Last week (Friday the 20th) the OSA held its first Customer Forum event. The event was a resounding success, with over 25 attendees representing 15 organizations, both public and private sector, who are adopting various open source applications. Attendees included the former CIO of Deluxe Check (a check printing and business stationery company), the lead IT architect for the Minnesota Dept of Transportation, and also the deputy CIO for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (a.k.a. MNSCU, and on whose facilities, not coincidentally, we held this event).


This was a half-day session, including a series of interactive presentations. First, Anthony Gold from Unisys led off, painting a broad picture of open source adoption in the enterprise, and what issues are getting in the way. Then yours truly provided an overview of what we're doing about it, introducing the OSA and the interoperability issues we're undertaking. Finally, Michael Grove from OpenITWorks presented what his company is doing to encourage broader end customer collaboration with open source and related projects. These were interspersed with lively discussion, as customers sounded off on their experiences adopting a wide variety of open source, including Moodle (curriculum management), JBoss/RedHat, Apache, Alfresco, Groundwork, and other tools and applications.


The interoperability challenges these customers face were as wide-ranging and diverse as the applications they are using, but the common theme is these challenges are getting in the way of greater adoption. Single signon and centralized identity management (the topic of our hack-a-thon at OSCON) resonated, and so did the notion of a "single source of truth" (a key feature of our Common Customer View project), among other data integration challenges. Proprietary integration also came up, especially Microsoft. And also common SLA's and the notion of a single throat to choke. And the list went on.


You can find all presentations, as well as the results of a questionnaire that several attendees filled out and returned, on the "Business Users Forum" project on the OSA community site.

After the event, we had lunch with Al Essa, the above-mentioned deputy CIO of MNSCU, and we discussed his various open source interoperability projects. His challenge: To integrate his curriculum management and other student self-service applications into front-end user experiences that students would find natural and easy to use. This had to include the ability for students to interact not only with the applications, but with faculty and staff, and with each other. With hundreds of thousands of students in over 50 college sites across the state, this is as gargantuan a collaboration and integration challenge as one can imagine. His insight: To get people to collaborate, let them use the tools that they are most familiar with, and for today's teens and twenty-somethings, it's not necessarily the email and static websites that us middle-aged folk have become accustomed to. Today's younger generation, a.k.a. "Millennials", are growing up with media-rich, interactive online applications like MySpace, Facebook and even Second Life. Those are the "front-ends" that come most naturally to them. His innovation: Integrating curriculum management and student self-service with these applications as a front-end. The Second Life integration is most interesting - A MNSCU island on Second Life, and his group is an active contributor to the Sloodle project. His feedback: Second Life as an immersive front-end to self-service applications is an emerging trend, and Second Life's APIs are both feature-rich and very complex, often requiring significant changes in the underlying application to make the most use of it. If you think that just plugging in your current MVC framework is good enough, then think again. Wouldn't it be great if there were some guidance and best practices for Second Life integration... Coming soon on an OSA interop roadmap near you.

In closing, I'd like to extend a special thanks for organizing this event to Ron Fresquez, who runs TOSTA (the Open Source Technology Alliance), a public-sector-focused open source advocacy organization, and a community member of the OSA. He did "yeoman's work" (using his words) to pull this event together. Also thanks go to MNSCU, who were kind enough to let us use their excellent facilities at Wheelock Whitney hall in downtown Minneapolis (pictured above).

This was a great kickoff to our customer forum series and we got great customer feedback. Now on to the next customer forum event in San Francisco on August 23rd, which will be co-hosted by Palamida and JasperSoft. This next event will have a different flavor, with a focus on licensing and compliance issues in addition to discussing interoperability in general. We hope you can make it!