enjoy the event.

The day before the conference there was an EMEA User Group Presidents meeting and I represented UKOUG. This is the 3rd year this has happened. It is good to just discus what different groups are doing and how they work with each other to capitalise on each other's conferences instead of clashing. We also talked about how to User Groups cater for Cloud? This is a difficult one, user groups are about what their members are doing now, and keeping them educated with what Oracle are doing. We have to be able to predict what that means, how much existing and how much futures to include. But more about this on my UKOUG posting.

The actual conference runs Tuesday to Thursday but with being there Monday as well I needed to get back to the UK, so asked DOAG if I could have all my sessions on the Tuesday. Thankfully they said yes.

I had three talks, An update on PaaS4SaaS, my 'What does Digital Disruption mean to the Oracle Ecosystem' and "UX tales from real implementations'. I had good audiences and great questions. All developers should strive for good User Experience and they can all learn from the research Oracle has done for own development.

Oracle marketing held a number of closed sessions to hear from users on their thoughts about Cloud, and this included a session for the EMEA Presidents. The main outcome was the sense that Oracle are simply marketing at everyone, and talking about nothing else.

In fact I even felt my hotel was in on the Oracle Marketing.

The travel was fine although I did have to spend a night at Stanstead airport as there were no easy travel options, but it all went smoothly. I stayed in a lovely small hotel, although I am not too shore about some of the other 'establishments' on the same street!

So a short trip, no time for the markets or shopping, but two great evenings, Thanks TO OTN for the ACE dinner and DOAG for the overseas speakers' dinner. A really good user group meeting and a fantastic day of sessions.

Hope to be back next year.