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.

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...

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.

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.

Two shows in one week

Week 12 of 2009 (March 16 to March 20) was a bit hectic for my department.

Monday March 16 my colleague Sri Carlyle and I went to Belgium to attend meetings with new partners. These meetings would take place in 2 different cities near Brussels, so as a result we had rented a car in advance online. The car we booked came with a built-in GPS (BMW 1-series). When we arrived in Brussels airport. we quickly learned that you dont always get what you ask for. Instead the woman at the counter told us our VW was ready. Come again?

After a bit of struggle and complaints about this replacement, we went to pick up our car, which we now had to pay an extra 10 Euro for in order to get a GPS. Apparently it pays off to complain, so instead of getting the VW we got upgraded to a BMW 318. By the way, do I have to mention this model comes with a built-in GPS? Regardless, I wonder where my extra 10 Euro went exactly.

Anyways, after some valuable meetings, we headed back to the big city and returned the car before going out to experience Brussels on foot. Although I have been through this city numerous times already, I haven't actually had much time to check it out. But I ensure you, there is lots to see.

 

The next morning we attended the Content Management Forum event in Brussels to network as well as give a keynote. Lars Nielsen, who flew down to do this presentation, did a great job talking about how you can drive increased revenue from your website during the financial crisis based on the latest reports from Forrester, whereas the other CMS  vendors were talking about features and functions. This approach resulted in quite a few enquiries from potential partners and customers, not only for a copy of the slides, but also to get to now more about Sitecore. All in all very positive and productive for us. We also had a chance to introduce some existing customers to each-other which was a very pleasant experience. We really have to get moving and get a local user group initiated. There is lots to gain from that. A short interview with Lars about his presentation is available on youtube by the way.

After the event I arrived home Tuesday night, more or less ready for flying out 18 hours later.

Wednesday went by quickly with me attending class (I have an ongoing study next to my job), and later going to the airport to catch the evening flight to Oslo.

As the headline suggests, the reason for going to Oslo was another event: The WebForum 2009 conference which took place at the Royal SAS Radisson. Not a huge event in number of exhibitors, but nonetheless a very important one to be part of. WebForum 2009 was a 2-day event packed with interesting keynotes and sessions. These sessions started with 2 members from the Obama campaign office sharing their insights from the recent election. As you probably know the Obama campaign had an unprecedented use of social networking, personalized email campaigns and youtube videos. I actually got to ask one of these individuals from the campaign, Mr. Dan McSwain, a question during lunch regarding the tremendous social networking effort he was part of. If you believe in 6-degrees of seperation, I guess I have been pretty close to Obama himself. I better tell my mom.

During and in between the sessions I manned out booth together with my colleagues Morten and Sri. Quite a few other CMS vendors were also present at the conference, none mentioned, none forgotten ;-)

Although the breaks between sessions were very short, we did manage to talk to quite a few people who had an interest in learning more about our product in relations to their upcoming projects. It is quite a challenge to present the full scope of the product in a 2-10 minute demo, but I think we managed to get the message across.

The first day of the event also came with a banquet in the evening. This was basically "a dinner and a show" as the musician/writer Jo Næsby hosted the dinner as well as the award-show called "Farmand prisen".  I guess it is a pity that I am not 100% fluent in Norwegian as it seemed I missed the point of most of his jokes.  After this event, most people went to the penthouse level bar "Summit". With clear skies over Oslo, the view was simply impressive. So was the price of the beer by the way.

On the second day of the event, Sri and I had some meetings with prospect partners to attend, so we left Morten at the booth and jumped a cab. As one of the prospect partners are already involved with one of our customers, the meeting went well and the resulting action plan was indeed positive for all parties.

Other than these meetings, the rest of day 2 went by much like the first, with new interesting leads to bring home.

To summarize the week, airplane food haven't improved (will it ever?) but getting to drive a nice "Beemer" as well as having a great view over Oslo made up for that. And then it is also always very inspiring to meet the competition and others from the industry who are willing to share their insights and visions.

Stockholm syndrome 2.0

I recently completed 2 days of certification training in Stockholm. This was actually my first time instructing a developer course on my own. Remember I got certified as an instructor back in November.

To start of with the hard facts, all the attendees passed the certification exam. Well done guys!

 

The training facilities in Kista (Stockholm's equivalent to Silicon Valley apparently) was quite nice, and the "classroom" offered all the necessary equipment as well as endless resources of coffee. However I quickly learned why they did not charge for the coffee. No one in their right mind would dare to charge anything for the brown foamy soup that came out of the self-service push-down cannisters. But being a caffeine addict, I somehow managed to drink it anyway.

 

The very interesting bit for me in doing the certification surfaced already during the roundrobin personal introduction. 4 out of 5 developers had all previously worked with the local Swedish competing product for a couple of years. So basically I had 4 chances of proving why Sitecore is a world-class product which is way ahead of the competition. I know this sounds harsh and very business oriented, and in reality it is not the purpose of the certification. Basically as an instructor you need to be objective and cover the material the best way possible and simply guide the students. Once they go through the course, they will realize the facts themselves.

To my great satisfaction, the students quickly caught on to the hook and expressed how the structure and the concepts of Sitecore was well crafted, and more flexible than what they were used to.

So you can easily say that Stockholm, or the suburb of Kista (pronounced 'Sheeesta') felt like a very welcoming environment, despite the luring threat of the bad coffee and the cold and wet winter of course. I wouldn't mind going back there some time.

Till then.

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...

In Berlin, the future is called Xtopia

Monday last week (Nov. 17th) i travelled to Berlin to help my colleague Marc Schneider man the Sitecore booth at the Xtopia event. My first trip to Berlin ever in fact, but definately not the last.

In short, the event was mainly all about keynotes and sessiona about future technology, and not really directly linked to the CMS world. However, since the event was targeting the developer community, there was many reasons for us to attend. Of course we used the opportunity to promote the Sitecore Xpress.
I am not fluent in German, since I haven't spoken the language for many years, but I did manage to put together the following advertisement: "Kostenlos für Entwickler" (Free for developers) which we rotated on our screen in between the demos.

We had quite a good turnover during the event, with many interesting partner leads, a few customer leads and lots of valuable networking with developers (some already certified Sitecore developers).

Unfortunately for me, I was unable to attend the keynotes and sessions. But from what I could gather, the technogoly revealed was cutting-edge stuff that will probably not be in top-of-mind of us mere mortals for another year to come. The oldest technology present at the event was apparently the two Microsoft Surface systems (you know, those table sized computerscreens inserted into a small table which support multi-touch commands). Something I think is more of a gimmick than an actual tool. Sure, it would look impressive to edit a sitecore website using the touch screen, but it would still just be a gimmick. And yes, the Surface is in fact a year old or so, but you get the picture.

 

A few closing statements about Berlin, it is certainly worth the trip, and the food and service at restaurant Bond is definately worth recommending. But the Tegel airport is some rookie architects attempt of being funny.
At least it had a Starbucks.

 

As one adventure ending is usually replaced by another one beginning, I am currently in London to become certified as a Sitecore Instructor. More info about this project to follow in a few days...

Lessons learned while travelling

After a full weeks absense from catching planes and eating second-serving food, I'm now back in business. I flew to Oslo today to be ready for a full day of training in Kongsberg, Norway tomorrow morning. So there I was, munching on a club-sandwich at the hotel restaurant, when I realised how much and how little the actual travelling had taught me so far. Not what I learned from the business perspective, but things surrounding the actual travelling itself.

Since I haven't always been in a role where travelling was part of my job, you can safely say that I had to learn the ropes from scratch.
OK, must stuff in travel are pretty self explanatory: remember your passport, be in the airport on time etc etc, but some things come from personal experience.

 

So without further ado, I hereby present a list of things I've learned:

When travelling, do remember cash.
I learned this the hard way once I went to Antwerpen. I was just in time for my meeting if only I could catch a cab from the trainstation. Finding the cabs was easy, but none of them took creditcards. None.
In Copenhagen, and the rest of Denmark for that matter, all cab-drivers accept all major creditcards, so naturally this came as a surprise to me. Anyway, I had to walk about a kilometer to find a working ATM, get cash, get a cab, and thus I ended up being 15 minutes late for my meeting. Lesson learned.

When travelling, do yourself a favor and check hotel services up front.
This lesson is not as important as the one above, but still entitles to be presented here. I know that most often you book your own hotel, which in some ways make this comment unnecessary. But in the cases where you are paid to come and do a presentation, and the involved party has booked your hotel for you, this comes in handy. It is actually very simple, since most hotels have a website. Just be sure to check for things like available internet access (wireless or cabled, free or not).
In case your shirts got crumbled in the suitcase, do rooms come with an iron, do you care? Does the hotel have sauna, pool, spa? If you intend to make use of those facilities, remember to bring your speedos trendy, yet subtle swimwear.

When travelling, make sure you have airport lounge membership.
This particular one, I must admit I haven't taken care of myself. But I can't count the amount of times I have looked at people walking into the nice lounges and thought, dammit I need to get me one of those cards. A good friend of mine already recommended getting a Diner's Club card, since it can get you into a lounge in most airports. Why don't I have one yet..? Utter stupidity, plain and simple. So until I get my act together, I will be enjoying coffee and incredibly expensive internet access next to screaming babies and drunk British people in the "monkey-class" bars which are present in most self-righteous airports.

When travelling, remember entertainment.
Ok, this is almost too stupid to mention, but it deserves being added to the list. Bringing a book, a magazine, a newspaper or similar can save you from a mild attack of momentarily insanity when you go through the seat pocket in front of you in the plane and realize that you've already read the inflight magazine and security instruction chart a dozen times. Another good travel companion is of course a music gadget (iPod or whatever you can afford). This could save you from a potential headache from listening to the screaming infant in the seat behind you. That and a double gin & tonic. Another option is to boot up your laptop and work, but frankly, the elbow space in those seats doesnt really justify anything but watching a movie. It is possible to work, definately, but I try to have that done before I get on the plane. Also, batteries tend to run out of juice, so having some good old fashioned reading material can be a life saver.

 

Allright, so this list was basically the tip of the iceberg of what I could remember while writing this post. So I will take any good advice you can provide (hint, hint).

In the meantime, do remember to check all the great Sitecore blogs and news-stories out there, theres quite a lot going on at the time...

MarketingFirst, business second in Belgium

Friday night of last week I came home after spending 2 days in Belgium. My colleague and I had attended a marketing event called MarketingFirst in Brussels as visitors. We didn't really know what to expect, except that we would meet a some of our partners who were exhibiting.

But since the event had free entrance for pre-registered visitors, we got alot more than we bargained for. With emphasis on A LOT. The event itself was quite small, with about 40 different companies on display. But the event was packed with people all looking to see and learn more about the latest marketing tools and trends. In between this crowd we met some existing customers, some newly signed customers and a few prospects. We of course also spent some time talking to our present partners. The Reference had a very nice stand where you could get a free massage, and LBi was handing out nice stuff and serving drinks.

Another important contact who had a booth was CMS-Channel. We managed to "kidnap" Christian Daems for a short meeting although he was quite busy. Sitecore International is going to be a Global Sponsor at the upcoming CM Innovation event (arranged by CMS Channel) in Brussels on December 4th.
Stay tuned for a lot more information about this...

So anyways, this was a recap of last Thursday which took us to the event in Brussels, and later by train to the city of Gent, which is a very nice city by the way. So all in all, we had a great day with lots of networking, for free!

 

Friday we then had a meeting with The Reference about previous and upcoming activities. We already have a lot going on in Belgium, but the future will bring even more, that is for sure. 
Besides that business aspect, it is always nice to talk to the developers at the partner, and hear them confess that for whatever project they are going to do, they always vote for Sitecore. They even had a few newly hired developers who passed the version 6 certification without prior knowledge about Sitecore, who already praised our API.

 

I'm travelling alot these days, but hopefully my upcoming posts will be more frequent than they have been lately.

Fine tuning in Basel

Tomorrow I'm doing a demo for a company located in Basel, Switzerland. This demo has been scheduled since the beginning of August, so you know the audience is expecting a killer demo. So apart from my trustworthy slide-deck that uncovers Sitecore and the API, I felt I had to finetune my stuff a bit.

A blog post from a colleague gave me a good idea of what to improve on my Nicam demo-site. Thanks to Alex Shyba for pointing out that little detail about enabling the Rich-Text Editor to filter MS Word  content by your own definition during copy/paste. This is not a new thing in Sitecore version 6, but the way it works OOTB have changed a bit. Nevertheless you can in a very simple manner tune the editor to do what you expect, whenever you are copying content from MS Word.

Another thing I want to present is the SEO module. This one was ported to version 6 a long time ago, but still I hadnt implemented it on the Nicam site. Shame on me. Quick trip to SDN to download the module, and about 3 minutes of installing. Easy.

One last thing I corrected while i was at it, was to display the bold, italic and underline buttons in the Rich-Text Editor. It seems we went a few steps to far when doing the version 6 release (internally known as "the simplicity" release). I personally know that I can just use the wellknown keyboard shortcuts in the editor, but not all editors know this. And frankly how bad can it be to display a few extra buttons?!?

The steps taken to "re-insert" these 3 buttons in the editor are very simple. Open up the core database, navigate to System -> Settings -> HTML Editor Profiles -> Rich Text Default -> Toolbar 1. Right-click and insert an HTML Editor button item. To insert a "BOLD" button simply name your new item 'Bold' and also write ' bold' in the 'click' field (yes, it is that simple. The editor backend code is already done, Sitecore is just not exposing the actual button until you force it to).

 

 

So now my Nicam site, running on version 6, is exposing a bit more functionality and easy of use. Perfection can always be improved...

Focusing on Belgium

As I wrote in my last post, I have spent 3 days doing a  roadshow in Belgium last week. The topic of the trip was basically letting our partners know who their new points of contact would be from now on.

Since Sitecore has expanded and grown quite substantially lately, we needed to re-arrange our responsibilities.
Marc Schneider was the previous Channel Sales Manager for Germany and all of Benelux, but since we are opening an office in Holland in two weeks, Marc is now focusing on the German speaking countries exclusively. In fact, I am already booked for an onsite demo in Basel together with Marc on September 9th, but that is a different story.

So with Marc focusing on Germany, Switzerland and Austria - and Holland opening an office of their own, my colleague Sri Carlyle and myself are now focusing mainly on Belgium.

Personally I think that it is an exciting challenge. And since Marc has already done a tremendous job in Belgium and signed partners and customers, Our main task  is to pick up from that goundwork and continue the trend.

Some headlines from our trip included meeting up with a good portion of our excisting partners in Brussels and Gent. This time around we met up with
LBi Group, The Reference and One Agency. Lbi is based out of Brussels mainly, while we met up with The Reference and One Agency in Gent. I have to say the centre of Gent is a very nice place with beautiful old houses. One was actually for sale, but i doubt my salary will cover a penthouse in central Gent. We also had a meeting with a prospect on our way between meeting our partners. Of course I can't announce who this was, but I do envy their location with a private lake and beach for the employees.

Next time we go to Belgium we will hopefully be meeting with our other excisting partners De Schutter Neroc and Delaware.

We also met the local CMS expert Christian Daems (CMS Channel) for lunch one day. Christian is a very nice guy that I look forward to meet again on his December event in Brussels. We will actually sponsor that event, but more info about all that once we get closer to December.

 

One last thing to say. Yes, the chocolate is good. Very very good.

Post WPC 2008 and what lies ahead

This summer featured this years biggest Microsoft partner event as I have previously mentioned. Sitecore had a nice big stand, which I have to say looked really great and given our red color, was easy to spot from far away in the huge convention centre.

In short, we had a really good week in Houston. Many new partners were eager to sign with us, some even after just seeing a 2-minute demo.

 

Obviously WPC 2008 ended about a month ago, but since then I have been away on 2 weeks of holiday, and as a result, simply been so busy following up on WPC related stuff, that I had to down-prioritize writing here. A few issues however, justifies this late post.

 

First of all, I have to mention the new demo site (running on version 6.0 of course) that premiered on WPC 2008. The site in itself is actually quite cool (the best demo concept so far in Sitecore IMO) and most spectators find it easy to relate to.

The "Nicam" demo-site, as it is called, does a great job at showing off features which prove the many advantages in having a content-based CMS (as compared to page-based ditto).
More importantly people tend to like our open API very much, since this will help them save precious time as they can reuse existing controls or easily integrate with 3rd party systems.

 

Secondly, I'd like to make another thing clear. Whenever Sitecore International signs a new partner they (the partner) will at some point require a visit from a Sitecore representative. In other words, I might be going to visit new partners in such places as South Africa, Hong Kong, Cairo, France, Belgium, Israel and Mexico in the coming year, just to name a few of the leads we got from WPC 2008.

I can't wait to blog about experiences from such exotic locations, but until then, I plan on going into much more detail about our latest and greatest release and the new features.

 

So what else happened during WPC week? Well, I was right about the no-sleep-on-the-agenda thing. Everyday, after spending many hours at the booth, featured various networking events/dinners/parties which I attended a couple of.
I have to say the UK party was the most amusing, but then again, who ever doubted the Brits can go a bit nuts when their away from home?

I also have to mention my hotel. In particular my room. The dreadful American architecture somehow made it possible for my room to be placed exactly behind the only 2 elevators in the entire building. There was literally only a paper-thin wall between my bed, and the elevator shafts. Nice huh? 
Ironically my jetlag ensured that I actually managed to sleep anyway.

 

Next weeks schedule features a 3-day roadshow in Belgium, and the week after that has Helsingfors and Stockholm on the agenda. Till then please check out the many blogposts about Sitecore and the new .Net 3.5 Service Pack.

Countdown to Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference

Next Monday (July 7th) the 2008 WPC event kicks off in Houston, Texas.
This is not my first trip to the US, but will be my first time participating in this giant Microsoft event.

I have been to a couple of IT tradeshows/conferences already this year. However, I don't really know what to expect from WPC at this point, apart from meeting a lot of fellow IT professionals, and that sleep is not really on the agenda.

I am very much looking forward to participate, as this is probably one of the most important Microsoft events of the year.

Sitecore is a Gold Sponsor for WPC, so beside being on display at the various WPC marketing material, we also have a huge booth at the conference. To back that up, we will be present with around 30 people from our various offices.

 

Checklist of stuff to bring for my trip to the US:

• Valid passport. Check
• Laptop with no private or confidential information. Check
• A copy of the new Sitecore v6 demo site. Check
• Deck of business cards. Check
• Book to read during 2 x 9-hour flight. Check
• Statement noting that I do not intent to joke about Texas state laws. TBA

 

See you there..?

Round trip to Madrid

Very recently I went to Madrid to participate in a meeting together with Claes Larsson from Guide Market Solutions and a customer prospect (which I for obvious reasons will not name in this post).

Initially the meeting was planned so I could fly in, have the meeting, and return home the same night. But since the only available flights out of Madrid required transfers through what seemed like a random selection of all of the worlds airports, I choose to book a hotel instead and fly back (direct) the next morning.

Soon this solution would prove very convinient and interesting, but before I get ahead of myself I have to start from the beginning.

The trip
On Wednesday morning May 14 I get ready and call for a cab.
Note to self: When cab drivers in your own city try to hustle you on your way to the airport, it may be a bad sign for the rest of the trip...
After taking what seems like the worlds longest shortcut, I finally arrive at the terminal, now focusing on the next important things: check-in and coffee.

My plane arrives in Barajas airport in Madrid fashionably late.
Nothing to declare. I make it to the exit and find myself a cab (this time expecting to be hustled) and arrive at the office in good time for the meeting, even with the detours.

The meeting
Attendees at the meeting includes the resident webmaster, a consultant (project manager), Claes Larsson and myself. The deal in question consists of a handful servers, extranet functionality and a shop.
I start out presenting the editing functionalities, versioning control, device control and language handling before talking about the backend stuff.
They have a userbase with close to one million customers, so scalability and perfomance is key. However, before I get so far, the webmaster interrupts asking about SEO and what we do to support this important marketing issue. A very valid question, and luckily we already have a state-of-the-art module which handles this in a userfriendly and logic way. (More about this specific tool will be available in my next post). Naturally I present the tool right away. The webmaster seem very pleased.

After more chit chat about how to solve specific issues like handling lists, we get into talking about how we deal with that many user accounts and personalization. The answer is quite simple, their existing user database will be integrated and connected into their desired extranet setup, re-using the existing user profiles. We have done this sort of thing many times before, just take a look at bwin.com (an online bookmaking company) with their 13 million user-accounts - all built on Sitecore.

The meeting was scheduled to last 2 hours, but we ended up spending 3 hours talking about the solution and various scenarios, only interrupted by the decision maker taking a short break to postpone some other meetings he had that day. Bottomline, it was a very promising and a most interesting meeting.

Madrid by night
After the meeting Claes and I agree to meet later in the city. I get to my hotel by cab with a driver who both looks a bit like Ronaldo and talks about 'futebol' when we pass some football training facility. I almost throw the Michael Laudrup card but decide not to, since I don't speaks Spanish anyway.
Hotel. Check in. Internet access is 5 Euro for 1 hour. Dang.

I make a few calls, check my mail and get a quick shower. New cab ride back into town, no funny business except for the driver being unable to successfully use his creditcard machinery. He gladly accepts cash however. Sigh.

We have dinner at a nice cosy tapas place with excellent food, but the highlight of the evening has got to be the city-wide party going on. May 15 is the day where Madrid celebrates their patron saint San Isidro Labrador with a holiday. Naturally you use this chance to party the night before, which was indeed the case here. The streets were literally filled with people including a batch of Claes' friends. And the bars served cheap beer and drinks in 1-litre cups. Wow.

Returning to Copenhagen
With 4 hours of sleep and no breakfast at the hotel, I make it to the airport in good time before departrure. 3 hour flight, laptop, batch of dvds. Oh sweet battery life.

Thanks alot to Claes and his friends, and of course to the customer prospect which I hope to hear more from very soon. See you next time Madrid.