Sitecore expanding in Poland

My blog has been silent for way to long, but let’s not waste time on excuses. Sitecore International has grown tremendously in 2010 doubling the number of employees and extending our reach and focus areas. Trying to keep up with this pace has of course been time consuming, but certainly also productive.

Very recently we hired Mr. Mariusz Krukowski to be a Regional Manager for Sitecore in Poland and the Czech Republic. Before joining Sitecore, Mariusz previously worked for competing CMS companies and thus is bringing a lot of experience from the WCM/CMS realm to Sitecore.

I previously hinted that I and Sitecore International were already focusing on this specific region, which now manifested itself with Mariusz joining us. Mariusz is already very busy getting partners on board and spreading the word about our Online Marketing Suite and Enterprise CMS solutions. Speaking of this, just last week I assisted Mariusz in Prague talking to some excisting and potential partners. Please join me in welcoming Mariusz to the team, and expect to meet us both if you are within the region, as I will be assisting Mariusz with getting up and running during 2011.

 

On another note, despite the long pause on this blog, I do expect to deliver more frequent updates in the future as a lot of interesting stuff is happening these days. Did you for example see the announcement of Sitecore 6.4 being finally released? The ‘Technical Preview’ release got great feedback from the developer community and certainly raised the bar for user-friendly interfaces.

 

Stay tuned for more updates and happy holidays!

Feedback on the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite

It has been some hectic weeks lately in Sitecore, mainly because we closed our fiscal year on June 30th - but also because we at the same time released our new version (Sitecore 6.1 including the OMS).

Doing both of these major events at the same time might seem as overkill and downright crazy, but we have actually managed quite well. At this point we cannot reveal any figures of the closed fiscal year, but just wait till the numbers have been chrunched and made public. It will blow your mind.

Part of the reason for releasing the product now, before the summer holidays really kick in, was also to have the product out prior to the upcoming Gartner report. A report which will probably also blow your mind.

I realize I am painting a really fantastic picture here, but I have to admit that this version (OMS) is also a huge test to our communication skills. There is alot of information to give out in terms of describing how the OMS can really make a difference for any website, even without getting into all the nitty gritty stuff.

I know for a fact that it is difficult because I have been in this situation a couple of times already. Even for trained senior Sitecore staff, the inner workings of OMS are a challenge to describe without confusing the receiver. Mainly because what might seem obvious to us, can look diffecult for the viewer. I think part of this is related to us technical people usually talking to other technical people. With OMS we will more often talk directly to marketing and sales people. Im not mocking non-technical people, but it can be challenging to learn and use their lingo, and talk "business value" instead of cool ground-breaking features.

Anyways, as I often seem to get side-tracked in my blog-posts, I will get back to the subject: Feedback on the OMS:

On Tuesday 7th we held a webinar for our partners to see OMS in action. We brought the big guns in shape of Lars F. Nielsen to host and run the presentation. The 30-or-so partner representatives who signed in was taken through a 2 hour live demonstration, as well as explanation of how to solve various analytics related issues. I was also signed in to surveil the session, in case my partners would have questions. During this, before the presentation was over, I recieved 2 mails from 2 different partners with headlines such as "Great product!" and "Excellent presentation, keep up the good work".

That made it pretty clear for me, that the product is certainly on the right track, and that our partners will be well equipped to meet their customers demands of marketing and analytics related features in the future.

 

A few screenshots from the slides used in the presentation:

Overview of the difference between another analytics tool and OMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overview of the conversion impact of tracked campaigns in OMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overview of a typical setup of multi-variate (A/B) testing and the tracking of progress

 

 

 

 

 

For the partners who were unable to attend (+ the lucky ones already enjoying their holidays), we of course offer a video from the presentation. If you for some reason did not receive the follow-up email, and want to get your hands on the video + slides, throw me a mail.

New release of Sitecore Intranet Portal

It is now official, the anticipated update of our Sitecore Intranet Portal solution passed the last QA cycles and is ready for download on SDN.

Read the release blog post from our Product Manager.

The SIP 2.2 release adresses a few issues that improves the overall performance and experience of working with the product. I know this for a fact, because I demonstrated it a few weeks ago to a client who are handing in the PO as we speak. Previously at similar demos, I would demonstrate the 2.1 release  which wasn't a bad product at all, but this release just makes a better demo. The release is more intuitive, easier to administrate and of course still offers strong integrations with 3rd party backend systems.

So thank you very much to the SIP team for a job well done!

More SIP info available on the main website.

I am planning to publish a movie which shows the nice features this release has to offer. Including topics like AD integration, ease-of-use, creating skins etc. So stay tuned.