The last days have been pretty active. Back from JavaOne, I can now rest a week-end in Altanta, where I will stay one week.

Ten days ago, just before flying to JavaOne, we held our first European Customer Advisory Board (CAB) in London. CABs are a great way to meet with your key/most representative customers and listen to what they actually have to say about your product line, your technology and your company as a whole. On top of that, it was also an excellent way to enjoy Marc's and Bob's presence in Europe.

What was specifically good in that CAB was first of all its composition: we had representative from Northern Europe, Central Europe and Southern Europe, end-customers, SI and ISV. 12 European companies that represented an excellent cross-section of our ecosystem. Feedback has been extremely constructive and useful. For example, an insurance company is willing to contribute back some security extensions they have developed on top of JBoss and we have had some very interesting discussions with a company from the travel industry about some smart replication/failover schemes they would love to see implemented in JBoss.

We also went through a demo of the new JBoss Network management tools that will be officially released later this month to our customers, more specifically the inventory management and monitoring features. That proved to be useful as a good number of customers questions were on that topic. As a beta version, it was also one of the first time I could use these features and I can tell you I've been really impressed by the work done by Richard's team. Congratulations! This will serve as a great foundation for all other JBoss Network features. If you are in need of advanced JBoss Management/Inventoring/Monitoring features, that will most probably interest you.

We are definitively going to re-organize regular CAB meeting in Europe. In fact, the next one might be organize in Barcelona during JBoss World Europe (October 10-12, 2005).

I'll be back...