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.

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...

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...