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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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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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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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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