Jan Rypdal who is GSE Technical Coordinator Nordic and Rune Hellem Chairman of the Nordic WebSphere User Group attended at the User Group Advisory Council in Vienna during the WebSphere Technical Conference 2007.

The purpose of the UGAC is to let representatives from the User Groups around Europe meet up with IBM'ers to discuss various topics that concerns both IBM and their users. This year IBM was represented by

Stefan Hepper: Responsible architect for the WebSphere Portal, Workplace Client and Server programming model and public APIs and was co-leading the Java Portlet Specification V 1.0 (JSR 168) and is now leading the V 2.0 (JSR 286).
Andreas Prokoph: Lead Architect Search Technologies WebSphere Portal Development

Other representatives from Guide Share Europe was present as well. This is one of the real values of being part of an active user group community, to be able to meet up and discuss important issues with IBM desicion makers.

If you want to know more about events like this, feel free to contact anyone involved with GSE-Nordic