Wrap-up and slides of the 2010 eZ Winter Conference in Geneva

Wednesday 03 February 2010 4:06:22 am

On january 21st and 22nd was held the 2010 eZ Winter Conference, in Geneva. As announced here, this eZ Ecosystem gathering turned into a lively, fun and intense event. A look back on 2009, and a promising look ahead on 2010 grabbed all attendees' attention during two full days. Here is a small wrap-up of the Community Day (jan. 21st) with slides of the talks, links to pictures and videos, and an attempt to put the overall great ambiance into words.

About 70 participants filled-up the neat conference room at the Hotel Royal, Geneva downtown, from 9am, ready for a full day of talks and exchange. The agenda was pretty booked with 11 talks, and the barcamp turned into an intense 1,5 hours of sharing around various concrete, daily topics. Technical topics as well as more functional ones were discussed, not without mentioning more business-oriented questions.

The day was kicked off by myself, by presenting the new perspectives for the eZ Community. The "before / now / to-come" chronological approach was chosen to present the evolution of the community from its very early stages, until now, and finally its future: the Community Program in details, the new portal (http://share.ez.no) and what objectives are pursued.
[Slides]

I continued with a short presentation of the share.ez.no team (the guys making this portal evolve in right direction, all being active community members), the tools they are using, and how to join.
[Slides]

Then Damien Pobel stepped in to present the fascinating subject of "Front-end performance" with eZ Publish...which got most of us to suddenly grow our TODOs on many projects.
[Slides]

He was followed by Jacques-André Eberhard and the interesting case of a Document Management solution based on eZ Publish.
[Slides]

Then Roland Benedetti speed-dated the audience, original and fun way of presenting eZ Systems' product strategy. The results are now online : Speed dating with 15 candidates for eZ Publish. This way of polling the community about features to push in the future versions of eZ Publish is meant to become more systematic, and more "online". Stay tuned on this.
[Slides]

Right after lunch, Mirko Battisti came with an open talk on the timeless topic of "eZ Publish project best practices". For each point addressed, he simply asked "are we doing it the right way?", after having presented "their way". This talk continued through active exchanges during the barcamp.
[Slides]

Donat Fritschy and Ekkehard Dörre then exposed two of their custom solutions based on eZ Publish: a support system ( FAQ, downloads, forums & ticket system ), and a system for graphical statistics.
[Slides]

A very concrete solution to a very common problem was demonstrated and detailed by Peter Keung, who came all the way from Vancouver to talk about "eZ Publish workflows: user-friendly delayed publishing".
[Slides]

Gilles Guirand then took his top 5 blog posts, and compiled them into a nicely facetted talk about Netvibes / iGoogle Widget, custom RSS, google maps and others tips, sharing a valuable expertise on web development with eZ Publish.
[Slides]

Following the well deserved break, Atila Mellilo came to present how eZ Engineering currently works: agile organisation, methods and quality. Impressive and promising view on an industrialized engineering unit.
[Slides]

And finally, Paul Borgermans gave us an insider's view on "What's brewing in the eZ Systems extensions kitchen": collaboration systems, document management, cloud-enabled archiving and ezfind as your preferred IR engine.
[Slides]

Some called it a day. But many didn't and were fit enough to make the 1,5h barcamp an active time. In bulk:

Creating Communities Online by Tony Wood [Slides]
New admin GUI, by Roland Benedetti and Christian Gjengedal ( freshly hired at eZ, responsible for design, GUI and ergonomy )
eZ Publish projects best practices: discussion based on Mirko Battisti's talk
How to do 24/7 support on eZ Publish, asked by Peter Keung
Community translation of eZ Publish, by Roland Benedetti and Nicolas Pastorino [Slides, from #32]
CJW Newsletter, by Ekkehard Dörre [Slides]

I would like to thank everyone for their participation and investment. Thanks to the TV watchers as well, next conference will probably provide a more stable, and better-quality live streaming ( we have had up to 60 people watching the live stream :) ). We should soon produce a video wrap-up of the event, but in the meantime, two parts of the recorded live stream are already available:

Ow, and by the way, the next eZ Summer Conference will take place in Berlin, 23-24-25 of June.

Cheers, and see you !

EDIT: in case you would want to share pictures taken during the event, feel free to post them as comments.