Dear Colleague
As usual, time is galloping by and soon it will be Christmas. But before then there are things to be done, and one of those is to tell you about what is happening on the EUNIS front.
Firstly I want to bring you up to date with progress with the EUNIS Elite Award. You will remember that we slipped the deadline to give some of you more time to complete your entries. The result is that we now have six entries and aim to complete the judging by the end of the year.
The person on each team who has been communicating with me has been e-mailed today with a formal acknowledgement of their entry. This is important. If you have submitted an entry and not had a note from me then your entry has got lost somewhere and you should contact me as soon as possible. (I am keeping the names of those who have entered confidential for the time being)
Why am I only telling you this now, the 14th December, when the time for entries closed at the end of November. The answer is work that we have all been doing relating to another EUNIS event that most of you will have heard nothing about. This was a meeting in Paris on the 4th December between members of the EUNIS General Assembly and our corporate sponsors.
Eunis now has an increased number of sponsors and it is confidently expected that the number will carry on increasing. The meeting was arranged so that the EUNIS representatives could make presentations about how the higher education market is organized in their country and what each country sees as the main issues that need to be addressed by hardware and software vendors. The sponsors also had an opportunity to tell the EUNIS members about their problems in trying to develop the Europe-wide market for their own particular products.
Eleven country representatives made presentations which were strictly limited to fifteen minutes each and all their slides are now available on the EUNIS web pages (http://www.eunis.org). When you get to the home page you need to click on the flashing 'NEW' icon to find them. I had the additional task of trying to summarize the main points from the presentations and the discussions that followed. My notes are also available in the same place.
One of the key points in all the discussions was the organization of networking in each country. Kristel Sarlin (Finland) had worked hard and prepared a paper from the survey we carried out earlier in the year. This is bulging with useful facts about all our networking configurations and can also be found with the other notes on the web pages.
At the end of the meeting, your Chairman, Yves Epelboin, asked the sponsors present whether they thought it had been helpful. Generally they thought that it had been and, most encouragingly, they suggested that similar gatherings should be arranged at regular intervals.
All our thanks go to Yves and Jean-Francois for arranging this meeting - in Paris and just before Christmas. It was on a Monday so that we could get there relatively cheaply on Sunday for a get-together dinner in the evening. However, we all noticed that we could get there even more cheaply by going on Saturday. My wife and I left Manchester at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning and were shopping before noon. My credit card is still glowing gently. Perhaps it wasn't cheaper after all.
Finally, a bit of news about the plans for EUNIS 2001 in Berlin next March. Most of us may have received a slightly mysterious e-mail in the last few days from Susanne Dobratz telling us that the deadline for submission of abstracts of papers for the conference had been extended - to the end of November! Perhaps she meant the end of December, or perhaps the message got sent again by mistake, because the information that we have from the conference organizers is that they now have over one hundred papers submitted for consideration.
All the indicators are that this will be a very good conference and one that will be well worth attending. If you haven't already done so put it in your diary now and make your plans to join us in Berlin.
Finally, let me wish you and your families a very happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year. Ron