And he was told but these few words,
Which opened up his heart,
“If ye cannot bring good news, then don’t bring any.”
- THE WICKED MESSENGER

So The Daily is live. Just finished watching the launch announcement and was impressed. I was lucky enough to see some sneaky preview concept versions a few months ago, and they’ve really turned it into reality in a ridiculously short amount of time.

Yeah, yeah, it did crash once in the launch demo. But all iPad apps crash, right?  I’m sure they’ll iron out the last few kinks over the coming days. If you’re in the US (or are wise in the ways of reverse proxies *), get it from the App Store now. If you’re anywhere else, or don’t know what a reserve proxy is, have a look at the web site, blog or FaceBook page.

I take my hat off to the techie brains behind the operation, John McKinley (@ourparents) who, it turns out, is not only wise but also delivers on time. And of course we all love Jon Miller and his basketball analogies . Random aside: It was a year today that Jon Miller interviewed yours truly for his current job. He really is a lovely guy. **

The app is really feature rich. It can live update during the day, has 360 degree video, live audio articles, a large sports score database, games and good social integration. And it even has the weather!

I’m not smart enough to know if The Daily is going to be a roaring success or an unholy disaster. But I love the fact that Rupert tries bold things like this. That’s one of the many reasons I’ve loved the last year I’ve spent on The Darkside at News Corp. Someone in this industry has to try something.

* No reserve proxies were harmed in the making of this blog post.
** This blog reflects my opinions only and not those of my employer.

You said you were going’ to Frisco, stay a couple of months.
I always liked San Francisco, I was there for a party once.
- MAYBE SOMEDAY

Good news. CMS Geeks are getting tanked up all over the world, and it’s spreading. We all drink and blabber on the last Thursday on every month, unless a conference or something means we should move the date for an uber-event. Here is a quick summary of where we are.

London (MeetUp, LinkedIn) - The original, a.k.a. #LastThursdayCMS. Thanks to Kenton and the other guys at Squiz for starting it. Been going a few years now, and had many celebrity visits. We will have lots of nice photos once our most recent celebrity visitor, @theresaregli, figures out how to download from her camera.

New York (LinkedIn) –  Follow this one on #CMSGeekUpNYC. There have been a few meetings, with another big one coming soon. Irina (@irina_guseva) has taken the baton here.

San Francisco (MeetUp, LinkedIn) - The first one is TONIGHT (20 May 2010), moved to coincide with Gilbane SF. The Mad Monks (@pmonks) is your guy for this one, and it’s on #CMSGeekUpSF. Hoping for some photos soon.

Amsterdam - The first event is tonight, and they’re using #CMSGeekUpAMS. The SDL Tridion folks will be there in force and you may see a Hippo or two. With the @erikmhartman event in town, it’s likely to grow. Don’t be put off by the stupidly small beers they serve in Amsterdam. Just drink more.

Boston - Yet to have a meeting, but the intentions are good. Threatening to organise is @natea. This should get big with many vendors based in the Boston area. Not sure we have a hashtag yet.

Paris (MeetUp, LinkedIn) – Just created! First event is on Monday 14 June, after which is becomes Last Thursdays. Created by @adeforsan and @elieauvray, and you can follow it on #CMSGeekupParis. Expect free drinks from Nuxeo, Jahia and others.

Geneva (MeetUp) – We’re “spreading like cholera”. A new joiner, set up by @scroisier. Looking forward to hearing about their first event.

So if you live in/travel to one of these areas, join your groups and tell your friends. A few cities with a visible CMS presence haven’t joined in yet. I’m talking to you Stockholm and Copenhagen. And Western Europe could use a couple. Australia (Yuval, you listening?), New Zealand, South Africa and India need to represent too.

Start spreading the word and creating those groups. Finally, feel free to map a better map than my horrorshow.

Celebrity Guest In London

Trails of troubles,
Roads of battles,
Paths of victory,
I shall walk.
- PATHS OF VICTORY

The votes have been tallied, checked and verified by our independent auditors. With over 250 tweets to the #cmshaiku hashtag and 114 votes in the Grand Winner category, it’s been more popular than expected. Time to announce the #cmshaiku 2010 winnners. The worthy Grand Winner from Cheryl McKinnon (who knows a thing or two about legacy vendors and legal):

Legacy vendors
want to play haiku too but
poems stuck in legal

I’ve always suspected that Peter Monks is actually a Bot written in Erlang, but he proved me wrong. He’s actually a BotNet with a powerful Poetry Plugin. Sadly, his Distributed Denial of Justice attack meant that poor Kathy Brown’s masterpiece was pushed into third. Philippe came a close fourth, although yours truly thinks his was probably the most inspired entry.

Cheryl (Self Promotion) and Peter’s (Random) legions of voters meant they also won their categories. Embarassingly I won the Product category by a country mile. Laurence Hart won the General section, and Paul Carvill won the Despair section. I fear I did Philippe (@proops) a disservice by including both his genius open source haiku and my fork in the same category, thus splitting the vote.

So, I owe Cheryl, Peter, Kathy, Laurence and Paul beers. You’ll receive your prizes next time we happen to be in a bar together. All liability for events occuring after drinking said beer falls squarely on the drinker. Kathy can tell you what happened last time I bought her a beer …

If you need a bit more poetry in your life, you can follow all the entrants using this Twitter list.  Also, a special shout to Tim Walters for laughing in the face of the Forrester personal brand building embargo.

Lastly, make sure you get your copy of the book from our friends at Gilbane Outsell.

And please, I beg, tweet /  haiku should inspiration / find you! For the book.

Took an untrodden path once, where the swift don’t win the race,
It goes to the worthy, who can divide the word of truth.
- I AND I

It’s the biggest competition to hit the web in a long time – The 2010 CMS Haiku Beer Contest. We created the fourth worst poetry in history, caused the CEO of Sun to resign, and inspired a prize for the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco. If I have forgotten you, please leave your entry in the comments. You can still make the book.

But enough of that, it’s time to pick the winners. Due to the overwhelming response, I’ve divided the best into six categories of five. Please vote in each category. Voting closes on Feb 10. I’m buying beers for all the winners.

There were many other fine entries. Sadly, a few good ones didn’t meet the strict traditional 5/7/5 syllable rule. We decided that an @ or a # could count as a syllable, but didn’t have to.

Happy voting, and watch this space for the winners.

I don’t build up illusion ’til it makes me sick,
I ain’t afraid of confusion no matter how thick.
- MOST OF THE TIME

As I write this, we’re kicking off the BCS Event – Public Funds in the UK: Open Source for Document and Content Management? I’ll write more about the event afterwards, but I thought I’d share my presentation.

I assumed I’d be stoned if I used PowerPoint at an Open Source event, so I did this using Prezi, which I really enjoyed. First time I’ve used it – apologies if it makes you feel sick. And it probably doesn’t make any sense without me talking over it. Probably doesn’t make sense then either, but anyway.

You can see the presentation online here: http://prezi.com/rmga5cq2iplv/

In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all
- LOVE MINUS ZERO/NO LIMIT

Just finished my “Inconvenient truths and unsolved industry challenges” session at JBoye Aarhus 09, with Janus Boye (the organiser) and Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch. The session was fairly lively, and the #fixwcm hashtag was nice and busy. Over 300 tweets so far, and it’s still going strong. Keep the discussion going. If you’re at the conference, grab me for some beers over the next couple of nights.

You can download the slide deck as a 2MB PDF here:
http://jonontech.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/JBoye20091103_v1.2.pdf

The slides probably don’t make any sense without my commentary. In fact, they probably don’t make any sense with it.

I know a few people have blogged about the session. So far I’m aware of:

• Janus Boye – Rethink web content management
• Jarrod Gingras, CMS Watch – Is WCM fundamentally broken?
• Irina Guseva, CMS Wire - #jboye09 Web Content Management: Inconvenient Truths and Industry Challenges
• Ron Miller , FierceCM – Is the vendor solely responsible for WCM project failure?
• Michael Kowalski- Hey everybody, let’s #fixwcm right now!
• Yuval Ararat – What went wrong? #fixwcm!
• Vern Imrich – Get the most out of a WCMS Trial, Test, or Proof of Concept (POC) (Sales Pitch Alert!)
• Ian Truscott – Does WCM Really Need a Fix?
• James Hoskins – #fixwcm – some thoughts from the front line
• Seth Gottlieb – The world’s worst WCMS
• Bryan Ruby, CMS Report – When WCM is no longer fun
• Philippe Parker – Something rotten in WCM
• Tristan Renaud – Fixing the WCM: don’t forget your crampons, your rope and your guide
• Lokesh Pant – Who should #fixwcm?

And thanks to the kind people that took the photos I stole without credit from Google. Sadly, I stole them from stolen sources so really don’t know who to credit. Finally, here’s a taster of some of the many tweets that came in:

• bjfogg OH in #jboye09 session: If we can name things better, we can put standards around them #fixwcm
• RussellNelson #fixwcm 1 happy cms customer in a room of 20 – that meets my definition of something that is broken
• jameshoskins #fixwcm not all the buyers fault – WCM vendors need to focus on long standing pain points as much as those business winning new features
• tednyberg Often times when companies switch #WCM often I think it’s a sign of dissatisfaction with the implementer, not necessarily the #CMS. #fixwcm
• sigdestad #fixwcm Dare to say no to the customer – Good advices some times require courage
• adrianmateljan Are the likes of @cmswatch diverting us from the real implementation issues? Perhaps #agencywatch would be more appropriate? #fixwcm
• theresaregli @janusboye says a big part of education is finding people who are trusted #jboye09 #fixwcm
• irina_guseva If you’re waiting for #WCM vendors to wake up and fix the problems, it is unrealistic, says @janusboye #fixwcm #jboye09
• yuvalararat Guys the products are fine the way we implement and the way clients envision the system is the failure, Kill the sales guys #fixwcm

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame.
All day long I hear him shout so loud,
Crying out that he was framed.
- I SHALL BE RELEASED

How many WCM implementations leave customers grinning from ear to ear? The statistics make sad reading. But if so many projects don’t meet expectations, who is to blame? Is it the vendor, either because of a crappy product or dodgy practice? Or the implementer that eats your budget while making a beautiful product smell real bad? Or are the customers naive, unrealistic or worse?

On Wednesday morning, the Web Content Management Track of the Greatest Web Conference in the World kicks off. The opening session, “Inconvenient truths and unsolved industry challenges “, has a rather unambitious aim – to solve the world’s WCM problems. A bit like WCM World Peace. On the panel we’ll have Janus Boye himself representing the customer viewpoint, Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch representing the analyst massive, and little old me defending the honour of the implementers.

The topics are sure to be varied, and our esteemed moderator will be sourcing questions from the crowd, and from Twitter. We’ll be using the hashtag #fixwcm so be sure to set up your Twitter search now, and get involved in the discussions. Apart from blaming each other for multiple disasters, some other issues we might be covering include:

• Does the term WCM even make sense these days?
• Are there too many vendors out there, and will we see consolidation?
• Can buyers navigate the marketplace themselves?
• Why do so many projects fall on their face?
• Will Open Source vendors dominate in the future?
• Do you need hard requirements to select a CMS, or is it a philosophical decision?
• Are more Web / Content Standards the answer to our prayers?
• Why are the Requests for Proposal always so bad?

You can start shaping the session right now by tweeting your thoughts using our #fixwcm hashtag. We want to hear why you think WCM is broken, and what the biggest challenges are. Or if you just want a 140-character rant about a horrorshow of a project, that’ll be fun too.

Join us live on Twitter on Wednesday 4th November between 10:30 and 12:00 CET to throw in some curveballs. And if, for some reason, you’re attending the conference but choose to attend one of the competing parallel sessions (like the great Kristina Halvorson, Bob Boiko, Jane McConnell or Shawn Shell – it’s a tough pool), you can still participate on Twitter at the same time!

See you in person or in the Twittersphere. It’s going to be cold as hell in Aarhus, but the discussions are sure to get heated.

P.S. If you think the main WCM problem is the design of the content repository, it looks like @pmonks, @justincormack, @micycle and others might have it fixed before our session starts. Hope they’ll share their findings live! The Content Tree is Dead. Long Live the Content Graph.

Well, early in the mornin’
‘Til late at night,
I got a poison headache,
But I feel all right.
- PLEDGING MY TIME

I managed to get to the EPiServer Customer and Partner Day in London on Tuesday. I presented there last year, but this year could relax and go to lots of sessions. There were over 250 people, a big increase. They’re doing rather nicely in the UK, and everywhere else. They claim to have launched 500 new sites in the last three months. Personally, I hate the number of sites metric. I wish vendors would use number of new clients. For a nice, general overview of the day read James’ blog post. I’m just going to ramble a bit as usual.

EPiServer are still moving extremely quickly, which I talked about six months ago at the Swedish event. The main goodies on the roadmap are the new Marketing Arena, and EPiServer 6. And I stayed till far too late and still have a headache two days later, but that’s a story for another time.

Yams, Yams everywhere

Yes, we’ve got Yet Another Marketing Suite. Hot on the heels of  SiteCore’s Online Marketing Suite, Tridion’s Unified Online Marketing Suite and Autonomy/Interwoven’s Optimized Landing Page Solution, our friends at EPiServer showed off their new Marketing Arena. EPiServer’s product has four main prongs (each sold separately, batteries included):

Campaign Monitor and Optimiser (CMO)

The CMO has two parts. The Landing Page Optimiser (LPO) performs A/B Testing and has a nice interface. It is an entry level product that doesn’t include demographic information in the A/B testing which, for me, is something they need to introduce before I’d consider using it. The tool needs to be able to say, for example, “Page A performs best for US customers and Page B for European customers”. It also doesn’t perform Multivariate Testing but who know what the future holds. It provides basic web analytics, but wouldn’t claim to complete with a niche analytics product. In summary, it’s a nice entry level tool.

The second part, EPiServer SEO, performs good static analysis of your site and provides friendly instructions about how to improve your searchability based on the ever-changing rules of the search engines. It does all the things it should, looking at sematic code quality as well as content quality. It summarises this into a single number (your Digital Visibility) in a similar way to WebSite Grader. It’s a hosted service maintained by a third party. I wish I’d known about this before an we could have tried to set up a partnership with LBi instead – we have a service that’s very similar.

One thing I don’t like is the fact EPiServer SEO also has basic web tracking, to provides things like Heat Maps showing where users focus. Other parts of the CMO already have script based tracking. Two products doing this is one too many. And another trend I don’t like – black seems to be the new white. CMO has a shiny black background on their new “funky” product, while everything else is still white. Vignette did it with their Rich Media product. What’s wrong with white backgrounds anyway?

B2B Adapt

This is cool. Using an enhanced version of the Dun & Bradstreet company database, it maps the visitor’s IP address to their company’s Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code. From this, the product can tell the vertical industry of the company, the number of employees and even the annual turnover. These attributes are then fed into the rules engine to allow you to target different content to the revelant people. For example, you could show a very different pages to a small Swedish fishing company and a large US pharma. This is a hosted service which contains both the up-to-date database of companies as well as the rules.

I’d really like to use a service like this simply to get the demographic information and then put it to use in my own evil ways. However, I’m told this isn’t legal. There are strict (and somewhat quirky) rules around how company demographic information can be used.

B2B Prospect

This is a lower-cost option using the same technology as B2B Adapt. It simply provides a report of the companies that visited your site, including contact details and other useful things.

From Zero to Hero

Those of you that are wise in the EPiWays will recognise a few of the features mentioned above. EPiServer have a really really strong development community and an extensible API, so third parties are continually adding modules and features. They’ve just taken the first step towards an EPiAppStore with the release of the EPiServer Extra directory which includes free and commercial modules created by EPiServer and third parties. Many of these modules are now in the main product. Some of the extras that have made the big time include:

• dropit - Their X3 add-on has become EPiServer Composer, part of the Create+ package.
• Meridium – Their ImageVault DAM add-on is also part of Create+ (and they stayed late and had lots of beer)
• Ottoboni - Their InteractiveScene is in Create+ too.
• Online Services – XTractor for EPiServer has become EPiServer SEO.
• Enecto - The adaptivecontent and prospectfinder are B2BAdapt and B2BProspect respectively.
• EPiTrace – this is now bundled in the Marketing Arena.

I really like this model, by the way. All the most of the integrations are loosely coupled, and using partners like this allows the EPiServer guys to focus on the core.

What’s in EPiServer 6

The other big news is, of course, the arrival of EPiServer 6. Technically, this isn’t a massive change and the upgrade from 5.x promises to be trivial. As @rogerwirz pointed out in his closing presentation, it’s more of an “editorial training upgrade” than a technical one. I loved the comedy-act demo from @sunnaster and @mathel, sucking Tweets into the new Dynamic Data Store. I’m slightly uneasy about the Dynamic Data Store “Big Table” architecture, but I think this is because I’m old-school and fear change. But don’t get fooled into believing that this is anything like Google’s BigTable which isn’t an RDBMS and wouldn’t pass the ACID test. The EPiServer “Big Table” really is just a big bastard of a SQL table which sounds pretty hard to index. But I’m sure they’ve got it right. Something to talk to Roger about next time he’s in town.

I liked the demo of the new Dashboard (and how to write extensions for it) from @epirach and @bevan_souster. This Dashboard is based on the new EPiServer CMS Shell framework and provides good Portalesque features. However, I think it also overlaps enormously with many of the features of EPiServer Composer. So much overlap, in fact, that keeping both technologies alive doesn’t make sense. If I was a betting man (which I am) I’ll wager the heart of EPiServer Composer will be ripped out and replaced with a shiny new one in one (or at most two versions) time. At least I hope so.

Some other new features of EPiServer 6 which excite me:

• Completely browser compatibility on the editorial site
• Complete mirroring rewrite, which is a very good thing
• Access rights on page types
• Access rights on languages
• Drag and drop page tree ordering

Final Thoughts

The thing I like most about EPiServer is their geekiness and honesty. For example, in the keynote, they happily admit which products are simply OEM’ed partner products. Some competitors will wax lyrical about how their product has won Award XYZ, which happened before they even OEM’ed it.  The final presentation was a tech demo that everyone was forced to watch. I did hear some less-technical people saying that some of the presentations aren’t slick and “marketeer” enough. Which is great. Keep it up I say.

But please use a shorter hashtag than #episerverdayuk09 next year.

Now I gotta friend who spends his life
Stabbing my picture with a bowie-knife
- I SHALL BE FREE NO. 10

Last week, LBi hosted the Umbraco 2009 UK meetup. This was mainly due to the enthuasism of the organiser, Darren Ferguson, and the power of Twitter. Our involvement started after I saw this:

How To Get A Free Venue

Darren and I hooked up, and the rest is history. So Twitter can get you free stuff too. The 20 people was a bit conservative – turned out that nearly 60 people signed up. Even CMSWire covered the event which makes it famous. According to Darren, the biggest cock-up of the event was the live coding demo which, true to form, failed spectacularly. I never trust a live coding demo which works properly so maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

Waiting near the barista before the start

For me the highlight was a chat with Niels Hartvig (@umbraco), Umbraco founder and guru. We talked mainly about XSLT which, I think, he likes. W00t! Turns out that he’s presenting later in the year at the Best Conference in the World. Yours truly is speaking there too. Come along – you know you want to. He flew over from Norway to be at the Umbraco Day, which kept all the groupies very happy.

Niels reveals the bonus features in the upcoming Umbraco version

I also really enjoyed chatting to Gregory Roekens (@roekens), CTO of Wunderman. It’s great to have a couple of beers with someone that works for another big agency and has to deal with the same kind of issues that I do. Hoping we’ll be able to do it again soon and, in his words, become good frenemies.

Thanks to Darren for organising, Marcus for doing all the logistics at LBi and Percipient Studios for taking a whole load of cool photos that I’ve stolen. You can also read more about the day on the LBiQ blog by @bijeshtank and @mobragauk. If anyone else knows of any other blogs or photos, please add links in the comments.

He cocked his rifle
And began to shout,
“You’re that travelin’ salesman
That I have heard about.”
- MOTORPSYCHO NIGHTMARE

I work in a very cosmopolitan area of London. Our office is on Brick Lane , which is known for its curry houses, vibrant night life, art, fashion and live music. If I work late or have a couple of brews after work, it isn’t uncommon for someone dodgy to sneak up on me and say something like “I got some ‘ash man“, “Yo, want some pure bomb?“, “I have some LSD, wanna trip?” or “Dude, you wanna fly?“.

But I find all this far less annoying than the advances I repeatedly got at Internet World . “Pssst. Do you do Web Content Management?“. I’m not even sure I know what that means. Do I *do* content management? It’s always an annoying salesman sidling up to me and popping some flyer into my hand. Most of the time I just smile and walk on by but every now and again I stop of a chat and wish I hasn’t.

Now, I’m not into drugs. Drugs are bad. But at least the dealers know their products. These CMS Flyer guys seem to have very superficial (if any) understanding of their product, and always seem to be disappointed when it turns out I’m from a potential partner, not a potential customer with a cheque book. Some stands have girls in hot pants or tinkerbell outfits that look pretty, smile, give you a flyer and point you to their stand. But at least they don’t also start babbling about their products. The CMS Salesman say things that they don’t really understand like “Oh yes, it supports <something> perfectly”. Their products do everything. And they like to sell hard. And watch out for the licensing models that try to get you hooked first, then fleece you when you’re dependent on the “product”.

It seems that the CMS vendor stands have two different kind of salesman. They have the people that really know their stuff and are extremely interesting to talk to. These guys are pretty honest, and I can really engage with them and share war stories from the past. These are the guys I enjoying sharing a beer with, and all vendors have a few of them. They sell indirectly. But then there are the walking commission calculators that don’t seem to know much about their products or their industry at all. They might as well be selling cars or shoes. And every vendor seems to have a couple of them too. I know that times are hard and cold-calling (or proactive selling) is probably a necessary evil. But it’s an evil I’d rather avoid and one that make me get depressed about these shows. The smell of desperation in the air doesn’t make for good conversation.

If any of you have seen The Wire, you’ll also know it isn’t cool for rival drug gangs to be selling their product in the same place. Imaging four gangs selling from the four corners of a busy intersection. It would be pretty awkward, and get messy quickly. Yet this is exactly what happens at Internet World. Really convenient for people like me that want to see as many vendor demos as possible, but you do sometimes get the “How Dare You Also Speak To Our Competitor” evil-eye from across the way. Some of the sales guys also have their standard line for slagging off each competitor. Something like “Oh yes, XYZ is a good product. Unfortunately, they don’t have <feature> X or any support in <region Y>”. These are targetted and XYZ = the vendor from whose stand you were previously at seeing they know exactly where you’ve come from.

Another thing the dealers and CMS Vendors have in common is that they both refer their customers as “users”. One main difference between them is that the rival vendors at Internet World don’t shoot at each other when the competition gets tough. Sometimes I think it might be more fun if they did.

I’ll go to some bar room
And drink with my friends
- MOONSHINER

Today was Day 1 at Internet World 2009 a.k.a. #iwexpo for the Twitterrati. I got there nice and early, got myself a coffee and settled in to CMS Watch’s Theresa Regli talking about “Findability in a Web 2.0 World”. It is really difficult for the speakers to pitch these at the correct altitude as the audience is so varied, but I quite enjoyed the talk. My favourite part was when she called most marketing “crap”. A nice relaxed, honest presentation.

I spent most of the day chatting to vendors. Got the lowdown from (in alphabetical order) Alterian, CoreMedia, Ektron, EPiServer, EZ Systems, FatWire, FirstSpirit, Gomez, Hybris, Jadu, Kentico, OpenText (nee RedDot), SiteCore, Squiz and Vyre. I enjoyed my chat with Ian about the crazy CMS shit we all got up to in the late nineties.

I am alway interested to see who has the biggest stands at these events. A few years ago, Tridion were all over Internet World but they aren’t at here at all any more (maybe the SDL influence?). Vignette and EMC weren’t there either. Autonomy/Interwoven were there although their collateral isn’t merged yet. Last year, Vyre had the biggest stand but they’ve decided to spend their marketing budget elsewhere and went for a normal stand this year. EPiServer seemed to have biggest stand and the most people this year. SiteCore had a big one too. Peer 1, a dedicated hosting company, had a massive stand and some really hot chixors in hotpants who looked nothing at all like network engineers.

There was a stand labelled “Plone” which made no sense and smelled a bit like a systems integrator trying to pull a fast one. It was actually manned by a company called Netsight that were trying to hijack the Plone brand. I don’t like those guys at all. Don’t give them any money please. [UPDATE: I got this very wrong. They did actually get permission to do this and are, by all accounts, good guys. So you can give them money. See the comments below or the Netsight blog for their explanations. Apologies to Netsight, Matt and everyone else. Although I'd still be happier if the booth company name said Netsight. ]

One of the cool things about these events are the freebies. I couldn’t find many stress balls this time. I did pick up one from Kentico and another from SiteCore. I’ve recently defined a new approach to Vendor Selection Exercises, so thought I’d ask the expert (my 11 month year old son) to perform an one:

After much thought, he picked SiteCore over Kentico. I’m pretty convinced he went for the rugby ball shape over the football shape, but it might have been down to cost or the developer API. As soon as he can talk, I’ll let you all know. Sometimes vendor selections can be rather random.

I watched LBi’s Dom Collier and Jill Lloyd (and our friends at the British Red Cross) talking to a packed session about a recent LBi project. For the LBi groupies, Mikey and Mark are talking about British Gas tomorrow at 13:00. One of my personal favourite projects. Get along and have a listen to that one.

The highlight of the event was, for me, the drinks afterwards. Was lucky enough to share quite a few pints with Tony Byrne from CMS Watch, Lau Andreasen from JBoye, LBi’s very own Microsoft guru Riaz, wise man James Hoskins and some other top secret guests. I can’t think of many things I enjoy more than a few pints of Guiness and a chat about CMS. Hope we can do it again some time soon. And I hope Tony has a better photo than my crappy iPhone one below.

All in all, a really interesting and enjoyable day! More tomorrow. I love this game.

The wind it was howlin’ and the snow was outrageous.
We chopped through the night and we chopped through the dawn.
When he died I was hopin’ that it wasn’t contagious,
But I made up my mind that I had to go on.
- ISIS

Just come back from EPiServer Day 2009 in Stockholm. I’m pleased to report that this was a truly excellent two days. Interesting presentations, interesting people and an interesting product. There were over 1100 people there, which is extremely impressive in the current climate. Speaking of which, it snowed throughout the event, but not enough to deter the Lesser-Spotted Hardened English Smoker, captured on film below.

First, the speakers. I was really impressed with the Keynote, Tim Walters from Forrester Research on the Death of WCM. The quality of the thinking from the large research companies is always impressive, but the presentation was given in a relaxed, informal manner which I really enjoyed.

I also loved the “It’s Like Being In A Rock Band”presentation by Andreas Sjöström from Sogeti. It had a very simple message, but presented extremely well. I was glad to discover I still have my passion. Also, the Crowd Surfing presentation by David Brain was enjoyable, and had a few intriguing nuggets. The Trust Survey highlighted how people don’t trust CEO’s very much …

None of these presentations had much to do with EPiServer, but they were great anyway.

The EPiServer specific sessions were also informative, and as usual I was struck by the speed with which they develop things. If anything, the roadmap moves too quickly for me! But it was good to hear that the majority of the focus is on the core products – Content Management and Community. I’m always skeptical of a CMS vendor that trys to expand into too many areas. I don’t need another End-To-End eBusiness Solution. I need focused products that solve my customers’ problems.

I attended another session on EPiServer’s Create+ package, which was far more of a technical deep dive than I’d seen of it before. The X3EPiServer Composer product has gone up a couple of notches in my esteem. For some reason, I’d previously thought that a page was either an EPiServer page, or an Extension Page, but not a combination. This is because of all the demos I’d been shown, no-one had ever combined normal EPiServer properties with an Extensions page. I think a better way to think about it is that the Composer adds a new property type (not page type) to an existing EPiServer page.

As usual, there was a fair bit of socialising. We had a few brews and talked about Life and Content Management. While I was the only representative from LBi UK this year, I was lucky to spend time with collegues from Sweden and the Netherlands. I met a few new Content Management Geeks that I’d not met before, and had some interesting discussions. We sensibly avoided the 2:00 am trip to a late night drinking venue, so I started Day 2 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Three London based Agencies had been nominated for EPiServer Awards (LBi, Rufus Leonard and Fortune Cookie), and we tried to stick together with the UK EPiServer staff. Unfortunately, our show of solidarity wasn’t enough to bring an EPiServer Award back to Blightly. In an extremely slick Oscars-like ceremony, the 5 awards were handed out. However, the voting felt rather Eurovision-esque, and while the UK received nil point, Sweden bagged 5 out of 5 awards. Earlier in the day, one of the keynote speakers asked the audience if they felt Sweden would be a top IT supplier in the next few years. After taking a clean sweep at the EPiServer Awards (beating 118 entries from 11 countries, if memory serves), they certainly already are. Maybe next year …

Finally, a note to EPiServer marketing. Changing the URL to the Events pages (Upcoming_Events to Passed_Events) makes linking to them pretty painful.

Expect another update from the next EPiServer Event in London Town.