[Typo3-marketing] OSCOM update and opinion about consultancies

[Daniel Hinderink]

Hi Michelle,

Thank you very much for the Update!

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I spent the last month gearing up for the OSCOM presentation, but
> unfortunately became very ill near the end of the month (I was also moving
> into a new house as well) so I couldn't attend. My boss, Jennifer Lynch,
> attended and I'll will be providing a full report next week. From the
> initial reaction, TYPO3 was very well received, but it still appears that
> there is much work needed to promote T3. We will be posting the presentation
> online and I'll send out the URL. Also, it was videotaped so I think that
> will be posted on the Web as well.

Cool. Good to know you are getting well. Please give my regards to Jennifer
and say thanks from all of us!!

> There were several people from all over the world at OSCOM, with many from
> colleges and universities. They are interested in having an open source
> all-in-one solution for their schools.  I have been working with Georg
> Kuehnberger and Kurt Dirnbauer on integrating Moodle with T3. Here at UMR we
> use Blackboard as do many universities in the United States. Unfortunately,
> like many users of Blackboard, we  are not very happy with it. It's a very
> buggy product (and we pay a large amount of money for it). I believe once we
> have the edu.typo3.com site up, we would be able to get sponsors for
> projects from colleges and universities since they expressed interest in
> doing so. If we give them this type of solution, they are more than willing
> to pay for services such as customization, training, support, design and
> architecture. My question is: can we offer them this? My freelance company
> has worked with other colleges and universities. I'm not sure how many other
> consultants are willing to handle them as customers since they are rather
> large customers and could take a lot of time. It seems like the only reason
> why schools would be reluctant to use T3 and other open source products is
> because they are concerned about support, etc.

That surely is a question that is important for the US. In Europe there are
several consultancies with edu-references and open for more.

Please let me know some more about the edu-specific applications.
What is Blackboard and Moodle? What's the tech basis (Language/DB), range,
price?


> This leads to another thing Daniel was talking about. He mentioned raising
> the bar for consultancies. This is definitely something that needs to be
> revisited. One of the things I've learned from OSCOM is that a consultancy
> for TYPO3 can be varied and so it will be very hard to judge them.

See my other reply.

> The only problem is that there could be several types of consultancies:
> large scale companies, small scale companies, single person consultancies,
> and Web hosting companies. I think it would be good to categorize the
> consultancies further and maybe require different things based on the
> groups. For example, I don't think we should require a Web hosting company
> to build extensions. Instead, it would be good to have a place where users
> could rate the Web hosting companies on their service and customer support.
> That would probably be more effective.

Yes, good notion. May be it would be interesting to change typo3.com listing
all together and make listing dependent on a variety of info that the
consultancies have to give.

Founding Date, employees, Customer size, industries served, number of
publicly accessible typo3-projects, emphasis of services (along your list of
1 thru 6).

> 
> For example, at my freelance company, we received emails from people who
> have emailed a few other T3 web hosting companies found in the consultancy
> database but did not get any email back. There was also another US
> consultant who took on a T3 project and then could not finish it, but the
> person had made it sound like they could do it. These are not good things
> for T3's reputation.

This happens all the time. If you take a close look, there might be ten to
twenty people in Germany who are really proficient with typo3. A large group
is doing HTML-templates and has never created an extension of some
complexity. The rest has no references, probably also no clue but just tried
to jump the train. On the other hand there are people like Ingmar Schlecht
or Luite van Zeist or even René Fritz who are definitely among the most
knowledgeable TYPO3-people, but judging from the consultancies and
references you would never think of asking them for a quote.

> 
> I think, especially for colleges, universities and large corporations to use
> TYPO3, there will need to be more large scale T3 consultancies. Of course,
> this is something far down the road. :)  But I really think we need to
> categorize the consultants better so that people know whether they are
> getting someone that will "fit" their project.

There is also a number of larger consultancies offering TYPO3-services who
are pretty clueless as well, so that alone is no criterium.

> 
> Anyway, I just wanted to share the good news from OSCOM and will speak more
> of it next week. Sorry my letter got a little long. :)

Thank you again! Great job, as always. And I like the website about your new
house. Too bad you and Alex are nowhere to be seen :-)

Cheers 

Daniel

-- 
TYPO3 - get.content.right

Daniel Hinderink
Marketing, Press Relations, Strategy
http://www.typo3.com