Umbraco Gold Partner: Open Source just died »

Yesterday one of the weirdest messages I have had in recent years came flying into my mailbox. Umbraco - the popular open source CMS software - was announcing the Gold Partner status. Being one of the most certified (Dutch) companies this was good news. Having experience with being a Microsoft Partner, that program really adds to your status and helps your developers work with the tools they promote.

But this time, my reaction was different. I could not believe my eyes…

Usually the status ‘Gold’ means really good, excellent and experienced development. You need extra competencies to reach that level and not every company can be ‘that good’. Here, it said the only difference was that a partner puts down a ridicoulous amount of money each year. I was flabbergasted.

There’s nothing wrong with supporting the Umbraco crew, in fact I am in favour of this. But the amount of money stated was like nothing I have ever seen before. Not even Microsoft would dare to ask this for their Gold Partner program. Next to that, it would not add anything to the reliability of the Partner, as the company could have less skills than a normal partner.

With the Microsoft Partner program you will get support FROM Microsoft to promote their products and use them as your basic tools. It is a win-win with both the vendor and the partner teaming up in developing all tools and making solutions from them. It isn’t used to pay Microsoft to develop their products.

We are building a huge package at the moment which would be a major add-on for the member section. As Umbraco is open-source our intention was to give it to the community, as we think this would really add to the product and would help out others who helped us with their packages. This is not your regular package, what we are building is huge. Yesterday’s message may have pursuaded me to commercialize on this product, so we can pay the Gold status from that. This is not what we want, we want to share, but if our competitors are stated as Gold we may be forced to. In my opinion, this move can kill the open-source thought which has made the Umbraco community strong.

Now, dear Umbraco, I know you guys are great at coding. You are great at functionality. You have built up a great community over the years… but your marketing still sucks. Please hire someone to do this properly, or if you did hire someone to invent this Gold Partner status, please fire him. There is only one profession that tells you how good you are when you put down money and you don’t deserve to be associated with that. Please fix this mistake.

Related subjects: umbraco partnership marketing software cms

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EPiServer Commerce »

Last week we had the opportunity to get a presentation from the guys at #episerver holland on EPiServer Commerce. To be honest, we were expecting another OS Commerce promising everything and ending up to be another shop add-on. We were proven wrong.

Sure, my company is an EPiServer partner, but we won’t use an add-on or module when we think it’s crap; our primary concern is our client, not the vendor. But EPiServer was something truly different, in a way we didn’t expect it. It actually integrates all important functionalities in the full sense of commerce, not just a shop.

A simple demonstration of this would be the marketing and campaign module, where bargains can be made according to business rules or audiences can be targeted based on their attributes. A lot of thought has been spent in how to facilitate the shop administrator and entrepreneur in their quest to earn money.

A full review of the product will be too much for this blog, but when interested visit the following link for all functionalities: http://www.episerver.com/en/Products/EPiServer-Commerce/EPiServer-Commerce-Functions/.

My company has been implementing e-commerce solutions for over 7 years now. All request for functionalities we ever had were available in this product. I am not talking about the shop visitor’s needs, but the client /entrepreneur / shop administrator’s needs. And that’s the one who pays your bills. I can’t wait to start implementing our first EPiServer Commerce solution.

Related subjects: episerver e-commerce CMS entrepreneur

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Related subjects: entrepreneur cms websites it social media

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Websites aren’t what they used to be anymore… »

You remember the days? You made some HTML, let it run on Netscape and voila! You’re a tech wizard and people called it a website! Well, this example might be a little prehistoric for most people but this is how it went in 1997. I just completed my first course ‘How to do websites in 20 minutes’ at college.

Thirteen years later, developing websites and the standards it has to meet have changed quite a bit. Some for the good (CSS, CMS) and some for the bad (a jungle of different browsers and versions). When you’re having experienced web developers around getting the website right with CSS, CMS and all browsers is something that just requires a lot of work and code purism.

But how about the creative part? You also need to know your way around the latest Web 2.0, 3.0 or wherever it is going. Social media should be integrated anywhere and should blend within the website as if it was part of it. Twitter can feed messages, Flickr generate your photo gallery and Share provides a quick way to share any page with your friends. Also add jQuery for the nifty movements and interaction and maybe get Flash in when you have some real creative people there.

When you have implemented all those things mentioned above, people will definitly call it a website. It is a great web presence and show-off for your company. But now arises the biggest question of them all: “Does the website achieve the goals we set for it to do?”. Now that is a real mindbreaker when you really think about this.

Anno 2010 you just need a team to develop websites, the techniques and possibilities have become too much to handle on your own. You need a team of creative people, a designer, web developers, a great CMS to build upon (we prefer Umbraco and EPiServer) and… a project manager (and a PM method). It only took 13 years to get to this point. This makes you wonder how we will develop websites in 2023. If they still exist.

Related subjects: websites CMS development umbraco episerver

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Umbraco 4.1 RC1 - A marketing WTF »

The new Umbraco release is bound to be a huge improvement over the latest version (4.0.something). 18 months of work has been spent on this huge improvement and loads of new features and enhancements are there. You want all the details? Click on the following link:

http://umbraco.codeplex.com/releases/view/42419

As good as programming goes at Umbraco, as bad marketing goes. Don’t get me wrong, I clearly love what the Robin Hoods of CMS are doing and we appreciate working with the product for over 4 years now… but for **** sake why call it version 4.1?!?

Any other company would call this major overhaul a new version. They might even put a version in between for marketing and sales purposes. But Umbraco will call this version 4.1. Sure, there’s a technical explanation for this but come on… how would it sell when Aston Martin improved its DB9 to… DB9.1? People might go and wonder about the DB9 had some bugs on it.

Last year I had a chance to meet up with the Umbracian in Denmark and I must say I have a lot of respect for those guys. Niels Hartvig contributed over 5 years without much returns and is now finally hitting the big stage with his team. Achieving this with open-source Microsoft technology is just outstanding and also proves he can give developers what they want. However, when hitting the bigger stage you might also want to give marketeers what they want. And that, my fellow Umbracians, would be the cherry on the cake.

Related subjects: umbraco cms marketing

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Ayo… technology? »

Rapper 50 Cent (prenouce FIT-TY) actually was singing about CMS developers when he rapped his ‘Ayo Technology’ together. Eventually, Belgium was catching up when Milow graveyarded the song to some ballad, so I think most of you know it. ‘I’m really tired about using technology, I need you to sit in front of me’ is what they were singing and boy… they were right!

Having been around the .NET scene since its early days I have always been looking for a good deployment solution. First, there were those terrifying Windows deployments. Great one-time, but updating? DLL hell as the devs used to call it. Sure, I hear all you C++ and even-more-dinosaur devs ralley about the prehistoric days, but this felt real to us too.

Then, professional web and CMS development finally arrived. Yes, this was it! No more de-centralized deployment! Our dark days were over! Nope, they were just about to start.

As to this day, you can synchronize everything. And then I mean… everything! Just log onto my mobile phone and check the house, my friends across the globe, e-mail, blog posts, website, you name it. Everything is connected to each other everytime, everyplace.
You know what thing can’t be synchronized? Your enterprise all-important-live-sitting-can’t-go-wrong CMS. It relies on programmers to manually update their DTAP (Development Testing Acceptance Live) environment 3 times, sometimes even on different environments and expect nothing to go wrong. And did I mention we should use a pen and paper to register the changes? Or use (Sharepoint) lists for the more sophisticated and fortunate of us. That makes up for this formula:

CMS Deployment = (Developer + List + Testing)³

You could imagine it could become the same mess as the programmer’s desk, although a bug wouldn’t smell as bad as his peanut butter.

Hello! Any CMS publisher listening? The client doesn’t want peanut butter. He wants the topping on the cake. Better start creating that cooking material pretty soon then. And please, don’t forget the cookbook as well.

Related subjects: cms development .net deployment

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