25 years ViCon – the early years

A quarter of a century is long, but goes by amazingly fast. In December ViCon celebrates its anniversary and at this point we would like to look back on "25 years ViCon" with a five-part series.

Today we continue with the years 2004–2008 in part two:

25 years ViCon – the early years ...

After the first five successful years with a great birthday party in the snow, the task was to determine the future course – after all, there should also be something to celebrate on the company's tenth birthday. Will we continue to offer general process management training and individual software development in addition to ViFlow? After all, these were our two mainstays in the years "before ViFlow". Or should we better go for the ViFlow card altogether? We decided for the latter and dedicated ourselves completely to our ViFlow in consulting services, trainings and software development.

At the beginning of 2004, ViFlow 2003 was released, the significantly improved successor to the 2002 version. ViFlow 2003 in 2004? This sounds like "late in the game", but it had a simple reason. To avoid unnecessary number confusion, the ViFlow names were linked to the currently available version of Microsoft Visio. Since Microsoft did not give us Visio 2004, the new ViFlow version was based on the still current 2003 Visio and inherited the year number from it.

2004 was also the year when we looked beyond our national borders and were able to gain very reliable and committed partnerships with today's VCCs (ViCon Competence Centers) Austria and Switzerland.

With the partner network, the customer base grew steadily and our team also grew, the first trainees successfully completed their training at ViCon and stayed directly in the team – most of them until today!

The second five years were a time when there were many trade fairs on the subject of quality and software, first and foremost Control in Sinsheim and, of course, CeBIT in Hanover as a home game. There we were regularly represented as direct exhibitors, then often with our partners, or as co-exhibitors. A lot of work, gigantic effort, expensive – nevertheless there were always satisfied faces, it was a lot of fun.

What else was there? Josef Schwab wrote the book "Prozessmanagement mit Visio, ViFlow und Project" (Process Management with Visio, ViFlow and Project), which was published by Carl Hanser Verlag at the end of 2006 and noticeably increased the level of awareness of ViFlow.

With the next, the fourth program version, we finally freed ourselves from the numerical ballast that caused confusion here and there – on the customer side and on ours. The child was simply christened "ViFlow 4" and remained faithful to us beyond ViCon's 10th birthday.

In December 2008 the time had come, ViCon was in double digits! And of course we celebrated properly. Not in the snow, like five years ago – but everyone was at least as excited as back then, how the ViCon story would continue …

(to be continued)