2. HiCo Board of Customer Advisory (BoCA) - HiCo innovations and guest lectures were the way to success

The premises of the Technology Center in Eisenstadt, Austria gave an attractive atmosphere to the 2^nd HiCo Board of Customer Advisory (BoCA) which took place on September 9^th and 10^th, 2009. The focus of this years succesful event was on the presentations and lectures from HiCo employees about the new major release and on interesting and practical contributions of guest lecturers.

After a short introduction and overview on the diversified programme of both BoCA days from Rainer Sommer, Chief Marketing Officer at HiCo, Managing Director Werner M. Schadelbauer gave a company update and spoke about the strategic development of HiCo in the near future.

Head of HiCo Professional Services, Katrin Birnbauer, showed the newest features of the current product portfolio to the interested trade audience and afterwards, Gebhard U. Maurer, Head of Software Development at HiCo, presented the global RoadMap and the planned prospective innovations from the HiCo family brands.

 

The afternoon of the first day was characterized by the presentations and speeches of the prominent guest lecturers from HiCo business partners and customers:

Sascha Prohaska is responsible for the national application and operation guidelines at the Air Material Staff of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Defence and Sport and represents Austria within the S1000D Steering Committee. He reported about the National Style Guide S1000D Austria (NSG-AT) and whose utilization as guideline for the delivery of IETP.

The HiCo solution for both standards, ATA iSpec2200 and S1000D, and their operation at TANNER AG was the topic of the presentation of Anton Rieser, project manager for the development of the ATA iSpec2200 functionality and Anil Biswal, Sales Manager at TANNER AG. Both spoke about the general conditions within the realization of ATA iSpec2200 projects. The practical usage was then shown live by Gebhard Maurer, HiCo.

Barbara Bennemann is project manager for integrated technical-logistic systems at Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft GmbH. In her lecture - Ship Logistic Information System - she addressed the issue of quality testing and data quality, process integration and usage of data through naval end-customers in particular. The HiCo X-Browser™ is in use at the end-customers of HDW. The live presentation of X-Process™ , the HiCo tool for process integration und quality testing, was done by Manfred Hagenauer, Product Manager at HiCo.

In Germany, SAP will be used for integrated Materiel Management, which places special requirements towards data creation and data quality. Those requirements and processes, which are of interest for the Integration of S2000M and S1000D in the environment of SAP, was the topic of the lecture of Walter Scharlau, Sales Manager for the business area Logistics at ESG.

Last but not least, Jörg Falk, Account Manager Aerospace & Defence at PTC Germany, spoke about the correlation of Technical Documentation and Product Development at PTC.

 

A finale full of atmosphere to the first BoCA day was the cosy Come-together for all participants at the tradition-rich Esterházy Winery at nearby Trausdorf.

 

The second day of the HiCo BoCA 2009 was all about a detailed insight into the new features and innovations of the current HiCo product versions:

At the beginning, Gebhard Maurer presented the highlights of the new versions from the HiCo family brand "Authoring & CMS" with the products HiCo ietdSuite™ and the HiCo ietdSuite™:Connector for Arbortext Editor™.

The presentation of the news from the HiCo family brand "Enterprise Publishing" and the products X-Publisher™ and X-ContentBuilder™ was done by Eduard Margulies, Product Manager at HiCo.

The features of the new versions of the HiCo X-Browser™ and the HiCo X-ContentSuite™, products from the family brand "Communication & Review", were demonstrated by Kay-Michael Goertz, Director Germany and Product Manager at HiCo.

Manfred Hagenauer, Product Manager at HiCo, closed the morning session with his presentation of the news of X-Process™ from the HiCo family brand "Business Process Integration".

The so called "expert panels", for product- and user-related questions and discussions with the HiCo product specialists, which took place in the afternoon, were well received by the competent audience.

These roundtable discussions were also the closing of the second HiCo BoCA, which was, not least because of the numerous participation of notable representatives from the most important HiCo customers and business partners, a truly success!