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All Good Things Must Come to an End and the New Hope and Direction

MWLUG 2017 was our most successful MWLUG conference we have ever had. With over 232 registered and a small number of cancellations, MWLUG 2017 was the most attended and largest conference. We had over 60 sessions, workshops and round tables with speakers from all over the United States and Europe. Over a third of the sessions were non-IBM specific and included sessions covering new topics like MongoDB and GDPR.

In tuned with our theme this year, Moving Collaboration Forward, our goal was to expand our conference this year forward towards a new direction and not just cover the usual. The world of collaboration is changing. No longer does a solution stand by itself nor does a solution just involve components from a single vendor. Companies need to chose the best of breed and integrate solutions together. Sometimes it involves solutions from many vendors. This is a direction that IBM is moving towards with Cisco and Box. At the same time we see customers moving away from the IBM stack towards competitive solutions or augmenting their IBM solutions with competitive solutions. We can not live with our head in the sand.

One of the frustrating parts of this years conference was trying to cover the many directions that IBM is going. As a small conference it is difficult to have the resources to effectively cover all the areas. Regardless, a vase majority of this year's attendees and always have been from the Domino space which has gotten smaller and smaller caused by the lack of clear direction and support for this product. This leads to the question what should we cover in the future. Should it be even more general and we evolve MWLUG to become a conference about many types of collaboration? Collaboration is not email and social communities. Collaboration as we have shown this year involves machines, processes and people. 

At the same time we heard from IBM that our favorite collaboration platform Domino may be a renewed area of focus. As we all know, many of us have been extremely frustrated over the past 5 years regarding the future of Domino.There is New Hope. 

So should we be more focused? In either case, we have decided that being a LUG conference is not appropriate and also confusing.Therefore, MWLUG 2017 was the last MWLUG conference. It has had a great run of nine years, but time has come to end MWLUG and consider starting something new. 

However, I see the same high quality sessions in the future that we all have come to expect, with great and wonderful community support from IBM Business Partners, IBM Customers, and IBM and of course BEER !!! 

Therefore, we would like to announce that MWLUG is now CollabSphere.  

CollabSphere 2018 will be in Ann Arbor, Michigan in late July early August 2018 and our local host will be Ray Bylik. So expect good and new technologies, people, and beer for next year.




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