I am very excited about our first ever user conference. While we’ve had our annual Dev-Jam developers conference going on five years now, this will be the first event aimed at the end users of OpenNMS software.
It will be held on 14 March in Frankfurt, Germany, which will be the weekend after CeBIT. We are currently finalizing the details of the venue and cost. Our guess is the cost will be around 200€ and will include catering and a really nice OpenNMS polo shirt (although not a green one).
The format of the conference is to have several training seminars in the morning, break for lunch, and do more “real world” presentations in the afternoon.
The event is being sponsored by the OpenNMS Project, The OpenNMS Group and Nethinks. You mayremember Nethinks as the focus of a rant of mine from awhile back. We are now getting along famously and they have done a lot of the work to organize it. The other great contributor has been Alex Finger (OGP) who is taking the lead from the project side of things.
I’ll be there to talk about the project and to demonstrate the upcoming features in 1.8 (such as native WMI support). Jeff is coming to talk about OpenNMS and Asterisk, both from a “how to monitor Asterisk with OpenNMS” viewpoint as well as integrating OpenNMS notifications with the phone system [be sure to check out Jeff’s presentation at Asterisk World in February]. I believe a couple of other OGP members will be there as well, so it should be a great introduction for those who don’t know much about OpenNMS as well as a chance for current users of OpenNMS to learn how to use it better and to get their questions answered by the team that develops it.
In order to gauge interest we have a “pre-registration” form set up. If you think there is a greater than 50% that you can be there, please pre-register to help us plan a little better.
If I still have your attention, there will also be an OpenNMS seminar in Milan, Italy, on 4 February at the Sun Microsystems office. This is much more of a business oriented seminar. If you are interested in attending that, please drop Antonio or me a note.
I will be in Milan to help teach the OpenNMS training course that we are holding there. We have very few seats left so please register or let me know soon if you are interested.
Much better than last year; I’ll only be seeing 3 countries in a week vs. our combined 8 during last year’s seminar series! We will be watching the Super Bowl in Italian, though, I typically turn the sound off during the games anyway ;-).