OpenBand

My food poisoning at DCDC (don't eat rare meat in DC!) abated just long enough for me to attend an excellent BoF towards the end of Friday at Drupalcon DC 2009. The goal was workable configuration management in Drupal, and in no particular order, attending were:

Drupal is a collaboration framework. It started as a simple system for managing conversations and files between friends in school, and has maintained that spirit through its many evolutions. But, as most things do, Drupal reached an age of maturity—it was time for the CMS to graduate and expand.

I feel confident declaring that everyone reading this post has at least seen an instant messaging client. From the early days of talking between terminals in command-line operating systems to the explosion of IM communication on services like AOL Instant Messenger, computer users have discovered and embraced the convenience and power of this electronic communication powerhouse.

It’s DruaplCon time, and this year, Openband team members are presenting two discussions. Darren Ferguson is talking about his XMPP Framework, the suite of modules that enables Drupal-hosted user-to-user chatting, multi-user chatting and real-time chat translation. Ben Lavender, Chris Johnson and Dan Karran are discussing our solutions for the unique challenges posed by enterprise-size systems and the hurdles still needing jumping.

It’s not often we’re able to get all of our team members from Openband and our collaboration partners together for a combined productivity sprint. In fact, DrupalCons probably make up half of the time we all (person-to-person) get to actually see each other in a given year. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we capitalize on any chance possible to push as much work into our meet-ups as possible.