At the beginning of November 2009 I received an email out of the blue from Kim Groneman at Novell letting me know that I had been nominated and subsequently selected to be one of 25 Novell Knowledge Partners. This was a program covering Novell (who had previously acquired SUSE) and openSUSE contributions to the user community.
Kim said that my nomination was based on my knowledge sharing contributions over the previous year which were mostly to the Novell Technology Transfer Partners (TTP) group.
It was an honour to be nominated and I quickly replied to accept and so started an interesting experience. Little did I know that this would last eleven years until the end of October 2020 when I formally resigned from the Micro Focus Knowledge Partner program.
Whilst I haven’t been using Micro Focus products for some time, I was still able to read and understand documentation, install software/servers, etc., and help out in the forums. Between changing jobs, the end of NNTP access to the forums (my primary method of reading and replying to posts), and the new community site replacing the forums, I felt that it was the right time to formally leave the program. This doesn’t mean that my previous contributions will disappear as my posts should still continue to exist associated with my username smflood (and a few with smflood1).
During my eleven years as a Novell/Micro Focus Knowledge Partner, Novell were bought by Attachmate which became known as The Attachmate Group with Novell and SUSE operating as two separate business units. Then Micro Focus bought The Attachmate Group and later sold the SUSE business unit to EQT Partners.
I have fond memories of my time as a Knowledge Partner and the opportunities, experiences, and friendships that it brought me (and my wife). I will always be grateful to Kim for contacting and inviting me to be part of the program and for his support to myself and the rest of the Knowledge Partners. Thanks also to the staff who in addition to their day jobs were our support route into the company - for me these were Pam Robello, Shaun Pond (who himself later became a Knowledge Partner), Craig Wilson, and Hans van den Heuvel.
Some of the opportunities and experiences included attending three Novell BrainShare conferences (in 2010, 2011, and 2013) and the first six SUSECON conferences (from 2012 to 2017). I was fortunate enough to present during Novell BrainShare 2010 (Integrating Apple Macs using Novell technologies) and SUSECON 2016 (Getting Started with SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6). My wife and I were also able to participate in a Knowledge Partner retreat in Utah in October 2010 as well as spend some time with other Knowledge Partners at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando before SUSECON 2013. I was very happy to win a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Android tablet at SUSECON 2013 because it became an invaluable tool for responding to forum posts whilst sitting in front of the TV!
I wish all of those associated with and running the Micro Focus Knowledge Partner program well. I recently joked about buying some Micro Focus shares at their then low price - I wish I had as they’ve since increased in value by over 50%!
It is currently my intention to continue as a SUSE Knowledge Partner.
Simon
Updated 03 Dec 2020:
- added link to migrated account (smflood1)