Dutch Plone Usersday 2009

About fifty developers and end-users had found time in their busy schedules to learn and talk about Plone. To exchange information, experiences and ideas about Plone. To meet and greet and to have a great day.

Matt Hamilton

From all over The Netherlands people arrived in Arnhem. It was a beautiful day, so it was possible to drink coffee and tea outside. I opened the day and introduced Matt Hamilton from Netsight who came all the way from Bristol (UK) to give an interesting keynote about Plone 4 and Plone 5 with the subject Plans and Progresses. For about an hour Matt talked to the people and showed them all the impressive things and plans for Plone 4 ( release end of 2009 ) and 5 which will be released in 2010.

Jacquelijn Ringersma

The organization of this Usersday wanted the day to be interesting for developers and users, so they asked for different Userscases. After Matt, Jacquelijn Ringersma from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics was willing to give a presentation.  Jacquelijn did a great job presenting the complete process from problem to solution and end results. With a few great examples and a completely clear talk she was a excellent speaker.

Enjoy

In the atmospheric bar there was tea and coffee for everybody and, because te sun was still shining, the doors to the terrace were opened and there was a little moment to enjoy the sun.

Post-it Investigation

After this coffeebreak it was time for Jeroen Vloothuis from Pareto to do his presentation. He wanted the audience to participate and handed out post-its. Jeroen asked everybody to write down a great feature of Plone and also write down points of attention. While doing that, the people listened and watched an impressive talk about the applications and possibilities in Plone. With screenshots from a lot of different sites and comments from the audience it became an interactive presentation. At the end of this presentation Jeroen showed the results of the Post-it Investigation. Flexibility and workflow were popular features and speed needs attention

It was time for lunch, but not before a group photo was taken in front of the Villa.

The sun was still shining so the terrace was full of Plone users enjoying their lunch, laughing, talking, drinking and networking.

Together

Ralph Jacobs from Four Digits and André Hermsen from Sensire/Yunio did a presentation together. This presentation was also a usercase but was brought differently, because Ralph was very technical and Plone-related, while André was talking from the clients point of view. This combination was very successful and made this presentation very useful for everybody in the audience.

Kees Hink

Kees Hink from Goldmund, Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe was responsible for the last presentation. This presentation was called Styling with Deliverance and gave the people a good impression of customizing, playing with themes and content. Kees showed the advantages and disadvantages and spoke about when to use Deliverance and when not to.

Special ending

After a short coffee and tea break the Dutch Plone Usersday 2009 got a special ending. Unlike 2007 and 2008 there was time for Lightning Talks. This was a succes! There were ten completely different talks.

• Maarten Kling from Four Digits did his talk about Skinswitching.
• Wieteke den Uijl from Proteon did a presentation about  a tool for Improving Web Application Development.
• Roel Bruggink from Four Digits talked about the Dutch translation sprint
• Jean Paul Ladage from Zest talked about Prettigpersoneel.nl
• Rob Gietema from Four Digits talked about Deco
• Laurens Kling from Goed Idee Producties talked about his Usability Investigation Study
• Peter Valkenburg and Martijn Zweistra from BPMI Websolutions introduced their company and gave a short Swordfish demo.
• Kit Blake from Infrae was willing to do a lightning talk about MOAI, an Open Acces Server platform for institutional repositories.
• Matt Hamilton from Netsight told something about Deliverance Examples as a usecase.
• Martijn Schenk from Four Digits introduced the first screenshots of Plone.nl

After the lightning talks, it was time to thank everybody who did a presentation and/or a lightning talk and Matt Hamilton recieved a small gift from the organization.

A few drinks

The last point on the agenda was drinking a few drinks in the sun. Doing this everybody came to the same conclusion. The Plone Users Day 2009 was a succes.