If you haven’t booked your trip to Fulda for the OpenNMS Users Conference, you should do so soon. It promises to be full of awesome, and I for one am excited to be in the audience for once, listening to the ingenuous ways people have come up with for using OpenNMS.

One talk in particular has caught my eye. It’s by Jan Stoetzer and it’s called “Automated Orders of Consumables Using OpenNMS“.

One of the tasks of our OpenNMS installation is to monitor the page counters and toner levels of our printers, copiers, faxes etc. Out there the idea to was born to automatically reorder toner.

Meanwhile our OpenNMS is able to order every supply. Toners, developer units, ozone filters, theoretically even soda cans for Tarus’s OpenVND drink machine.

In this short talk I want to show you how we realized this.

This is one of the great things I love about open source. I scratched an itch and built a monitorable soda machine, and now someone has taken the basic premise and extended it.

This is the first conference event organized by The OpenNMS Foundation, an independent non-profit created to promote OpenNMS, and it is the first conference event that is focused totally on end users with content from end users. I look forward to getting my OpenNMS geek on with everyone in a few weeks.