Back from OpenExpo

Yes, OpenExpo is already over since some days but I didn't find the time yet to blog about it.

I luckily found a small hotel near the exhibition hall so it was just a quick ride with the tram (or a 15 minute walk the other day). The booth (or rather the table, see the picture) was quickly set up on Wednesday morning except for a small problem with the power plug adapter - the one I brought with me didn't fit into those %$§!& swiss sockets (so much for the need for multiple standards). No big deal though, I just walked over to the COOP warehouse and bought one for CHF 6.95.



Overall the OpenExpo had more than 500 visitors on the two days. I did give around 20 OFBiz presentation and lot more flyers were taken. Amongst the interested parties were a publishing house (question: does OFBiz handle 3 million products?), a food retailer, a machine manufacturer and quite a few ERP consultants/service providers.
Most of the visitors actually had never heard of Apache OFBiz and someone even told me that he was looking for an Open Source Ecommerce solution for some time and didn't stumble over OFBiz (lot's of work to do for the marketing department :-).
Quite a few asked for the accounting part which is (still) rather basic and especially for a swiss payment procedure called BESR/VESR. And someone promised me (and did it already) to send a swiss chart of accounts (called KAEFER and KMU).
It was also nice to meet David Kuenzler, an OFBiz Developer from Zürich, who started a OFBiz related project called ofbizmyhome at SourceForge.

The talks were well attended - I didn't see any but they should be available somewhere as streams. On Wednesday evening the OpenMeet, a social event with OpenBeer (which was also free, free as in .. ;-) and FreeFood sponsored by Google, some lightning talks and music took place.

You want to see pictures? I only brought our old Canon A75 with me which showed the notorious E18 error most of the time and if it was working most pictures came out blurred - a few are available on Flickr. Next time I'll bring the DSLR with me for sure. More pictures are available on the OpenExpo website.

All in all, it was a really nice event. Big thanks to the organizers (Hannes Gassert, Matthias Günter, Matthias Stuermer and everybody else involved). I hope I'll be at the next OpenExpo in March in Bern.