First day of the OpenOffice.org “Cento Milioni” Conference in Orvieto, Italy. It was fun to watch the expression of the people arriving in the Palazzo dei Popolo for the keynote sessions. Imagine the typical glass and concrete conference centre – now imagine the opposite!

Another ten hour day – even the lunch hour was taken up by a follow-up Community Council meeting – so I won’t attempt a summary of every session. The Conference Programme is on the web, as are the recordings of the conference sessions.

My main impression at the end of the first day is the way that OpenOffice.org is becoming mainstream. We had presentations from municipal authorities who have adopted OpenOffice.org wholescale; from a systems integrator who building OpenOffice.org into solutions; even a hardware company launching a multi-button mouse specifically designed for OpenOffice.org. Presenters addressed the kind of issues that only arise in large scale deployments: migration, training, tailoring OpenOffice.org / locking down the software for mass desktop rollouts. Presenters talked about running OpenOffice.org on netbooks and creating portable versions to run from a usb stick – OpenOffice is now a truly pervasive application.

To end the day: another civic reception with drinks and a buffet, this time featuring local wines, meats, pastas, cheeses, etc. These people take their food seriously. A quick conversation with some senior Oracle folks – I hope they were impressed with the astonishing value for money which the OpenOffice.org Community represents   A beer stop on the way home with a dozen folk from several continents, then some more putting the world to rights conversations with Cor.

I now need to add today’s photos to my OOoCon album in Facebook…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 8:18 am and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.