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 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…

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.

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!

Sitecore blogs, now all neatly indexed

Mark Van Alst from Evident in The Netherlands have made a very nice site over the Christmas holidays which utilizes Google custom search to index over 30 Sitecore related blogs.

Check it out here: http://www.sitecoreblogsearch.com/

 

Original post by Mark: http://www.markvanaalst.com/2008/12/26/custom-search-for-sitecore-blogs/

Well done!

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!

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...

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.

Oslo makes it 5 weeks in a row

Yesterday I was in Oslo with a colleague to attend a few meetings. This trip is the fifth trip in five weeks I have been on. Thats right, I've been in and out of Copenhagen Airport's departure hall every week for five weeks. Unfortunately the security guys haven't seemed to recognize me so I could skip in line.

One thing I wonder is, why other people in the security line seem to not understand the simple concept of the security check. I mean you're going through a metal detector, so it might be wise to remove coins, wallets, belt etc first. Maybe I am asking to much?
   Enough nagging for now, I usually have time for coffee before departure anyway, despite the slow move through airport security.

 

Oslo is quite a nice city in case you haven't had the chance to visit. Especially downtown is quite nice, but thats a whole other story.

 

After arriving in Oslo, we went to meet existing customer UDI regarding some projects. UDI is responsible for immigration, seeking asylum and similar important topics for foreigners who want to live in Norway. One thing on the agenda was the option to improve the search experience for their visitors, a topic that is not directly related to Sitecore, but very important for the overall experience of any website. So we discussed the options (Sitecore recommends a broad range of search tools) and also talked about future projects.

After meeting the very nice people at UDI, we had a quick lunch before visiting a partner prospect whom we met briefly at this years WPC in Houston.

This partner is a very interesting prospect for us, given their size and reputation in Norway. So we went over the business aspects of being a Sitecore partner, and of course what our solution offers them and their customers.

Gartner and CMS Wire already shared some nice reviews of our latest version, but I of course showed our cool editing and patent pending usability features first, before going into details with the (enhancend) .Net 2.0 based security model, the content based structure, the available free modules (seo, webforms, AD integration etc) and so on. Hopefully we can come to an agreement with this new partner, and have even more customers in Norway benefit from using Sitecore in the future.

Thats it for now, but time will tell where my next trip is heading. But both Israel and Belgium is on the radar...

New Sitecore version revealed

I hereby interrupt the transmission of
on-the-road stories and module presentations with a special news bulletin:
It is now official, Sitecore will release the upcoming version 6.0 June 30th 2008.

This upcoming release is mainly focusing on simplicity and improved usability. Editors especially will have new tools available such as in-line editing, instant validation and simple layout control. Adding to that is a security enhancement based on the latest .Net security model allowing for roles-in-roles inheritance plus improving the already flexible Sitecore security layer. More information available in the officiel press release.

The current feedback from various sources point out some of these very interesting features:

CMS-Wire mentions the usability, the support for 64-bit systems and more.

Jukka-Pekka Keisala lists some of the overall changes from the previous version including the switcth from .Net 2.0 to 3.5.

Chris Wojciech goes into more technical detail listing many of the new options and features in the Sitecore framework and API.

Personally I really like the new version. It's even faster than the previous one and the UI is, in lack of better words, very sexy. But the biggest plus is definately the improved usability (with patents pending might I add) that will enable editors to create fully W3C (including accessibility) compliant content without even thinking about it.

I'm certain my upcoming posts from the road will contion reactions on these specific features, so stay tuned.

End of transmission.

Going into uncharted territory

Working in Sitecore as a Solution Architect means quite some travelling around to our many regional partners and customers. Often I present our solutions to prospects along with the involved partner at their location. Occationally I also get to speak on seminars for groups of selected individuals which can be quite a fun challenge.

Bottomline I am most definately meeting a lot of people in need of content management solutions, looking for advice and inspiration. And on this blog, I will be sharing my experiences with you, along with presentations of some of the many cool features that Sitecore provides.

I come from a background working for a Sitecore technology partner, where I among other cool projects improved the visitor experience on the Vatican's website. I have worked with the Sitecore products for 2+ years and counting.

I already have a growing list of things to share, so stay tuned for posts about my recent trip to Madrid, info about SEO solutions and much much more...