Hello fellow MarCons,
I'd like to share my impressions of CeBIT with you.
Ever since, the German OpenOffice.org project has attended CeBIT, one of
the world's largest and most important trade shows, taking place in
Hannover, Germany. This year, it took place from March 2nd to March 6th.
For the Germanophone project, it is one of the two most important fairs
taking place during the year.
Open source for the very first time has been one of the major topics for
the trade show organizer, so the open source area has been placed in the
very famous hall 2. Linux New Media (publisher of Linux Pro Magazine)
organized a forum with talks and lectures as well as free booths for
open source projects.
Like the last years, our demand for the booth has been higher than one
single demo point, as usually masses of people come to us. :-) So, like
the last years, for this year we also booked our own booth in an
OpenOffice.org theme park in the open source area of hall 2.
OpenOffice.org had three demo points, and we were accompanied by
providers of commercial support and services: Sun/Oracle, SCAI,
TeamDrive and FOSS-Group. This helped us showing what professional
services are available, and many interesting discussions took place with
enterprise users.
To me, it has been a real success. CeBIT was one day shorter than the
years before, but the OpenOffice.org booth attracts lots of people, from
the average daily users, system administrators to decision makers. So,
in the end, more visitors per day came. :-)
In terms of developers, CeBIT is not very important, but all other
target audiences stop by. This year, a total of at least 8 people manned
our booth to fit the demands -- some of them being there all week long,
some of them only for a few days. Important topics this year have been
compatibility with office 2010, network deployment and, of course, the
Ribbon. :-)
We had interesting talks, good conversations and got in touch once again
with important decision makers, so in total, it helped strenthening the
recognition of OpenOffice.org and will probably lead to a few more
adoptions. I've already begun to follow-up on individual conversations
and hope to be able to present some more information soon, when we have
more details.
Several lectures on OpenOffice.org have been held: Jacqueline talked
about news in OpenOffice.org 3.2 [1], Michael introduced his legal
counsel software for OpenOffice.org [2], and I presented the Munich open
source meetups [3], jointly organized by Mozilla and OpenOffice.org. On
the last day, we even had a nice CeBIT interview with RadioTux [4],
where I could introduce product and community of OpenOffice.org and talk
a little bit about migration, compatibility and large adoptions. CeBIT
also was a chance for us to introduce our second OpenOffice.org Congress
for Business and Administration, to be held in Munich in November.
I didn't take many pictures, but uploaded a few to my album [5], so you
get an impression on how our appearance has been.
Unfortunately, CeBIT has a large drawback: It is fairly expensive. Like
the last years, the nonprofit OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. paid for
the booth and other costs, which had been more than 3.000 € in total.
For the travelling and lodging costs of all booth personnel who requires
it - about 8 people - I'd love to get funding from the marketing
project. Costs are approximately 2.500 € (and thus a bit higher than
last year), and I think it is a fair deal to divide costs between OOoDeV
and the marketing budget. Having less people and thus less costs
wouldn't be an option, due to the length of the trade show and the
masses of visitors you need to deal with.
I agree, that in total, CeBIT is very expensive, but for us, it has such
an important marketing impact, that we shouldn't miss it. Being there is
just a necessity -- and makes a lot of fun. :-)
Florian
[1]
http://blog.radiotux.de/2010/03/07/cebit-2010-jacqueline-rahemipour-openoffice-org-3-2/
[2]
http://blog.radiotux.de/2010/03/09/cebit-2010-michael-stehmann-mit-freiheit-der-advokatur/
[3]
http://www.slideshare.net/floeff/opensourcetreffen-oder-wie-kocht-man-sich-sein-eigenes-event-cebit-2010
[4]
http://blog.radiotux.de/2010/03/10/cebit-2010-interview-mit-florian-effenberger-florian-schliessl-carsten-book-ueber-limux-openoffice-mozilla/
[5] http://picasaweb.google.com/floeff/CeBIT2010
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