Initially announced here, and teased again here, the eZ Winter Conference 2011 in Nice, France, on January 27th & 28th was a great event ! Here are a small wrap-up, pictures and slides.
[Community day] [Partner day] [Slides] [Pictures] [Next time]
Sunny Mediterranean coast
The eZ Community (a part of it only) together for real-life exchanges, nice wooden terrace, next to the smoking-hot indoor & outdoor pool, orange-trees, direct view on the sea, shining sun, 5th largest city in France, cosy landscapes, old part of the city...
What else ? ©
Community Day, January 27th
Fully-packed agenda for this first day, welcoming all the braves who had convinced their boss, kicked-off by my usual opening talk accompanied this time by Christof, meeting the eZ Community for the first time. After a short brush-up on what happened since the last eZ Conference in Berlin, we looked ahead on the next 6 months, busy schedule only partially presented in the slides. The main thing will be the eZ Publish Community Project, attracting lots of love and energy.
Ole Marius took over by presenting, at both technical and conceptual levels, how eZ Publish can be turned into a multi-channel machine based on the soon-to-be released REST API. Tightly linked, the PHP API was also covered, along with the overarching architecture of this new front controller, and the ways to extend this REST layer. On top of the slides below, a preview was released (walking you through these topics) here.
eZ Tags was then presented by Ivo, Netgen. Controlling taxonomies is a recurring issue, organizational maze, and performance killer most of the time. After a thorough study, Ivo comes up with a possible solution, eZ Tags, that caught everyone's attention.
After an OK lunch break (beach, sun, shades, sea, what else ? ©), Cyril, Internethic launched the afternoon by sharing how they handle large-scale, complex, multi-developers development projects at Internethic. Catchy approach to a timeless, universal question.
Flash-talks. That was new, and that has been lots of fun.
The idea was to time-box every speaker to maximum seven minutes, using the medium of his choice for presenting his preferred extension, his toolbox, his anything related to eZ Publish that could be useful to the rest of the eZ Community. Subjects ranged from a comics-style mobile website conception, to social-media enabled and security-freak extensions, through bleeding-edge R&D from eZ Engineering, eZ Flow industrialization, the uncovering of a full-blown eZ Developer toolbox, and a recommender plug-in for eZ Publish. No break between the presenters, all of them have been game for this first experiment. Per the crowd's request, we will continue this in the next conferences !
Relentlessly craving for innovation, yet another new concept was successfully tried after the flash-talks : the "Interactive workshop : sharing views on the product's evolution". Christof and myself opened the talk : eZ Publish as a whole, and consequently its roadmap, can be morphed into the box-model :
- Extensibility
- Vertical Features
- Base Features
- General System Capabilities
For each of these four major building-blocks, a team was formed, and given 3 comfortable quarters to fill-out the 4Cs model (Components, Characteristics, Challenges, Characters ). The result was an astonishing amount of properly formalized ideas, user-stories, and visions. Unity is strength, proved once again !
The interactive innovation workshop last a bit longer than expected, and the barcamp turned into more of a "bar" than a "camp" : beer on the house for everyone :)
The eZ Community then invaded Nice's streets for a lovely evening, pretty enjoyable, relaxing times after a busy day.
The whole day was live-streamed, on the usual eZ Community channel on Ustream : http://ustream.tv/channel/ez-community, and was massively tweeted about (hashtag : #ezconf)
In parallel of this day was held a Sales training, meant to educate/sharpen our partners' Sales team on eZ's distribution model.
Partner Day, January 28th
This second day was more of a business-oriented one. The opening keynote set the tone by presenting eZ's vision and strategy for the coming years. Gabriele Viebach, eZ's new CEO, warmed-up the crowd for the day. Christof Zahneissen then presented, as a continuation of the Community day, the product vision, and particularly how the eZ Community, one of the three essential building-block of the eZ Ecosystem, will be deeply involved at all stages. Among other, Paal Berg, eZ's new VP Marketing, detailed his thorough strategy for 2011.
In parallel of this second day, an eZ Publish 4.4 update training was given by Gaetano, to Business Partners.
Slides
Community day
Partner day
The pictures
Here is the full album : https://picasaweb.google.com/ezpublishcommunity/EZWinterConference2011NiceFranceJan27th28th#.
A special thanks to Quoc Huy, who nicely shared his wonderful pictures. Feel free to drop me an email to community@ez.no if you want to share you pictures on the same album. Alternatively, you can paste a link in the comments below.
Ski trip in Isola 2000
Cream on the top, a share of the conference attendee left on friday evening to Isola 2000, close-by ski resort where a fair amount of snow (compared to the rest of the Alps at the same time) "warmly" welcomed us. Two very relaxing days, surfing o the conference's big momentum, skiing and partying. A second surge of snow delighted us on sunday morning, when drawing the curtains : 40-ish cms of fresh powder...calling for action :)
eZ Conference 2011, in June
The next big eZ Event will be the eZ Conference 2011, in June. The location will be confirmed very soon, but rumors are already running :)
In the meantime we should be meeting locally, in smaller groups, to continue exchanging, and keep a high momentum !
See you next time, and thanks for this wonderful Winter Conference !