Professional Sitecore Development book now available

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

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

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

Is silence really golden?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sitecore expanding in Poland

My blog has been silent for way to long, but let’s not waste time on excuses. Sitecore International has grown tremendously in 2010 doubling the number of employees and extending our reach and focus areas. Trying to keep up with this pace has of course been time consuming, but certainly also productive.

Very recently we hired Mr. Mariusz Krukowski to be a Regional Manager for Sitecore in Poland and the Czech Republic. Before joining Sitecore, Mariusz previously worked for competing CMS companies and thus is bringing a lot of experience from the WCM/CMS realm to Sitecore.

I previously hinted that I and Sitecore International were already focusing on this specific region, which now manifested itself with Mariusz joining us. Mariusz is already very busy getting partners on board and spreading the word about our Online Marketing Suite and Enterprise CMS solutions. Speaking of this, just last week I assisted Mariusz in Prague talking to some excisting and potential partners. Please join me in welcoming Mariusz to the team, and expect to meet us both if you are within the region, as I will be assisting Mariusz with getting up and running during 2011.

 

On another note, despite the long pause on this blog, I do expect to deliver more frequent updates in the future as a lot of interesting stuff is happening these days. Did you for example see the announcement of Sitecore 6.4 being finally released? The ‘Technical Preview’ release got great feedback from the developer community and certainly raised the bar for user-friendly interfaces.

 

Stay tuned for more updates and happy holidays!

Sitecore International keeps expanding

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

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

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

The following postings are up:

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

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

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

Introducing our Regional Manager for BeLux

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently the world is still turning

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

Proud father signing off…

Online Marketing Suite Creativity

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

So I wondered, what else could the package offer.

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

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

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

So what makes a good targeted advertising control?!?

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

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

That brings me to the desired process in Sitecore:

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

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

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

 

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