Martin Bekkelund

Last weekend I joined the eZ publish Summer Conference 2005 at Gaustablikk, Norway. As some of the participants noticed, it’s not the centre of the world, but it’s a very beautiful and representative piece of Norway.

For me, the social part was as important as the seminars, getting to meet the eZ Community, represented by 120 persons from 24 nations from all over the world.

On Friday, the “eZ publish day”, I watched the following seminars:

• “Online business with eZ publish” by Bård Farstad (eZ)
• “Designing eZ publish sites” by Sandro Groganz (eZ)
• “Making money on eZ publish” by Vidar Top (eZ)
• “Selling eZ” by Vidar Top (eZ)
• “From open source to open business” by Frank Dege (silver.solutions) and Christian Lundvang (Nexus)
• “Multilingual tips and traps” by Tony Woods (VisionWT)

On Saturday, the “Community day”, I joined the licensing, partner & business group discussing important issues concerning the partner model, eZ publish licensing and business integration.

As an upcomming partner, I feel that there were several important issues that were discussed during “Community day”. One of the major topics was regarding issues that are important to the partners in an Open Source business model.

For me the following topics is important to make a partnership work, based on the Enterprise Open Source philosophy:

• An eZ publish SWOT-analysis available to the partners
• A forum for exchanging solutions, ideas and customers
• Scalability both up (for large customers) and down (for small customers)
• Network products adding value to eZ publish
• Both GPL and LGPL licenses available
• Access to marketing material
• Migration tools to move from other CMSes to eZ publish
• Reference list of large enterprise customers

Last, but not least, I’ve gathered some pictures from the summer conference.

Bård Farstad about Online Business with eZ publish. (Notice Markus Gamenius’ politically correct Ubuntu t-shirt!)

Tony Woods about Multilingual tips and traps.

The spectacular view of Gaustatoppen in the evening.

And of course the social events in the small hours.

If you have any opinions, you’re more than welcome to leave a comment!