Happy New Year from Copenhagen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

CM Innovation 2008, what a show!

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

Educating in London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

Innovation is coming in just 3 weeks...

CM Innovation that is. It shouldn't really come as a surprise to me, since we are a Global Sponsor of the event, but it did anyway just now, so I thought I might as well write a short post to remind myself.

3 weeks, thats pretty close. I guess I have been to busy traveling to realize it. But rest assure, Sitecore is coming well prepared. We have our keynote speaker lined up, the booth material is either done or in the works, and we have a great spot at the show!

If you are in the area of Brussels Airport around Thursday December 4th, be sure to come by and meet us. The event should be free for visitors, so there really is no excuse.

More info available here: www.cminnovation.eu

Some of our competitors will obviously also be present, but curiously enough, only one other looks to be a Global Sponsor as well.

Looking very much forward to the exhibition, and also to the annual CMS Awards show, which will take place during the evening on the 4th.

See you then.

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.