At the beginning of each year, one of the best Automic events is held in Vienna: The Technicians Training.

I try to be there every year – and so I was there this year, too. Together with around 80 other Automic consultants and service partners, I was there at the Hotel Renaissance.

80 participants at the Automic Technicians Training.

On the first day, there was an internal meeting about the company strategy, the rest of us were able to participate from day two. We got the opportunity to drink directly from the source: Automic Product Management and Development offered technical lectures and training for three days.

Finally, employees and partners were able to get certified as experts on the last day.

Focus on quality

Automic stands for quality, and they proofed that right from the beginnen, when every Automic Premium Service Partner was given a backpack with the Automic Service Partner Logo It was not some cheap promotional backpack, but an absolutely high-quality laptop backpack.

Automic stands for quality – even with the backpacks every participant received as a gift..

At dinner, I even learned the story behind this gift. Michael von Busse, the head of the professional service CEMA, told me how he had personally tested different backpacks before choosing a model. And he also hand-picked the company for the embroidery in Hanover after extensive research. The great effort paid off, the gift is impressive.

The entertainment program was also perfect for the event. A table-magician was invited and showed unobtrusively his nonetheless amazing tricks.

A table wizard was responsible for the entertainment.

The Sessions of the Training

In the various lectures, workshops, and trainings, the main focus was on technical details, development and consulting practice reports. And explanations why things are the way they are.

Most of the conferences and events I visit mainly for networking. The Technicians Training is different. Here, the sessions are in the most important thing. You can see that with my notes: after two days, my notes from the Technicians Training is always five times more extensive than after a two-day user conference.

Only a slight exaggeration: A representation of my notes at the Technicians Training.

An important topic of the sessions was, of course, the AWI. Besides technical and architectural explanations, there were also some useful tips on sizing and high availability. It was also very useful to see how to move the configuration files and the autoinstall directory to separate the administration of the web application from the configuration.

There was also a lot of technical background info about the Zero Downtime Upgrade, e.g. that XREQs are stored in the database so that you can restart WPs of the old version during the running ZDU. In addition, we got some practical tips, some of which can also be found in the Automic documentation:

  • During a ZDU, there may be no DWPs (Dialog Work Processes).
  • During the ZDU, no DB.Utilities may run – except, of course, the loading of the initial data immediately after the start of the ZDU.
  • If you have to restart the AE during a ZDU, you must first start the processes of the target version.

This is, of course, only a small selection of the many topics that were discussed at the event. There was also a session specifically about functions that were introduced on the basis of customer feedback. And in the “Improvements under the Hood” session I learned, for example, that the agent assignment from agent groups for “Generate at runtime” is now immediately before the generation and not at the activation time.

I always find it particularly exciting, within the sessions or in between them, to hear why things are the way they are. For installations on MS SQL V12 or later, the MQ tables can be loaded into a separate database. This is nothing new, but do you know the reason for it? The reason for this is that the MS SQL Server Ghost Record Cleaner for some customers is not able to keep up.

Oh, of course, there was also a detailed session on the Centralized Agent Upgrade. But I will soon write about it in a separate article about this feature.

Closing words

I’m looking forward to this event every year and my expectations are high – but Automic did not disappoint me. The event was superbly organized and about the content I may only say: Absolutely priceless.

Thanks to Automic for this great event!