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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Partner ships »

A partnership is easy to setup; just grab a phone, call the company which gives out the partnership, sign an agreement and off you go. Now that’s the easy part.

A good partnership sees both companies which are part of it investing time and effort into the product and partnership itself. Some people might see reselling as retail business, but the key to success lies in applying the product within your projects and benefit from it. Otherwise, you can just as easy give up the partnership right away.

Yesterday, we signed our 4th - and final - product partnership with Forward Search. Already being a partner with Umbraco, EPiServer and EPM Live this search tool can add something extra to all these products. Also, search will become more and more important in the coming years when data is ever expanding and the tools to find the information becoming more and more simplistic. At least, from an end-user’s perspective.

Having the right products in place - through partnerships - to provide our clients with a broad range of standard solutions gives us the flexibility to focus on the end solution. Each product has a basic setup, but each product also needs to be installed, configured and implemented before it can be used. We won’t focus on the basics anymore; somebody, somewhere has already done this for us and will continue to improve his product. Using shared benefits we make sure both companies focus on what they do best.

I have become a firm believer of partnerships and live them to the fullest when it comes to integrating them within our software solutions. It only works though, when the partner ships the product and starts his first sale. That is the only way to get things going, because until then, the partnership remains on paper only.

Related subjects: entrepreneur it umbraco episerver epm live forward search

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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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Converting products into solutions »

Having a great product is not enough anymore. All the products my company sells - umbraco, episerver and epm live - all have great features that most of the time fits to the requested business needs. Then why don’t we sell 100% since it’s that good?

Today’s businesses don’t expect to figure out working with a product anymore. They expect you to figure out how it works for them. Fair enough. This has become a result of personalization on the web and the increasing customer demands for flexibility. It also imposes an interesting question for the salespeople: do I sell the product old-school or should I become a business analyst?

I have always sold my products being a business analyst and love figuring out the right solutions. Most don’t call me sales, although I am responsible for bringing in most of the sales. Result is that most of our sales processes take up much longer, but in the end the client relationship is bound to go further for a long time. This long-term sales strategy takes up a lot of effort as well.

You know the biggest compliment I get from clients? Telling me I sold them nothing. I only got approved to invoice them on delivering the right solution.

Related subjects: entrepreneur sales umbraco episerver epm live it

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CMS is dead! Long live CMS! »

I’m not going to lie about it, yes, my company is an EPiServer partner. But then again, if the product was crap I’d change to another one. So here’s my post:

CMS is dead! It is? You might wonder. Most companies are investing right now to get their website up to speed with a friendly CMS to support it. Totally true. But that doesn’t mean the CMS you’re using is a success.

As businesses invest their money into corporate sites, in time, their wish list grows on and on. What started out as a clean and simple CMS has become a monster with evermore redicoulous demands. Your’re stretching the product to its upper limits and still don’t get the job done.

Having just visited the EPiServer Summit this year gave me great insight into the product and made me wonder… is this still a CMS? It’s becoming more like a web-based business suite built on a CMS! Crap, they finally figured it out, we need things like this! The economy is cutting our budget and time and business demands are getting more similar every day. Maybe because everyone has a hard time keeping up with the latest things anyways, but it’s causing a lot of work that is kind of repetitive.

So is CMS dead? I don’t think so. So is CMS alive then? If you call this a CMS, then yes, it is. To me it’s something much better and worth investigating for every web builder that offers .NET based CMS systems.

Related subjects: cms episerver

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