LdapCon : Just great !

We have spent two days in Köln, Germany, attending the first Ldap Conference. This was a great conference ! We met a lot of people, including other server teams (OpenDS and OpenLdap peeps), and Isode guys. How lucky we were to be able to discuss with Kurt Zeilenga ! Not only a LDAP guru, but also a very cool dude !!

We discussed extensively with Howard Chu (Symas chief architect), and with Ludovic Poitou (who has great pictures on his blog, where you can see one very intense technical session ...). OpenDS vision is quite different than Apache's one, but at least, it is a coherent vision. I'm also sure that we can find some synergy with the OpenLdap team, as they also share this Open Community spirit (openDS is much more about only OSS, not Open Community).

Otherwise, it was also great to meet Stefan Zörner for the first time. He is one of us, but we never have been lucky enough to meet him. Just a very cool dude, too ! We were 7 apache committers, around 10% of the attendance, all of us with a sweet ADS T-shirt ! Easy for us to share our ideas and message with the 63 other guys, they knew we were from Apache :) Naomi Klein was plain right : The brand is everything...

We managed to get Apache Directory Server 1.5.1 and Apache Directory Studio 1.0.0 released just before the conference, and Apache Directory Server 1.0.2 has also been certified compliant by the Open Group for the second year.

Last, not least : the beer ... Excellent !