[OFBiz] OFBiz Users Conference 2004 - Report & Follow-up

[David Jones]

The OFBiz Users Conference for 2004 was a great experience for me, and 
I'm pretty sure the same goes for everyone else who attended. There 
were about 20 people there from a number of groups, and including 
different experience levels with OFBiz from just getting started to 
those who have been using and contributing to the project for years.

Thanks again to Integral Business Solutions for hosting the conference 
(see www.go-integral.com), and to Automation Groups for getting this 
started last year.

We talked a lot about community issues such as coordinating 
development, facilitating contributions, promoting the project, and so 
on. Based on those discussions we will be working on certain efforts to 
improve things and enhance the momentum of the project. I will be 
sending out a few emails today, or over the next couple of days, to 
present some of what was discussed in the conference, add some initial 
ideas, and hopefully get some conversation going about these topics.

For anyone interested, we did a recording of the conference this year. 
Thanks to much better software and hardware than we used last year, the 
video and audio quality is significantly better, basically up to DVD 
quality picture and sound now. We have also done editing this year and 
added titles and such for easier use. And, they even have nice 
color-laser printed labels this year instead of the hand-written method 
we used for the 2003 CD.

Just like in 2003 there were some training type presentations this year 
(infrastructure, ecommerce setup/management, etc), and some 
introductions to new things in the project like a presentation on 
Content Management by Al Byers, on the new Testing Framework (in CVS, 
but still some effective use issues to work out) by Brett Palmer, a 
presentation on the OpenDM project by some of the guys at Integral (who 
hosted the conference this year), and lots of other great stuff. Of 
course it also includes the group discussions and an overview of the 
past and future of the project. This is pretty much 2 full days of 
video, and is DivX encoded to fit it all (~8Gb) on 2 DVDs.

We have tried to keep the cost reasonable, and be assured that 
everything beyond the production and shipping costs (~$20 per set this 
year) will go to supporting the project (you know, like Google 
pay-per-click ads (thanks for not clicking on them by the way), new 
features, and long winded emails from me).

I put the link up late Saturday night (or early Sunday) and we already 
have orders, but I thought I would mention it in an email for those who 
have been waiting or might in general be interested. To order go see 
the Services page on the ofbiz.org web site:

http://www.ofbiz.org/services.html

Later,
-David

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