The Zentity team is soliciting your feedback. They just broadcasted a message that I thought might be good to redistribute through this blog as well. Please note that the deadline for paper submission is FAST approaching. I’m looking forward to seeing all the things that the Zentity community is doing with the platform.

Furthermore, if Oscar Naim (Zentity’s great Program Manager) manages to pull things off, I will be staying up all night Thu->Fri in order to virtually participate, through videoconferencing, at the DEV8D conference and answer any Zentity-related questions that developers might have.

We are very excited about the fact that you have deployed or are evaluating Zentity, and we would very much like to hear from you in order to keep improving our product.

We are particularly interested in the following information (although all feedback is welcome):

1. Installation/deployment experience
2. Zentity as a platform
3. Available documentation
4. Tools to help you get started
5. Intended and actual use
6. Performance
7. Dataset size currently in use
8. Pain points

This is a great opportunity for you to help influence the direction that Zentity will follow in future releases, so we hope you will share your experience!

As you may know, the annual Open Repositories 2010 conference will be held in Madrid, Spain this July.  This would be an excellent opportunity for you to come and present your experiences with Zentity and to learn more about what’s coming in our next version of Zentity. Hundreds of people in the repository space will attend, discussing the latest innovations in repository technologies and implementations. The Microsoft Research team is planning to have a Zentity community presence at the
Open Repositories
conference.  We wanted to raise this point because we wanted to suggest that you might consider putting forth a proposal to speak at the conference.  We have registered a good deal of interest in Zentity, but we’d very much like to see papers/sessions at the conference where you would be able to share your experiences (good and bad) with the platform with the wider community.  Please note that the deadline for submissions is March 1st.

On a related note, Microsoft is hoping to convene a Zentity half-day workshop/tutorial in conjunction with this conference in Madrid.  This will hopefully be another opportunity for our nascent community to learn what’s new with the platform, as well as to discuss practical implementation issues, suggest new features, etc.  Assuming you are able to attend, we would be very pleased if you would consider participating in this event as well.  Please, let us know if you are interested and we can provide additional details.

(For those of you in the UK, we also wanted to point out that there will be a Zentity Lab NEXT WEEK as part of the

DEV8D

conference in London, UK on February 24-27th, and you are welcome to join us.  Hope to see some of you there!)

Thanks again for using and evaluating Zentity and we looking forward to hearing your feedback and comments!