I can't sleep, so I thought I would sit down and write my thoughts about day 4 of the convention.

Yesterday was the last day of the conference.  The first session consisted of Dries giving a talk on the state of Drupal.  As Kevin, Rad, Greg, and I figured it would be a popular session we skipped sitting down for breakfast favouring heading to the Citilab to scope out seats.  We arrived early and shortly after we settled down the rain came heavy and soaking.

Dries session was very interesting.  It was based on a survey that he put up a month earlier.  He had over 1000 respondents, which seems pretty darn good to me.  I will cover the highlights of that presentation in another post on my overall thoughts of Drupal and the Drupal community.

I also attended a session on Drupal and creating Business Applications.  The presentation consisted of talking about standard business practice using the free version of SugarCRM as the model.  What I brought away from this session, perhaps isn't what they wanted.  I believe the point was to prove that robust Business Applications (like SugarCRM) can be built quickly and efficiently in Drupal but there are several key components missing and that they are working on filling in those gaps.  Things that I heard included:

1. Business rules are often very difficult to extract from a client but that it is key to a successful project.
2. That the work flow must be clearly defined.  In the case of Customer Management, this might run through the following:
   a)  Prospecting
   b)  Qualification
   c)  Needs analysis
   d)  Value proposition
   e)  Identification of  decision makers
   f)  Perception analysis
   g)  Proposal creation
   h)  Prospect follow up
   i)  Contract lost or
   j)  Contract won
3. Drupal provides many horizontal features which are attractive in Business Applications, but lacks some other relational features (such a parent child relationships) needed in robust systems--but this can be overcome.
4. It is important to have an attractive presentation layer for the client to interact with.  Very slick features can be created using AJAX.
5. These kinds of AJAXy features ought to allow business analysts to make changes easily without having to go to a programmer.

I thought the presentation was very good.

Finally, in the morning, I went to a session that discussed the "HeyWatch" module.  This is a module that leverages the HeyWatch system--a system that will encode video over the Internet for you to prevent you from having to deal, with what can be, heavy server load.  Basically the process is straight forward:

1. A user uploads video to Drupal
2. HeyWatch gets video and encodes
3. Drupal is alerted the video is complete and ready for pickup via ping
4. The "Video Not Yet Available" message is replaced with whichever player has been selected.
5. The video can be delivered in a variety of ways, but the coolest was that you can have them send the video to a Amazon S3 account.

The session was  a little on the light side, but was informative and interesting.

I had lunch with Laura at the Cafe behind the Citilab building.  Basically, the previous three days had the same catered lunch and lack of variety can breed contempt.

In the afternoon, I only attended two sessions.  The first was on Drupal, Semantic Search, and the Semantic Web.  This is an area I must research more heavily because much of what was being discussed really relied on a foundation I don't yet possess.

The final session was a "Goodbye" wrap up.

In the evening a group of us went out for dinner--we ended up at a Tapas/Paella place.  I had a little grilled cuttlefish, patates, half a croquette, and some roast beef.  It was quite pleasant.

We headed out to go back to the flat and hit drummers and fireworks.  Video and photos to follow.  It was an uproar of light and sound cacophony and chaos with thousands in the street.  I loved it.  There was the smell of gun powder everywhere and people dancing and singing.

What a way to end the conference.

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