At this year's CeBIT, Mittwald sponsored sub booths for open source communities. TYPO3 was in the company of Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento. Every system was at the disposal of three monitors neatly staged on a round table and an extra table with another monitor. Last year TYPO3 was sponsored by the Open Source Park in hall 2 with one small workspace, but this was the only difference to this year's CeBIT.
Moving to hall 6 increased the quality level of the requests. The TYPO3 CeBIT team staffed the booth with three to four people. Some days there has also been support by community members that dropped in spontaneously. It has been absolutely cool and helpful that the Mittwald team - that mainly provided information on their hosting services - allocated three TYPO3 specialists that could step in at any time to answer questions about TYPO3. As the number of visitors also hit a new peak this year the team of three to eight contact persons has been quite busy.
We had different visitor groups visiting the TYPO3 booth and it seems a lot of different-sized companies will use TYPO3 for their upcoming projects. The team at our booth provided all necessary assistance to make sure the reasons for using TYPO3 where clear and were also not shy to point visitors to one of the other open source systems as a better fit for their purposes.
Governmental institutions were well represented in hall 6 and especially in hall 7 this year, which resulted in quite a few city administrations and federal agencies visiting our booth. TYPO3 is one of the few accredited systems in Germany that can be used as an alternative to the Government Site Builder (GSB). The fact that TYPO3 is now offering HTML5 support and accessibility boosted the interest in the public sector noticeably.
Quite a number of visits could be attributed to our CeBIT special. For this CeBIT only applicants for a TYPO3 Association membership could sign up without having to pay the registration fee. Our CeBIT special resulted in 20 new members that now support the TYPO3 project through their membership. Thank you all!
It was a great experience to be at CeBIT for the team with a lot of positive feedback from visitors. The T3N party on Friday at the Webciety booth was one of the fun highlights of this week for the whole TYPO3 CeBIT team. We partied on old school beats enjoying German beers and had the chance of networking with the other open source communities. Thanks T3N for your invitation!
The synergy between a commercial company and the open source systems like we witnessed here on CeBIT seems to pay of for all parties, even though we did not pay anything for the booth ;-). The atmosphere at the booth was great among the staff and the visitors. Their has been a lot of praise and nice words for TYPO3. We really appreciate to hear that. We can't wait to be there again next year.