Last week I participated in the JBoye Web & Intranet Conference 2013 in Aarhus, Denmark. In last few years I had the chance to be on many conferences but rarely on such perfectly organised one. You can see and feel how much experience Mr. Boye and his team have in organising events, they are really using it to their advantage.
From the concept perspective the conference is not a common one. You will not see much sales oriented presentation although vendors are present. Sharing component is emphasised through workshops and encouraging all visitors to actively participate in all sessions. Chances for networking are almost constant, cleverly supported by the organisers. A mixture of workshops, use case presentations, demos, round tables and "town hall" sessions, joined breakfasts, lunches and dinners, all of this support attendees in sharing and networking opportunities. Really quite a unique event.
My agenda was not only to cover as much of good sessions as possible, but to give a presentation about one of our use cases and present a simple tool for search results quality measurements. The slides are available here but a more detailed post about the topic is underway. The funny thing worth of mentioning is that my laptop froze just few minutes before the presentation. That would not be much interesting if the laptop was not a 2 month old MacBook Pro with brand new OSX. I thought those problems occur only on Windows :)
Anyway, few of the takeaways from the conference are from the "The art and science of selecting the right CMS" session:
- The Gartner Magic Quadrant is over simplified view
- The biggest challenge for CMS users in 2013 is still editorial interface, its to heavy.
- Homework for customers before starting a CMS project: Content strategy, Governance/Editors, Internal resources, Budget, Stakeholders, Technology, Project methodology & plan.
What I was a bit surprised is that people are still a bit confused when it comes to open source and the meaning of the term. Lot of people still divide solutions into 2 main groups:
- open source, simple, free, Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal kind of solutions and
- enterprise, serious, closed source, Sitecore/Adobe kind of solutions.
I explained few times at the session that situations is not that simple. Open source is a development model. There are vendors there that use this model to drive the innovation and build the community. They seek for sustainability with dual licensing, letting community editions to be free to use and give enterprise features and services to bigger customers who need such a thing. There are more vendors in CMS world that are going into this direction: eZ Publish that we use, but also Liferay, Magnolia, Acquia/Drupal, etc.
To conclude: had great times in Denmark, missed the Legoland in Billund for few weeks (closed in October), met a lot of interesting CMS people, hope to repeat the experience next year :)