Happy New Year from Copenhagen

2008 is closing soon, and it's time for a small summary of the activities that happened during the year. Not in the google 'zeitgeist' manner, but more in terms of milestones and interesting Sitecore bulletpoints from my point of view.

After joining Sitecore (International) in January, it of course took a while to get acquainted with all the internal procedures and such. But I was already at my first tradeshow in February, showing off the wonders of Sitecore in Stockholm at the Internet Expo. 

More events followed, and during the summer came the big WPC in Houston. After that travelling in the name of Sitecore really took off, which is also why I try to update this blog as often as possible when there is something even mildly interesting to share from abroad.

Most of the events/tradeshows have been covered already on this blog.

On a more product oriented side, we had the release of version 6 in July which introduced many great features which really caters for the marketing units rather than the typical IT / developer audiance. We also released an updated version of the Intranet Portal and Sitecore Foundry. All in all some very interesting releases which will be improved even more once we release further marketing oriented modules. One thing to add is, that the release also introduced an improved structure for releasing updates in 3 levels, hotfixes, updates and service releases. This should ensure that we are on top of things, including fixing issues related to 3rd party vendor software like Adobe's release of Flash 10, and the issues it caused us and others like wordpress.

From the business side, we came out of our fiscal year with a growth in sales by over 100% from last year following our past trend. Included in that was a lot of nice sized deals and many great new references. Despite the whole world is currently still discussing how the financial crisis is going to impact business as we know it, I so far haven't met a prospect within my territories who postponed their investments. Hopefully this applies to all our markets also in 2009.

But rest assure, that despite any potential decrease in the market, Sitecore is well equipped and financially sound for going into 2009 head on.

 

As goes for the upcoming year there is already a lot of things planned. Aside from the various events we will be participating in, there is also plans for travelling to various destinations ranging from Dubai to Brussels, Oslo and Singapore. I will also be giving my first Sitecore Certified Developer training in 2009 in Stockholm in February.

So on that note, I wish you a happy new year!

CM Innovation 2008, what a show!

On December 4th, the annual CM Innovation event took place at Brussels Airport in the Sky Hall. This event is hosted by CMS Channel, an association of Content Management professionals and analysts.

Sitecore International sponsored the event as Global Sponsors and as a result we had one of the largerst booths, just in front of the area where most of the sessions of the event took place. To top that off, we also had the opening keynote speaker session at our disposal. My colleague Sri Carlyle and myself went one day in advance in order to setup shop.

The keynote was done by Lars Fløe Nielsen, one of the founders of Sitecore. He did a very great job, talking not about features and hot-buttons, but about how to navigate the tech crunch. A topic which dealt with the current global financial situation, and why this is not the time to save money, but to spend money for easy gain of marketshare. The presentation covered a recent customer case, including their calculations of cost savings, and increase in revenue based on improved focus on their web platform. The keynote received some great feedback, and also resulted in an interview with a local IT magazine called Smart Business Strategies.

This really kicked off the event, and our booth was packed for the rest of the day with interested people and partner prospects. I'm glad we had some reinforcements from our Dutch office in the shape of Alex de Groot, otherwise we simply wouldn't have had time to talk to everybody.

To spice the show up a bit, we brought some nice prizes to win from our customer Royal Copenhagen (see case study). Something which made the 3 people who each won a gift quite happy by the looks of it. Thanks to Christian Daems from CMS Channel for helping us handing out the prizes.



After the tradeshow closed, it was time for the annual CMS Awards show. Sitecore had a few cases submitted to the awards, and we ended up winning the Silver Award in the category "Web 2.0" for the Thomas Cook solution done by our partner The Reference.
I'm the guy that is all smiles in the right hand side of the picture, next to Anja Capelle from The Reference.

The Award ceremony also came with a nice dinner arrangement, and a Belgian radio celebrity who controlled the turntables to get the party started. I left around 11 pm, after quite a bit of networking and dancing. All in all it was a very good event for us, with many interesting leads and positive feedback. We will definately be present at the upcoming WebScene event which will take place in the summer of 2009.

 

Till then, enjoy a few pictures from the CM Innovation event.

 

Sri Carlyle just after we had setup our booth and added the prizes from Royal Copenhagen.

 

 

 

 

 

Lars Fløe Nielsens keynote had quite a big audiance and gave us a lot of positive vibes throughout the day of the event. Thats me standing in the back checking out the setup.

 

 

 

Alex de Groot giving a demo at the Sitecore booth. In Dutch of course.

Educating in London

This post was supposed to be ready almost 2 weeks ago. Why it hasn't been is quite simply due to all the other things that have been on the agenda. More about this in my upcoming post.

But regarding todays topic London, here's the outline.
I travelled to London on November 25th in order to be ready for the SCD1 training that started in the morning on the 26th. This Sitecore training session however was a bit special, since I was going to be the instructor for the first time.

In Sitecore we have quite a strict plan for people to become instructors. First of all you need to complete the course yourself 2 times, each with a score above 90%. After you complete this step, you must carry out your first training session under the supervision of a trained instructor. This aproach ensures that whenever Sitecore sends an instructor out to certify developers, that they are well equipped with knowledge, know the material they are presenting by heart, and can assist the students in the best possible way.

So this was basically the reason why I went to London, to become one of these Sitecore  instructors. I had already passed the SCD1 training twice with high scores (one with 92% and one with 100%), so all which was missing from my puzzle, was to run the course under the supervision of Raul, who besides being based out of the London office is also responsible for certifying Sitecore instructors.

Training, Day 1,
I welcomed the 7 participants for the first day of training. The group consisted of a good mix of developers located at excisting partners and customers like the FA. Well, with the exceptance of one, but more about that later.

The day went by fairly smooth, although it's a bit tough doing the training for the first time. With well over 200 slides, there is alot of ground to cover on top of the labs which the students have to complete. Raul gave me some nice pointers and some well put criticism during the day which helped me fine-tune my delivery of the content. Practise makes perfect as they say. As day 1 wrapped up, everybody in the 'class' seemed to be very much into the material I had presented. So far so good.

After leaving the office I went for a walk in the surrounding area. My hotel was only 2 blocks from Tower of London, so I walked across Tower Bridge an into the area below Butler's Wharf. Very nice area I have to say. I easily found a nice Italian restaurant that was able to cure my hunger. Great pizza! Instead of walking back the way I came, I followed the river up to the London Brigde and back to my hotel. Not the longest walk ever, but it had been quite an exhausting day.

Training day 2,
Second day of training starts of with a summary of the previous day, before going into the more advanced Sitecore stuff. It was about this time that one student made a point that he should probably not participate in the SCD2 training on the next day afterall, as he was actually appointed to be a sitecore administrator, and not really a developer. We covered the rest of the slides and labs and then I prepared them all for the exam, developers or not.

Exam time.
The exam consists of 40 multiple choice questions drawn from a big pool of questions. This approach ensures that students are not answering the same questions in the same order at any time, so cheating is nearly impossible. Instead students may use all the information they have available as well as the internet to find the answers they need. If all my efforts in delivering the material should pay off, now was the time.

All students passed, one even scoring a clean 100%. And the administrator, who figured out he wasnt really suited for developer training, well, he scored 88% (and had the lowest score of them all).

I was of course very pleased that my students all did so well, and also pleased to know that Raul certified me as a Sitecore Instructor with nice grades.

Bye bye London,
On my way out of town, after leaving the office, I had to jump a few trains in the London Underground. Finding the right way was easy, but as it was the end of the working day for everybody, the Tube was packed. It's crazy and like nothing I have experienced in Copenhagen. I had to squeeze myself and my luggage into an already packed train. But I guess this is everyday life for most people in London. Eventually I made it to Heathrow, which will probably for a long time rank lowest on my list of interesting airports.

Well back in Copenhagen, my cab driver drove me home using a completely different way than instructed. Quite annoying, but I was too tired to argue about the price. At least I was certified, and ready to get started on the upcoming tasks and reaching the goals I had set out for...