DNN OpenForce Europe 2008 Wrap up
Sorry for the untimely reporting, but right after OF Europe drew to a close I headed over to Germany to spend the rest of the week with family and friends. I even met up with Vasilis in Berlin. Then, as I settled back into the home office to prepare for the second leg of OpenForce 2008, we got swamped with consulting work. But hey, that’s how it goes.
Enough with the excuses though. OF Europe held just outside Amsterdam was a great time. We had an average of about 20 people in the room for speaker sessions and I would say about 50 people attending the opening keynote by Shaun Walker. This smaller setting greatly facilitated networking among attendees, speakers, and DNN core team members, which played into meeting my main goal of the conference: mingling with the European contingent of the DNN community.
Rather than commenting on every session individually, I singled out 2 talks, which I think are a good representation of the mix of established speakers such as Chris Hammond and new faces like Stefan Cullmann.
As you can imagine, Chris’ talk on “Friendly Urls and SEO Best Practices” was of special interest to me as it formed somewhat of a prelude to my session on DNN SEO in a few weeks in Las Vegas. The material was well researched and Chris’ experience as a presenter and speaker turned it into a fun hour of learning and collaboration.
Well known in German DNN circles, Stefan did very well in his first presentation in English as he introduced himself as the new team lead of the Forms & Lists project (formerly known as UDT.) This talk put Forms & Lists on the radar for me and based on the lively discussion in the room, it did so for many others.
In closing, I would like to thank the SDN Software Development Network for allowing the DNN community to be part of a well-run conference. Additionally, I would like to thank the Dutch DNN User Group as well as DNN Corp. for organizing and supporting these kinds of events. And last but not least, my gratitude goes out to the European DNN community as a whole as well as the following individuals in particular: Leigh Pointer, Peter Donker, Erik van Ballegoij, Sebastian Leupold, Lee Sykes, Timo Breumelhof, Peter Schotman, and Declan Ward for making the trip and their efforts behind the scenes. And yes, DNN will eventually support full content localization :)-
Name (required)
Email (will not be published) (required)
Website