Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
- MR. TAMBOURINE MAN

A change is as good as a holiday, they say. Well, after ten brilliant years at the company now known as LBi, it’s time for a change. I wasn’t looking for anything, but an opportunity came along that, had I turned it down, I’d probably regret for the rest of my life. More on this here; I plan to keep this blog going strong – time and lawyers permitting.

To all my LBi colleagues, thanks for the wonderful times, the beers and the things you’ve taught me. You’ve got an awesome gig going, and the road ahead looks rosy. In particular, thanks to the exec for their vision and guidance, the technical architects for all their wisdom, and my development teams for fucking up far less projects than the industry average.

To the Dream Team (@mislip, @laurajaybee, @dacrumb, @skinnybouffant and @shakster), congrats on a job well done and I’ll be watching a certain site with eager anticipation. And a huge huge thanks to my boss, Mark, for keeping me honest for the last few years.

To end my Paltrow-esque blubbering – to all my wonderful, well-informed clients that read this blog, thanks for letting me go near your projects, and for making most of the work a pleasure.

We’ll always have The Pride. It’s been real.

P.S. If anyone wants my old job (the best job at the best agency in London), mail careers@lbi.com for the attention of Mark Agar and the subject “I want Jon’s old job”. I’m serious.

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.

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
“I thought you’d never say hello,” she said
“You look like the silent type.”
- TANGLED UP IN BLUE

I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked. When I started this blog, I planned to post a lot more from the “Agency Perspective” but all the recent CMS activity has kept me busy. This post was the post I planned to write first as it helps to set the scene for things I’d like to talk about in the future. So, “Hello Everyone”. Welcome to my blog.

What is a Full Service Digital Agency?

Let’s start with just the Digital Agency part, and use Wikipedia for that:

A digital or new media agency is a business that delivers services for the creative and technical development of internet based products. These services range from the more generalist such as web design, e-mail marketing and microsites etc. to the more specialist such as viral campaigns, banner advertising, search engine optimisation, podcasting or widget development etc.

The million dollar question: What exactly is a Full Service Digital Agency? I’m going to take some liberties here and invent a new acronym:  FSDA. Everyone and his dog seem to be one these days. New Media Age (NMA) tracks Agencies in their Top 100 Interactive Agencies list. I wouldn’t trust everything you read in here. Most of the numbers are volunteered by the agencies themselves, so you’re never quite sure how reliable they are. One interesting aside – the agencies have to put themselves into one of three categories: Marketing, Design & Build or Technical. Quite a few of the agencies listed would love to pick more than one of these, but you are forced to choose. Rules is rules. As a techie, I’d prefer to see us listed as “Design & Build”, but that does seem to exclude many of the other services we offer. So we’re listed as Marketing. I’m a marketeer now, I guess.

As most of you know, I work for LBi in the London office (for the purposes of this post, I’m only going to talk about the UK market in isolation, although in reality I spend a fair bit of my time working with the other offices in the network). We call ourselves “The Largest Full Service Digital Agency in the UK”. I’m going to off-brand and say we’re quite possibly also the smallest Full Service Digital Agency in the UK, if indeed it is possible to be Full Service at all. For the record, the 2008 Top 10 Agencies (by Turnover) is shown above. We’re the biggest by headcount in this list but, as I said, some of the numbers in here might be crap. The LBi headcount numbers are correct. I’ll post more about these numbers some other time. We’ve got about 350 permanent employees in the UK.

What are the services?

So, what do all of these people do in an FSDA? By definition, everything digital. I’m not going to attempt to say what this is, but I will outline what my agency does by listing all the departments in our London office. To stop myself rambling, I’ve decided on a self-imposed 140 character limit per department. All you crazy people can tweet the definitions to your friends. Or tweet me better definitions if you don’t like mine. Especially if you’re from LBi and I’ve insulted your department. I haven’t mentioned User Centered Design here as this is a key philosophy that spans all departments. In a vague project order:

• Planning & Strategy – Consultancy, Business Plans, financial models, requirements, user research/testing, personas, planning and buying
• Experience Architecture – Information architecture (sitemaps, taxonomy), requirements, wireframes, usability
• Concept & Design – The Officially Creative People. Concepting, Design, making things look pretty, copy writing, win lots of awards
• Technology - Architecture, Product Selections, Interface Dev (CSS/HTML/JS), App Dev (Java/C#), RIA (Flash, Adobe), Testing, QA
• Managed Services – Live projects. Hosting, maintenance, monitoring, application support, incremental development, tickets, help desks
• Media - Where to spend your online media budget, keywords to bid on, place ads. Campaigns, email marketing,  outbound email comms
• SEO - Get you into the first page of Google organically. Analyse algorithms. Semantic markup, crafted content, link building. Analytics.
• Delivery Management – Ensure projects are delivered, as usual, on time and under budget. Producers, Project and Programme Managers
• Client Services – Keep existing clients sweet and “grow” accounts. New Business Development (Sales) and Account Management. Play Golf

That’s 9 different departments. Within each department, things can get even more specialised. For example, our Technology department is split into 3 sub-departments: Technical Architecture, Quality Assurance and Development. The Development Department is split into Interface Development, Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft and Java. Within each of these, things get even more specialised. As the interwebs mature and spread, the number of technologies we need to be expert in continues to grow. And it isn’t going to converge any time soon. Other departments specialise in a similar way. Note that these departmental divisions are often more of an organisational need then a working reality. We try to get our teams to blend well together and many individuals could easily fit in to many of the little boxes on the org chart.

Does Size Matter?

Ignoring our internal “Core Services” (HR, Finance, Operations, Resourcing, Office Services, Marketing and Upper Management) which every company has to have, I’m told, we’ve probably got a shade over 300 “project work” people in our London office. The rough breakdown of department size by headcount looks something like this:

The information isn’t top secret, in case anyone was wondering. We disclose it on our NMA Listing (albeit mapped to their categories). When you break it down like this, an uber-agency of 350 people suddenly has less than 40 project managers (which means less than 40 active projects), under 60 designers, and less than 80 techie nerds like me. Which brings me to my point. In order to provide all the services we need to provide in order to be a credible FSDA, we couldn’t be any smaller. I’d say that any company under 300 people cannot begin to claim to be an FSDA.

It is also interesting, referring back to the Top 5 from the NMA list, that all of them have a similar number of employees. Why aren’t there any agencies with more than 400 people? The short answer – because it is difficult to keep the “agency vibe” using the structures needed to manage a massive company. The larger agencies are not trying to be like the big IT services/consultancies (Atos, Deloitte, KPMG, Accenture, Fujitsu, Cap Gemini, PWC, Wipro etc). They’re trying to behave more like a “boutique”, while maintaining the scale, professionalism and expertise needed to service the major accounts.

Neil Potter from RedWeb (another FSDA) blogged about FSDAs recently on his excellent blog . He argues that the LBi view of full service (a one stop shop that can provide everything) is outdated. While I do agree that being truly full service is probably impossible, I think a handful of agencies (in the UK) get pretty close. Neil’s blog entry says:

As Richard Sedley, Director of cScape Customer Engagement Unit and Course Director for Social Media at Chartered Institute of Marketing, told me “Today you can be full service with a limited focused offering”. I like this. “Full service” doesn’t have to mean jack of all trades. In fact, it shouldn’t mean that at all. Nowadays clients need specialists; people who know their discipline intimately and who can work with the client from conception of the idea to delivering the end product, and then studying its performance. This is where the real skill and expertise comes in.

I don’t understand the quote from Richard Sedley. Full Service does not mean “limited focused offering”. Can anyone shed any light on this for me? I agree with the rest. Of course Full Service doesn’t mean jack of all trades. Of course you need specialists. You need lots of them. You need more than 300 employees to have them, too. Yes, size matters.

You didn’t answer the question!

Sorry. In closing, I’ll define an FSDA as a Digital Agency that provides all the services you need – a one stop shop. Of course there will be gaps in the offerings, but the FSDA should have partners to help plug these. Often customers will only engage an FSDA to perform a small subset of their services. This can be a very sensible “avoid all eggs in one basket” strategy, or they already have specialist agencies with which they’re very happy. In these cases, the various agencies on the account need to work closely together. Other customers will choose to use all of the services offered as they see benefits gained when different disciplines blend. Or they just want one agency to shout at if things go tits up.

Some parts of an FSDA compete with more traditional above the line marketing agencies. Other parts (like mine) will compete with pure play systems integrators, although it looks to me like the SIs are trying to become more like agencies these days, introducing elements of the User Centered Design process into their traditionally purely technically offering.

Seeing as I’ve been agency-side for the last 10 years, I’ve got a decent understanding of most of the disciplines. But of course I know most about the technical ones, and that is what I plan to use this blog to talk about. If you do have any particular burning issues you’d like me to focus on, please let me know. Nothing quite like pandering to a non-existent audience …

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.

We’ve been through too much tough times that they never shared.
They’ve had nothing to say to us before,
Now all of a sudden it’s as if they’ve always cared.
All we need is honesty, a little humility and trust.
Oh, darlin’, can we keep it between us?
- LET’S KEEP IT BETWEEN US

Janus Boye just posted blog about SITATM: When system integrators take all the money. I work for an SI, so should I be horrified by these accusations? Not at all. I think nearly everything he says is true, and I urge you to read his article before carrying on with this one. I would say that most SI’s do not try to take the money and run. We need long term accounts and repeat business to survive.

I do disagree with his final symptom:

You’ve worked with the same system integrator for a very long time on many different projects involving many different vendors and technologies.

In my experience this is, more often than not, a positive thing. Sure, you need to continually re-evaluate all your supplier relationships and not be complacent, but a long history is normally a healthy sign, not a worrying one.

But there are other worrying signs, some of which are also fairly clear to the SI. Here are some more you should watch out for:

• People stop questioning fundamental decisions that were made earlier in the project for fear of the answer. If the customer stakeholder that selected the SI is the same one that will look foolish if they get rid of them, things can spiral out of control. Or, as MacBeth once said to the wife: “I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
• Certain features or deliverables are created/demanded simply because they were part of a Statement of Work that is extremely old. Everyone knows the deliverable is useless and will never be used, but the contract is the contract …
• You look at your implementation one day and realise that slowly but surely the CMS product that you’ve bought has been replaced by custom modules until there is nothing recognisable left.
• The excellent team the SI gave you in the pitch and the initial project phases have been slowly replaced by a more junior, less passionate team that doesn’t know your account very well.

And some more suggestions to customers for avoiding SITATM:

• Don’t ask for a fix price for a big monolithic project. If you need a fixed price to secure budget, get one for a smaller, more predictable phase and ask for indicative costs for future phases. Make sure each phases does have useful, tangible deliverables. Reserve the right to use any outputs of Phase X as part of a new SI selection process for Phase X+1. Even if you never do it, it should keep the SI on their toes.
• After working with your selected SI for a Fixed Price project or two, ask yourself if you would trust them on an Agile/Variable Scope basis, or a Time and Materials basis. If the answer is no, you might have the wrong SI. I firmly believe everyone gets better value from a more agile/T&M based approach. But the customer and partner need to first earn one another’s trust – it is a two way thing.
• Don’t be afraid to admit earlier decisions were wrong. As you learn more about the project, you become more informed. Question everything, all the way. Show me a project that got everything right in the initial requirements, and I’ll show you a project team with their head buried in the sand.
• Ensure you have the budget for the support, maintenance and ongoing development of a project. If the budget for the initial launch is massive and then enormously scaled down, it is only reasonable for the SI to scale down accordingly. As a wise colleague of mine recently said, “The real success of a project is determined by the ease of delivering Phase 2″.

Many SI people would argue we should write a “How Do You Know When You’ve Picked A Bad Customer” article. It isn’t uncommon to hear vendors, agencies and sytems integrators saying “X is a nightmare customer. We’ve lost a fortune on that account“. I don’t buy this. I believe there is no such thing as a bad customer. But that’s a story for another blog post.

Well, Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, they were the best of friends.
So when Frankie Lee needed money one day, Judas quickly pulled out a roll of tens
And placed them on a footstool just above the plotted plain,
Sayin’, “Take your pick, Frankie Boy, my loss will be your gain.”
- THE BALLAD OF FRANKIE LEE AND JUDAS PRIEST

Corruption in Tech Paradise?

Janus Boye recently posted a thought provoking article on his blog (Is corruption an issue?) which highlights various activities in the online industry which he considers extremely dodgy. He gives some examples of some goings-on which sound pretty shifty. After listing these issues, he goes on to say:

I’ve seen many examples of contracts being signed with a vendor that was not actually the best fit for the project. As my old mentor always used to say: “The best product never wins”. Perhaps he was referring to the fact that many buyers are corrupt.

This got me thinking. He is, of course, correct although the “influencing” happens at many different levels. At one level, the corruption and kickback can get rather big. About two years ago, the US Justice Department sued Accenture, Sun and HP for fraud relating to exactly this. Many technology companies were also looked at (including a few vendors I deal with), and IBM and PWC have each coughed up more than $2 million. I’ve got no idea if the case has ended, or still going on. EMC are being investigated at the moment for similar things, although the events in this case are 10 years old.

But I digress. Before I get to the dilemma, here’s a bit of background. I work for a “full service” digital agency. I’ll write a post on what the hell this means at some point in the future, but in a nutshell the client hires us to do everything. This includes strategy, branding, research, media, creative design, user experience work and a whole lot more. Importantly, it can also include vendor selections, site build, rollout, hosting and support. There are many good reasons to want to have a single supplier perform all of these tasks for you. There are also many reasons why it might be a terrible idea. Maybe another blog post on this later too. I strongly believe that in most cases the positives outweigh the negatives – or I wouldn’t be working where I do – and for the purposes of my argument I’ll trust you to humour me.

A Hypothetical Project

Phase 2 (the implementation) isn't defined yet

Picture the scene. Client X has an idea for a large public facing web site, and engages a full service agency. At the risk of horribly over-simplifying, someone needs to do the following:

• Step 1: Firm up the requirements to an appropriate level, help with a business plan and plan the project
• Step 2: Perform some user research and testing to ensure the idea is a valid one
• Step 3: Design the user experience (UX), and do the creative work
• Step 4: Pick the tools (for example WCMS, Search and Analytics) that will satisfy the requirement, design and UX
• Step 5: Build and launch the site, which includes integrating the selected third party products
• Step 6: Continually support and improve the site post launch

Now this seems like a sensible order of events to me, with the vendor selection exercises being performed as late in the project as is sensibly possible. The more information we have at point of vendor selection the better. On all large projects, these exercises are formal and involve the customer’s Procurement department, who exist partly to combat the very corruption mentioned by Janus.

The Dilemma

So here is the dilemma. Even assuming no vendor kickbacks, no bribery and pure hearts everywhere, how can the agency/systems integrator that is going to do the build possibly be impartial?

Regardless of size, all implementers will be more skilled with certain products. As it is highly unusual that only one of the candidate products in a vendor selection exercise is fit for purpose, the deciding factor will often be which can be implemented in the most low-risk manner. Which boils down to selecting a product that your implementer is confident enough to guarantee delivery on. If using a formal scoring system, and Product A which I know well and have implemented many times scores 86/100, while Product B, which I’ve never heard of, scores 90/100, it will be better for everyone if we pick Product A. A different integrator would correctly select Product B if they have the appropriate skills. Experience is everything in the CMS implementation game.

So does that mean it isn’t ethical to select the implementer before selecting the tool as the “best product” may not win? If that’s the case, many projects are going to suffer horribly. And full service agencies like mine wouldn’t be able to offer the full service with a clear conscience. We’d have three options (referring to the simplified steps earlier):

• Perform Steps 1-4. Do the upfront planning, research, requirements and design. We’d help the client select the objectively best tools for the job (which I believe we can do), and walk away. The client would need to find an expert in the tool(s) we recommend for the build, who’d we would need to work closely with. Even if it was a tool we knew very well, we still couldn’t build as is it may look like the tool was selected for the wrong reasons.
• Perform only Steps 5 and 6. Build the site only once someone else has defined the solution and selected the products. We do a fair bit of this, but this isn’t full service so the client still might end up with all the issues associated with The Agency Finger Pointing Game.
• Perform all Steps except Step 4, and pray to all that is holy that the non-corrupt, impartial vendor selection exercise decides on a tool we can actually use.

In the first two cases, we aren’t performing our “Full Service”. The third case simply wouldn’t work. So if you can’t select the implementation team before selecting your tools, how do we take heed of the advice of one of Janus’ Web Content Management Inconvenient Truths:

It’s the crew and not the tool – forget about finding the best CMS, but do work hard to find the best implementation crew

A Little Crisis of Confidence

Wait a sec. What does this actually mean? I’ve always taken it to mean you pick an Agency/Systems Integrator (the Crew) first and then let them pick the tool (the CMS) for you? And tell Procurement to look the other way? Is this ethical? Maybe it doesn’t mean that at all. Do you pick the Crew and the CMS as a team, using another consultant with no ulterior motives to help you? If this is the approach you choose, you need to select the CMS very early in the process. It certainly isn’t a workable model for an agency like mine. Or do you pick the CMS first (maybe just flip a coin?) and put the real effort into the selection of the crew around that CMS.

Hmmm. Confusing. I’m starting to wonder if we (agencies and systems integrators) should offer formal vendor selection exercises at all. And which does comes first: the Crew or the CMS? Answers on a postcard. Help. Somebody. Please.

Come and go with me, my pretty little miss,
Come and go with me, my honey.
Take you where the grass grows green,
You never will want for money
- BLACKJACK DAVEY

It’s good to win something every now and again. We recently walked away with the best B2B Award at the 2009 Revolution Awards for British Gas’ Generation Green site. Now this happens fairly often as there are many digital marketing awards. However, I am really happy about this one because it is a site that has a whole boatload of cool technology behind the scenes.

Generation Green Home Page

For those that what to read about the marketing side of things, read this press release. The general idea is to help schools to be greener by performing various tasks, teaching Green lessons, recycling their mobile phones and more. The numbers behind the site (from the press release):

The campaign has been successful – more than 8000 schools (35%) have registered with Generation Green to date and teachers have downloaded more than 13,000 lesson plans and hosted more than 750 ‘green’ assemblies. This means that 3,168,515 children across the UK were potentially impacted by the programme. The popularity of the Green lesson plans with teachers has resulted in British Gas providing over 303,000 hours of learning in UK schools.

For those that are interested in the technology, this little site contains:

• EPiServer 5 CMS with many custom extensions
• A 5 level Flash platform game with WebORB framework to allow the Flash to talk to the EPiServer based server side code (for login, leader boards and more).
• Integration with britishgas.co.uk to generate secure tokens for leaf donation,
• SOAP web services for integrations with order placement at the fulfillment house, the external carbon calculator, and recycool leaf integration to allow schools to earn leaves by recycling their mobile phone and printer cartridges.
• Google Map mash-up for school location and postcode search.
• SQL Server Integration Services used for placing product orders and updating order status.

So, in summary, I think this is a really good idea which has been beautifully designed, and brought to life using a number of technologies. And the site saves the planet. Which is why I wrote this during #earthhour.

Eco-Rangers Platform 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.