Expo this year was mildly suprising for a number of reasons; mostly, it was a lot busier than last year (maybe even busier than a couple of years ago). Nice to see old friends again, and also meet some new ones.
Hula attracted a fair amount of attention. I'm going to send a slightly longer write-up to the lists, because there was a lot of feedback that kept getting repeated by lots of people: not terribly large jobs in the most part, but specific use cases and features that seem pretty commonly needed.
Lots of people stopped by the booth, users I've seen on the lists or on IRC, lovely to see Michael Meeks even if it was a short visit. Other Novell employees visited; knowledge of Hula varied interestingly. Also, I was a little surprised by the number of people who didn't know what Hula is - since there isn't a "proper" release yet this shouldn't be surprising, but lots of people don't know it exists yet. 1.0 will probably bring a flood of users, I imagine. Debian's Phil Hands did a great job of redirecting people enquiring about mail/groupware options from their stand, and the general confusion about what was happening with Open Exchange at RedHat (and Novell mostly talking about Groupwise) both contributed to people coming to check out the "community alternative".
© 2005 European Bob, All Rights Reserved