Last Friday in Bonn, the German Tongued User Group had its first meeting. 32 participants from Germany, Austria and Switzerland came together to get informed and discuss about DotNetNuke in General and in our Region. We started the evening before with an informal meeting in a typical "Kölsch" pub, where about a dozen DNN users discussed their experiences and insight on DNN, Sharepoint and other stuff. Typical food and the local beer helped to create a nice athmosphere until deep in the night - it was already 1:30 AM, when we reached our hotel.
Early next morning we started with out sessions: After the introduction, Philip Becker and I reported from the OpenForce Conferences in Arnhem and Las Vegas and there was much interest in the upcoming DNN 5 ("Cambrian"). The next session was about Content Localization - an important subject not only for the Swiss users, who usually have to address at least all 4 languages spoken in their country. Most of the participants have to create multilingual web sites and need easy managable solutions. The last session before noon was about selling DotNetNuke. Micky Schwall and Benjamin Hermann pointed out, which key features they address when presenting DNN to clients and how to compete with other CMS solutions.
After a very tasteful lunch we separated into workshops to discuss more specific subjects in depths:
- Oliver Dembniak dove into the new development features of VS2008 and .Net 3.5
- Benjamin Hermann presented the prototype of a new single sign on solution (code named "Space Card") that allows to share user profiles amongst DNN installation even from different servers
- I discussed Troubleshooting Techniques for DotNetNuke and how to act more planned in this area
- Philipp Becker presented eCommerce solutions, obvious a very interesting subject for many DNN administrators and consultants.
The final session was about future enhancements to the user group and its offers: there is a strong demand in module reviews and documentation, so this will be the focus when extending our services. The next meeting is planned at CeBIT trade fair in March 2008 and we also plan to offer a module development seminar next year. It looks like 2008 will become an interesting DNN year for our User Group.
PS: more photos available on our web site www.dnn-usergroup.de