Last week I attended interesting IT conference related to the program, which I administer every day. Just now I am involved in upgrade of two OT servers, so I could test versions: 11.2, 11.3.3 and 11.4.0.

After real disappointment with version 11.4.0 , which didn’t work at all for one of my databases and had lots of strange bugs and finally was withdrawn by Omninet.

Testing version 11.2, which doesn’t behave like I’d like it to, I must admit that version 11.3.3 seems to be the best version of recently released. It has lots of useful for us functionalities and just now works without minor problems.

The IT conference was lead in Antwerp in „San Marco Village”, which is really impressive. The interior is like an old theather comparable to Gdansk 'Shakespearean Theater’. Warmly greating of Belgian CEO as well as German CEO and their professional attitude was really remarkable and will be remebered by me for long. Short conversations with other Omninet specialists were also helpful.

Here is short review and my insight of presentations, which I have seen:

1.What can you expect from us

This was short introduction of what will be presented during this day. The most interesting for me was intelligent chatbot integrated with Omnitracker as it could solve one of our customer’s problem. Next interesting thing was Bussiness Intelligence embeded in Omnitracker. I saw sample of that in March this year, however this presentation showed with details, how can it be used.

2. Platform features and new Admin Client

New features presented during this presentation showed modern and more user friendly (for administrators) and with higher usability GUI of OT Admin. Finally there will be only one application instead of two, which will enable faster testing of introduced configuration changes and I assume there will no longer be discrepancies between OT Admin and OT Client, as there are now. Release of this new 11.5 version is planned for half of next year.

3. Shared Service Center

This presentation I saw with interest as I know exactly, how difficult is to gather proper requirements from users and implement them in such a way, so everybody was happy. This was next usage of Omnitracker, what was not so obvious at the first glance.

4. Omnitracker BI Dashboards

This presentation was the most important for me, as since July we are really involved in Bussiness Intelligence project at my company. We were looking for tools for firstly: integrate data from 5 different sources of data: Actian Vector, JSON data, app. logs, Omnitracker and emails and then query them in proper way and finally present as set of dashboards for interested departments. Approach shown by Omninet – integration Omnitracker via DBViews with PowerBI, using DataWarehouse gave me some insight on how to do it. However we will finally use different approach, which is still in consideration.

5. Omnitracker SOAP-REST Consumer and Provider

This presentation was mainly for my friend as he was to learn REST API integration with Omnitracker. It was very detailed presentation and he was very glad with it and finally said: „Oh, that it is easy;)”. Hopefully we will be able to use this fantastic functionality in our Omnitracker env.

6. WG 2.0 & OmniLibrary

This presentation was related to new WebGateway 2.0. Main functionalities worth to mention from my point of view:

• possibility to add photos, screenshots directly from mobile phone camera as attachments to chosen request
• modern AJAX GUI – faster and more userfriendly
• possibility to use scripts in webforms
• SelfService Portal

OmniLibrary was not so interesting for me just now, as it is set of functions used in BPMN.

7. Omnitracker in the Cloud – round table sessions

This was the second interesting presentation for me. During our OT server upgrade, we encountered set of unexpected difficulties, which could be avoided if only we knew earlier of approach applied by Omninet. But it is longer story, which shouldn’t be described here.

My overall impression :

That was really helpful IT conference, not only because of delicious Belgian chocolates (my weakness;)), exquisite dinner 😉 and possibility to win interesting prizes, but mainly by exchanging knowledge with other customers and acquaintance of future OT functionalities, as well as ideas on how to solve encountered problems.