Sitecore enters Global partnership with Avanade

On November 1st, the news about the Sitecore / Avanade partnership was finally official. I have been eagerly waiting to share the story since early summer, but in respect of our corporate marketing team, I have kept quiet until now.

Teaming up with a player like Avanade is an important step for us in Sitecore, as Avanade’s organization of 16.000+ employees, as well as their focus on Microsoft based technologies and digital solutions, will help Sitecore reach even further - and to even larger clients. This is also a stamp of approval, that everything Sitecore has worked hard to achieve (see the recent Gartner MQ report), now materializes and is backed up by such an important group.

As this partnership has been in effect for months and counting, with a few public statements along the way, the foundation is already quite solid. Without disclosing exact numbers, Avanade is by far the partner with most Sitecore certified developers on board (to list one key parameter). Avanade has definitely set the bar for other Sitecore Partners to follow.

 

My role in this is fairly simple, as I was early on appointed to help facilitate and connect Avanade peers to the proper Sitecore contacts to get things moving fast. This was mainly for assisting with their numerous training requests as well as presales related needs. As they are a big organization, it at times felt almost like “whack a mole” with new people in need of information popping up constantly. I have also had the pleasure of meeting some of the involved Avanade managers during this partnership start-up (check my LinkedIn if you are curious) throughout 2012, and must say I am impressed with their involvement and dedication.

I can only speak on behalf of Sitecore International and the combined efforts with Avanade throughout Europe, which so far has manifested in several co-sponsored events followed by interesting discussions with leading brands. But this appears as the beginning of something big, especially given the already closed deals deriving from this partnership, as well as the building pipeline. For the rest of Sitecore, it appears they have similar ongoing success – one example being Sonnenkraft and their Sitecore solution running on Azure.

 

Now we just have to keep up with Avanade’s ambitious plans, as well as their need for sales and presales support across the globe. Looking forward to support this ongoing, and now official, challenge…

Professional Sitecore Development book now available

Fresh of the press is this developer handbook written by Sitecore rockstar John West. The book is published by Wrox as announced here. News about the book have been circulating recently, but now you have the chance to get a copy for yourself and get the insight on how Sitecore employees address development on our CMS platform.

While I haven’t had time to read it yet myself, I am sure I could learn a thing a two. First however, I got to recover from a sudden stroke of nostalgia, as I remember my first purchase from Wrox being a book about “Active Server Pages” back in the nineties. Things certainly have changed since then…

Go check out the book on Wiley’s shop: Professional Sitecore Development

Is silence really golden?

My last post was in December 2010, about 18 months ago. I will be the first to admit the silence from my part is a bit embarrassing, as there has been plenty of things to announce during this time.

• I could for example have outlined the fantastic reviews by Gartner in their MQ reports released in 2010 as well as 2011 (just as I did in 2009).
  
• I could also have announced the various new Regional Directors joining in our many new locations within Sitecore International’s reach (as I did in 2010 and 2009).
  
• Or re-posted information about our Sitecore product releases (version 6.5 with DMS, Adaptive Print Studio and similar) as well as information about our constantly growing partner network and client base.

Obviously I haven’t done so, and I can only blame my busy schedule. The fact is that since I started this blog, my unit (Sitecore International) has doubled in number of staff more than 6 times over. A growth which has been very rapid during the past 18 months.  These are definitely interesting times for all involved…

But back to the headline question; has my blog silence been golden? Yes, It sure has in terms of won business and having had the opportunity to spread our vision and demonstrate the capabilities of our unique product suite offering to customers and partners alike, around the globe. My only regret is, that I was not able to share all those good stories here.

Let me make that up to you in the coming posts…

Some exciting news will appear officially very soon, underlining our strong global position. Something I am proud to be part of. Stay tuned.

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!

Sitecore International keeps expanding

In the “good old days” back in 2008, Sitecore International had a head-count of 4-5 employees. Today the current number is 11 including our latest addition of key employees who left RedDot (now OpenText) in favor of Sitecore.

The growth of our unit is the result of hard work, a great and well recognized product, as well as the obvious strategy to expand our operations further.

Should you wish to join the great team of Sitecore International, now is the chance, as we just added some new listings on our job page on the Sitecore CMS website.

The following postings are up:

• Marketing Manager for DACH region
• Regional Sales Manager for Switzerland
• Solution Architect Belgium
• Regional Sales Manager Finland
• Regional Sales Manager Norway
• Regional Sales Manager Singapore
• Regional Sales Manager Hong Kong

As goes for myself, I know this blog has been left alone for a while. The reason is simple: we are extremely busy these days. On the very positive side, the quite optimistic budget for the current fiscal year (which ends June 30th) was met already in the previous quarter by the team (yes, we are that good). And I have also been spending time assisting a lot of my new colleagues who started working for Sitecore International within the past 6 months.

Apart from that, I am allocating whatever is left of my resources to establish a good foundation for Sitecore International in Poland and the Czech Republic. You can expect to hear more about this particular endeavour in coming blog posts…

Introducing our Regional Manager for BeLux

As a natural development, the amount of business generated out of Belgium and Luxembourg the past year called for local representation. I am of course proud that the work I have been part of doing, together with our great and productive partners in the region, have made this possible.

So to keep our momentem in the region, Sitecore International very recently hired mr. Eddy Lalou as Regional Manager for BeLux to further strengthen our position and partnerships. Mr. Lalou, a man with many talents and much experience from the world of IT and management, started officially February 15th 2010.

Although this was already ‘leaked’ to our partners some while ago, I have just spent 2 days on the road in Belgium together with Eddy last week. The objective was to visit as many partners as possible to introduce Eddy properly.

We had a nice little roadtrip around the area of Gent, Antwerp, Leuven and Brussels during the 2 days, as the partners received Eddy extremely well.
Of course this addition to the growing numbers of Sitecore employees will also make things a lot easier and better for our local partners, so it is definately a win-win. We also took the opportunity to share our latest roadmap, which definately was greatly appreciated. Some of those inputs are still ‘eyes only' – but keep a close eye on the coming press releases to learn what is coming from one of the leading ASP.NET content management system providers…

Apart from the meet-and-greet, we had the chance to discuss other key things, such as the plan for the near future with all the stuff we need to do, as well as Eddy’s great vision for the region.

At this point I would like to make it clear, that I will of course still be focusing on Belgium and Luxembourg for the coming months. This is to ensure that Eddy gets the best start possible, and that the transition will be a smooth as can be.

Apparently the world is still turning

Monday, January 18th was my first day back at work after being on paternity leave for 14 days. As promised in the previous post “expecting a delivery”, I can now proudly provide some pictures of my little miracle (she does not have a name yet). Pictures are listed at the bottom of the post.

 

Back at work
In short Monday 18th was obviously very different from my new life with my firstborn child. Not only was i back at work – my first working day consisted of me travelling to Paris for a meeting with a potential client. Quite a tough start one might say, as the past couple of weeks have meant being with my family 24/7 (and almost being awake 24/7)…

But then again what could possibly be more tough than getting up at 4 a.m. for the third consecutive nightly “baby-situation” (diaper change, pacifier gone missing, hunger, etc.) anyway?

As usual I cannot disclose any specific details of the project (and who brought me to Paris), but as the trend has been lately, the agenda included how Sitecore and MOSS compliment each other. Of course MOSS is not new on the ECM scene and the 2010 version is up for release soon. But I guess the type of clients we are facing more and more often, simply makes this a typical situation. In some cases they have MOSS already, or are looking to invest in it because they need some sort of ECM solution. Naturally they scout the market to check the available opportunities and thanks to our strong product, and the great reviews by the analysts, even large corporations now realize that Sitecore offers something which need to be investigated.

As if often turns out, people mistake the relationship between the offerings of the 2 products, and regard us and MOSS as competing products. Although this could be argued as true if you really want to be picky, the fact is, that the 2 products are not offering the same – and each have their strong points. This has been debated many times already (great blogpost by Julius Ganns, Netzkern), but the ultra short version is, that MOSS is strong on collaboration and weak on WCM, where Sitecore offers the opposite.

So the bottomline is, that combining these 2 different products can result in a very strong platform which offer great document management and collaboration as well as good support for multiple languages and great content management across even large organizations. Cases which prove this type of setup already exist – one being the dollar.com car rental website. For more information about combining Sitecore and MOSS, please see the whitepaper available on sitecore.net.

 

 

Here are a few shots of my firstborn only a few hours old. The date of birth was 01.01.2010 – but as I like to say, reset your calendar to year zero, as the birth of my little princess will surely mark a change in history...

 

Proud father signing off…

Online Marketing Suite Creativity

Lately I started thinking if the “Online Marketing Suite” (OMS) offered by Sitecore was really offering enough. According to analysts we’re doing pretty good in this area already, but there’s always room for improvement ;-)

So I wondered, what else could the package offer.

What first came to mind, is actually very simple and will require a mix of the already existing features. Basically OMS could deliver a banner control system for targeted advertising. Obviously this would only be interesting for portals which are running ads on their site, or offers sponsorship in the shape of advertisement.

I realize that 3rd party systems which delivers such functionality already exist, but this option, like everything else in OMS would excel in the fact that we can base it very accurately on the visitors and the type of content they are interested in.

Facebook is doing this to an almost criminal point, by offering advertisers to display their messages to a selected crowd based on interest, demographics and so on.

So what makes a good targeted advertising control?!?

• Ability to segment visitors based on demographics/GeoIP: Check.
• Ability to explicitely personalize content for identified users: Check.
• Ability to deliver campaign and conversion data: Check
• Ability to deliver multivariate ads for the same ad campaign: Check.

What else do we need, well that depends on how detailed we want to be. To deliver a great service to whoever wants to sponsor a site, we need to sell them accurate valuable exposures, eg 1000 exposures to potential clients for $100. So we need to control how many times an ad is displayed. Not too difficult, but lets make it interesting. Perhaps the sponsor would like to try 3 exposures per visitor before giving up on getting a conversion from that individual, and instead display the ad to others. It is all about targeting your message to an interested audience. Once you do that, the number of conversions per thousand exposures will go up. Obviously sponsors would most likely want to receive some kind of reporting as well, but I will skip that part for now.

That brings me to the desired process in Sitecore:

• Sponsor requests to advertise their services. E.g. 5.000 exposures to a target audience of “Engineers/technically savvy visitors in German speaking countries”.
• Creation of a new ‘Targeted Advertising’ item and any number of ‘spots’ (in case the sponsor desires to try a multivariate approach), in the shape of image(s), or small flashfile(s).
• Definition of segmentation and other personalization properties.
• Ad goes live.
• Reports of clickthru’s (and multivariate successrate, if applicable) is delivered to the sponsor.

Obviously this conceptual idea needs some polishing, as well as minor coding (in order to limit the number of exposures etc), before it could become a module. As mentioned in the beginning, this sort of functionality is mostly interesting for portals who already have sponsored advertising such as beliefnet.com or kino.dk.

If you have other ideas for extending what is already in the OMS package, I would be glad to hear about them.

 

As this is probably my last post in 2009, I wish you a Happy new year!

Expecting a delivery

So we entered the final Month of the year, and it is time for a lot of things. Some companies have closing budgets, some people are getting ready for holidays, and me, well I am getting ready for something completely fantastic.

On December 3rd it was 4 years ago since I met my girlfriend, and this wonderful relationship is manifesting itself around December 27 where we are expecting our first child. Now that is a delivery which will certainly change my life.

Obviously this doens’t really have anything to do with Sitecore, but any parent will recognize how grand it is, and hopefully nod smilingly when I show up at the office looking like I haven’t slept for days (which might also become true). I guess it is safe to say I will soon be working 2 jobs: fulltime parent being one, and Sitecore being the other.

For the moment I have grounded myself regarding travelling, as nobody can really predict when the baby will come out. Naturally this is something I definately do not want to miss.

I expect to pick up my travel activities again in the beginning of 2010 and deliver more “on the road” posts by then…

Evidently, a blog

Last week Mark van Aalst released his much anticipated blog module “EviBlog” for Sitecore in a stable version. Mark has been working on the module for a while, and his work has definately payed off with a VERY impressive module.

The module is of course based on the latest Sitecore version (6.2) with support for Inline Editing as well as RSS, tag clouds, categories and so on. But that is not all, Mark have also added support for Microsoft Live Writer for those who enjoy writing content offline in a nice setting.

As the module was greatly expected, our Shared Source Coordinator Jimmie Overby has released 2 videos showcasing the module in action. These videos are available through Mark’s original blogpost.

The blog module is available for download on the Sitecore Shared Source Portal.

Great work Mark, keep it up!

What you say, and what they hear

Whenever I am writing emails or talking to people, I try my best to make sure that what I write or say is easy to understand. A message that is misinterpreted will most often cost you extra time and effort to solve gracefully. Practising this mindset continuously will of course improve your own communication skills over time, but it will most definately also make you realize whenever someone else fails to deliver a precise message – one that can not be misunderstood.

In general 2 things exist in communication “what you say” (and your own understanding and context of that), and “what the recipient hear” – which can be something completely different. Gary Larson, one of my favorite sketch/comic artists, already immortalized this basic rule of life [image link] (copyright restrictions might apply for the image). This also covers the problem that even despite your best efforts to deliver a clear message, maybe the recipient will still misinterpret the content.

 

Today i saw a real life example of something which probably made sense to the communicator, but which is easily misunderstood by the recipient. Basically this is a big example of what can go wrong in communication. I don’t think i need to explain further…

 

 

Normally things do not go as awry as in the advertisement above, but it serves as a reminder to carefully consider what you say or write before you execute.

 

So why am I reminding you all about this? Well basically because in online marketing, you have many options to deliver messages (also ‘bad’ messages), one is to do A/B testing (aka ‘split testing’ or ‘multivariate testing’) where several versions of a message can be defined and displayed to different visitors in order to track which option returns most conversions.

This is one of the basic features in Sitecore’s Online Marketing Suite (OMS) by the way. Imagine that you are releasing a new product and you put a big message on your front page. Normally this will get attention directly, but if you re-phrased it a bit, maybe it would get even more hits. To test this, simply create a few versions and deliver them randomly to all visitors. Over time, one option will prove better than the others, and then you should obviously select this as the only option (and stop the A/B test). This concept is covered in a 2-3 minute video that was recently released on the Sitecore website. The video titled “Increasing your website conversions” is available on this page: http://www.sitecore.net/Products/Resources/Tours.aspx

We are also currently inviting people to attend a webinar about OMS, which will also cover how Sitecore deals with A/B testing. To read more and sign up, please see: http://www.sitecore.net/en/News/Webinars/2009/OMS-Webinar-December-09-Europe.aspx.

Post DMF 2009

One week ago I attended the DMF aka Digital Marketing First expo in the centre of Brussels. The reason for attending this show as an exhibitor, was based on our experience there in 2008 as visitors. Back then my colleague and I were quite baffled at the extremly nice exhibitions. Clearly many top agencies in Belgium regarded this event as "the place to be".

So with that in mind we deciced we simply had to be part of DMF this time around. And I am sure glad we did. Apart from networking with our existing partners (Uniway, The Reference & LBi), we got a few nice partner leads to take home. We also met with existing customers who are really great advocats of Sitecore. Stephen Delvoye from Bekaert is particularly satisfied, and certainly does not mind telling people how great he think Sitecore is. Marvelous!

As mentioned in the previous post, we had Mark van der Wal from Pectora co-host our booth. This was a great combo for us, as Pectora have already delivered some nice Sitecore cases, and since the theme of the event was mainly marketing oriented. Pectora delivers a Sitecore/InDesign integration which can help companies control content and assets across print- and online material. Mark being the nice guy he is, added great value to the show.

On the downside I have to admit that our booth came a bit short of some of the others. The guys from Emakina built a whole giant black box (almost a house actually) where they invited people in for a talk. LBi had a huge bar very nicely set up as well, while a lot of other creative companies clearly had been spending big bucks on the event.

Of course the important part of going to an event such as DMF is both to be seen, but also to make new business. On the latter part, I will be busy for quite a while.

One thing is for sure, see you at DMF next year!

Sitecore attending DMF 2009.

On October 22nd Sitecore will be present at the annual Digital Marketing First (DMF) event in Brussels "Tour & Taxis" expo. As this event is more focused on Online Marketing and not 'just' CMS, Sitecore has teamed up with our partner Pectora for the show.

Pectora is the inventor of a very nice Adobe InDesign integration to Sitecore, which allows content owners to build catalogues with ease in InDesign while at the same time having full control of all their products and their properties.

One good example of the Pectora/Sitecore solution is BoConcept, a furtniture retailer with 1000's of products, who use the solution to easily tailor PDF catalogues for print on their different markets, they also use the solution to save time on creating price signs for their 200 stores. Too learn more about this case, and the other Sitecore/Pectora projects, please feel free to stop by our booth (D17).

 

 

From Sitecore Lila Carlyle and myself will be present, ready to showcase our Online Marketing Suite (OMS). A web-marketing tool which have already been praised by analysts such as Gartner. In short the OMS can bring your website and other marketing initiatives much closer together.

Attending DMF is free for visitors, please go here to pre-register.

See you on the 22nd of October!

Microsoft Germany Partner Conference coming up

During next week I will participate in the partner conference for Microsoft Germany in Dresden. Together with me on the set will be Søren Bak Jepsen, the Director of Sitecore International as well as of course our Regional Director DACH  Marc Schneider.

The show is a 2 day event (September 8+9) for Microsoft and their partners to network as well as experience the many keynote sessions and learn about the latest market trends. More information here and here.

Come visit us at booth #22 to learn more about Sitecore and our recent product release of the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite.

Bis dann...

Pleased to say I told you so.

The long awaited Gartner Magic Quadrant report has now been released by Gartner. As Sitecore holds reprint rights, this new report is available through this Sitecore link (requires registration).

As mentioned in my previous post I envisioned that this report "would blow your mind". This gut-feeling of mine is actually backed up better than I expected in the report. We are placed furthest out on the "completeness of vision" axis, among the top visionaries, as well placed centrally on the "ability to execute" axis.

This places us ahead of all the pure .Net based players, and can be seen as the result of our global business strategy, as well as Sitecore focusing solely on product development while our partners focus on building first-class customer implementations.

Needless to say, we at Sitecore are of course very pleased with this report. This kind of market approval from one of the leading analysts is bound to make a difference in the competitive CMS market.

Sitecore International at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2009

Next week WPC is taking place in New Orleans. Although I myself am not going to be participating this year, my 2 colleagues Morten Ljungberg and Søren Bak Jepsen will be present.

Please be gentle with them as it is their first WPC experience. I remember from my trip last year that it is a lot of hard work, followed up by lots of networking and very little sleep. I also remember the Microsoft UK party - but that is a different story.

As one could expect, this years conference will be all about Sitecore's new release: Online Marketing Suite. If you have even the slightest interest in seeing this ground-breaking integrated marketing tool in action, do not hesitate to visit our booth. Sitecore is a Gold Sponsor, so it should not be hard to locate us.

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.

Next stop WebScene 2009 in Brussels

In a few hours I will be travelling to Brussels to setup shop for the WebScene Expo 2009 event which starts tomorrow.

Hosted by Christian Daems and CMS-Channel, this June 9 event features many CMS vendors and partners and is definately the place to be for any serious player in the Benelux (and beyond) market.

 

From Sitecore 3 people are attending the show, my colleagues Torben Brams, Lila Carlyle and myself. By the way, we are of course sponsoring the event as you can also see on the website: www.websceneexpo.com.

We of course hope to meet a lot of people who are interested in knowing more about Sitecore and our upcoming release: Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS). So if you are in the neighbourhood, please stop by our booth to learn more.

More information about the OMS is available on the Sitecore website and through the press release.

Welcome to the revolution

Today Sitecore announced the upcoming release of Sitecore. This new addition of groundbreaking marketing features is aimed at providing accurate analytics and real-time personalization on websites.

In short this release will address the growing problem of using 3rd party tools for website analytics. If your website visitors use a modern browser, which by default blocks all interaction with 3rd-party sites (for privacy reasons), then these visitors will be completely invisible to you. If you haven't even considered if your current analytics tool is subject to such browser filters, you better check that very soon. Potential conversions on your website may very well be lost in the void already.

So what is this "revolution" about? Well, Sitecore has adressed the issue subject to 3rd-party analytics tools by integrating site-analytics completely  into the CMS. Every action on the website is logged and can help you identify new leads and also divide visitors into groups based on their behavior (for real-time personalization).

Consider this post as an "early warning" of much more information to flow about the Sitecore OMS (Online Marketing Suite). Quite a lot of my fellow bloggers already leaked the link to the published information on the sitecore website where more information is available. Press release about the Sitecore OMS also available.

Enjoying the show

Last week I was in Brussels attending an Emakina event. Emakina Group actually owns The Reference which is one of our big partners in Belgium.

The event was titled "CMS for International accounts" and evolved around the process of choosing a Content Management System (which is not a trivial task as you need to identify the right tool for the right job).  They had found a really cool location to host the event, a place nowadays called Flagey Centre. This used to be the studios of the Belgian National Radio Broadcast I was told. All the studios were still intact but now turned into conference and event facilities.

Sitecore sponsored the event, and I was glad to see how many interested people showed up to learn about CMS.

To make sure the whole event wasnt biased by us or other vendors, different cases were presented. Each running on a different platform ranging from open source system Drupal to SharePoint, Tridion, Emagic and of course Sitecore. The Sitecore case presented was Betafence, a very tight B2B and B2C website with a large product catalogue, all easy to filter through using the nice features on the site. Philip Achten from our partner The Reference ran the presentation and did an enthusiastic and very impressive job.

So what was I doing in all of this you might ask, and to be honest I was sitting in the back of the theatre enjoying the show. Philip presented the case much better, and much more believable than I ever could. This however wasn't the scoop of the day for me personally. That came during "one of the other presentations" where some of the participants asked some really cool questions about the competitor CMS. Questions which, to the presenters regret, revealed some important weaknesses of their systems. Basically my job was done, and I never even left my seat!

A few short breaks, as well as the lunch after the presentations, left me some time to mingle with the Emakina crowd, talk to excisting Sitecore customers in person as well as meet some prospects. Finally I also caught up to speed with the projects that The Reference have in the pipeline. You got to hand it to these guys, they are very professional, and one of the reasons for the success we have on the Belgian market.

After the event, I went with Steven Volders from Emakina to their premises. Although time was sparse we managed to have a short meeting about Sitecore and our partner program. Looks like The Reference's bigbrother want's a piece of the action as well, and they are most welcome.