Mambo News

LinuxWorld Australia: Day 3

Day Three dawns clear and cool. Cecilia and I will be the only members of the Team at the show today, so we head out early, crash Starbucks, then head to the Convention Center so we're there when the doors open. Cecilia's been a joy to work with - friendly, capable, reliable. Exactly what you want from a booth partner (last thing you want is someone who keeps disappearing and leaving you stuck dealing with the crowds).

We just sold out of Packt Books this morning. The publisher was kind enough to donate a number of copies to us and we've sold them to raise money for the Foundation. Thank you Packt!

There's clearly serious desire for real documentation - people are asking lots of questions and looking for help. It's also interesting to see how few people get really deep into the system. There's so much functionality in there, but it's under-documented, so they just miss it. 

Being a Linux show, one would expect a world of Penguins -- and indeed that is the case, so in this instalment I've included the Penguin Gallery I've accumulated over the last 3 days. As you walk around the show you also find there's a few SUSE lizards and lots and lots of red hats -- the fave freebie from this show without a doubt.

Today's the last day and actually it's focused entirely on one vertical market: Government. We've had pretty good traffic despite the narrow focus. Lots of various government departments and civic authorities have come by as well as some educational institutions. Seems to be a great deal of interest from this sector, with a lot of people saying "We've been looking at mambo for (this) or (that)." We also had several people comment that they had looked at the system in the past and rejected it due to bewildering frequency of releases, updates, upgrades and patches. Seems the new Team's focus on building a more stable and predictable system is exactly on point for at least what this group of buyers wants.

In a similar vein, a number of developers (primary web designers, actually) express concerns about their difficulties convincing clients to accept Open Source solutions. The primary concern: FUD. As one IT Consultant put it "I have clients who say to me 'that's sounds great, but what happens if you die?'" It's sort of a vendor lock-in fear generated by the fact that the clients have no clue about how to select and deal with the Open Source solutions -- they are deferring entirely to the knowledge of their consultants, and in the absence of the re-assurance of a recognized brand name, the clients fear disruption of their businesses if something happens to their vendor. While the example above sounds like a long shot fear -- a manageable risk -- the fact remains that no one (particularly SMEs) wants to take on additional undue risk.

The area of business continuity is one of the areas where I really think we've got it right: The presence of the Foundation reduces the risk of disruption of the development process due to outside (or inside) forces.  Additionally, the MSC's ongoing emphasis on moving deliberately with stable periodic releases, rather than the purist old style "release early, release often" approach embraced by some other CMSes re-assures clients. Speaking to people here really reinforces that we're on the right path with this approach. None of these people want to administer a system which releases 8 versions in as many months. They don't want the non-stop upgrade merry-go-round -- it's one of the same reasons why they avoid Microsoft. Constantly having to upgrade / update / patch their CMS (or their clients' for no additional $$) means wasted time and energy and cuts right into the cost/benefit advantage which Open Source should bring to the table.

Had a good talk with one of the Moodle developers today. Turns out we share the hopes of speeding development of a Moodle / Mambo bridge. They are in the process of going to Beta with a new version, so the time is right. Nice guys with a great specialized CMS. With large high profile educational institutions like the University of North Carolina adopting Mambo, we've seen an uptick in interest from the educational sector. Oftentimes the smaller schools want courseware - an  area where Moodle excels, but they also need the content management functionality and extensibility of a system like Mambo. Hence a Moodle / Mambo combo makes perfect sense and fills a need.

We just signed up for next years' event. Looks like we'll be back at LinuxWorld Australia 2007.  In the meantime, you can catch as at events in Boston, Milan, Madrid and other locations TBD.

Well, this pretty much brings our story to a close. Not a bad event at all. Good attendence, lots of traffic. Learned a few things. Met PostgreSQL, met Moodle, met a ton of users. Got to de-fuse some myths and dis-information. Got to eat some great seafood and see a new city. Got a really sweet award.

In closing, I want to thank Cecilia, Wee Keat and the entire Mambo Communities Team for making this trip possible and for working hard to everyone's mutual benefit. Next stop - Boston!   

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