Tag Archives: episerver

DSB: How to keep the website up during extreme traffic peaks

Posted on January 27 2011 by Janus Boye
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On 23 December, Denmark was badly hit by a snow storm. DSB, Danish Railways, worked hard to get passengers to their destinations on the busiest travel day of the year. The combination of inclement weather and a very busy day, forced the company website, dsb.dk, to its knees.

Many organisations experience extreme traffic peaks on their website, sometimes expectedly; sometimes unexpectedly. I had a conversation with Thomas Jørgensen, system owner for the website in DSB's IT department. Thomas shared several crucial lessons learned on how to keep a busy site with regular peaks up and running, while also having prepared for when the unexpected happens.

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What actually lies ahead for EPiServer?

Posted on November 25 2010 by Janus Boye
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Acquisitions are usually seen as positive signs for those being acquired. Somehow, this one leaves a strange aftertaste with hints of turbulent times and notes of uncertainty for EPiServer. Customers and prospects in the US market may want to speak (and by “speak” I mean “really question”) to EPi about their future plans in this geography before planning on further investments in this Web CMS vendor.

From CMSWire: Web CMS Vendor EPiServer Acquired by a Surprising Buyer (Nov 10, 2010)

EPiserver logoIt has now been a few weeks after the change in ownership for Sweden-based Web CMS vendor EPiServer and the initial critical posting by industry publication CMSWire. Typical for this industry, the news has left many customers, including several of our members, puzzled. EPiServer was bought by a European private equity firm on November 10, but was that really a bad thing?

Here's our take from conversations with the wider community: While competitors are naturally fast to spin tales of doom, this is actually at worst a  "non-event" for prospects and customers, but may well turn out to be good news.

Since the EPiServer founder sold out to investors with global ambitions back in August 2007, EPiServer has been on a rapid growth path internationally and has successfully managed the transition from founder-led to investor-led. Unlike Danish arch rival Sitecore which went big internationally much earlier, EPiServer actually did not hire their first international employee until 2006 (in Denmark) and did not set foot in the US until early 2009. Today, EPiServer has partners around the world and staff in several European locations as well as a US team with local solution architects, sales, marketing and support. Experienced integration partners may still be few and far between in certain regions, but EPiServer has certainly come a long way since the founder left the company.

Unlike most direct competitors EPiServer has effectively been using venture funding to grow the company and it is highly unlikely that the newest owner, experienced European private equity IK Investment Partners, would have bought the company without being impressed by the management team and without having a detailed plan for continued growth. Replacing family ownership and multiple venture capitalists, this new single owner, positions EPiServer well in terms of preparing for 2011 and beyond in relation to their competitors Alterian, Ektron, Kentico, Sitecore and Telerik. To customers this should mean increased investments in local sales & marketing as well as engineering.

As this unfolding story illustrates, it is difficult to conclude what actually lies ahead for EPiServer. As a prospect or customer, our advice remains:

  • select implementation partner carefully
  • negotiate license and support cost, since modules and bundles can quickly get confusing and expensive
  • talk to the vendor
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Who should be on your CMS shortlist?

Posted on August 12 2009 by Janus Boye
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Selecting the right CMS is not an easy task with; there is in excess of 1,000 vendors in the very dynamic CMS marketplace. Unfortunately industry analysts tend to evaluate too many vendors for the needs of most buyers. Consider CMS Watch which has 42 systems in their Web CMS Report and Gartner with 18 vendors in their recently updated Magic Quadrant. How do you narrow it down even further, so you can get to a shortlist of vendors you should examine closer and potentially send your RFP to?

Based on our extensive experience with CMS selection, we have created the below Top 10 list with vendors you should always consider. This is geared towards buyers from large and complex organisations with significant web demands.

Web CMS Shortlist 2009

What it requires to be on the list:

  • Significant dedication to CMS. It does not have to be everything the vendor does, but to mitigate your risk, CMS has to be very important to them. This includes a history of relatively smooth upgrades combined with on-going technology investments in improving the system.
  • Global footprint. You can either find direct vendor representation or experienced partners in almost all parts of the world to help you with the implementation. There are also successful references around the world for you to learn from.
  • The vendor has something very significant to offer. This easily turns into yet another unhelpful long list, so we kept the list short and predict that the list will change in 2010. A vendor can only get on the list if we can remove another one. This means that many vendors, even though they might have interesting references, are not on this list.

You can reduce the list further by considering licensing and technology. Some on the list might also not have local partners in your region. If you feel troubled by suddenly having too few vendors, remember that you also need to find a good implementation partner to support you. To find the right one, you should send to more than one implementation partner for each vendor; this way you will easily end up with 10 - 12 qualified companies on your list.

Here a few comments about some of those missing from the list:

  • Microsoft is not on the list as neither SharePoint nor Oxite are good fits for Web CMS. Despite tremendous adoption, SharePoint is often chosen for the wrong reasons. Also, as mentioned on this blog, content management does not seem important to Microsoft. For additional details, you can consult our research on Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites.
  • Several other large vendors are absent, eg. Autonomy, IBM, Oracle, as they are often simply overkill for Web CMS. Not only are their products very expensive, but they are also very complex to implement and use. We challenge buyers who insist on adding them, that they carry additional risk due to the CMS being acquired from smaller vendors and their diminutive focus on WCM in the overall picture.
  • Many significant, but still regional vendors, eg. CoreMedia, e-Spirit and Terminalfour are left out as they do not yet have a global footprint. There are regional differences in the market, which we will cover in separate forthcoming blogs.
  • Alfresco has very good marketing, in particular for an open source vendor. The actual product is quite complex with weak usability and many on-going architectural changes.
  • Joomla lacks a few important features such as workflow, custom roles and custom content types. This combined with security concerns means that we do not always recommend Joomla.
  • WordPress is a very popular blogging platform, which might slowly be morphing into a CMS, but is still lacking in many enterprise features, including security. In too many regions it is also quite difficult to find any significant SI that offers WordPress implementation support.

Most CMS vendors are having a great time, c.f. recent earnings from Day Software, FatWire and Sitecore, but I'm hoping this list will help you save some time and confusion while navigating a still very crowded marketplace.

I welcome your feedback and stay tuned for regional shortlists soon!

Thanks to James Hoskins (@jameshoskins), John Goode (@johngoode), Jon Marks (@McBoof) and Mark Morell (@markmorrell) for valuable input.

UPDATE:  Aug 18 - In response to popular demand, I've released a wrap-up with additional background on the shortlist

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Don’t buy licenses from your system integrator

Posted on May 20 2009 by Janus Boye
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ContractThis week I've talked to several members in our community of practice who were all of the impression that CMS licenses can only be bought from system integrators. This is undoubtedly in the interest of your system integrator, but for the vendors I cover, you can buy the software directly from the vendor as well. In most cases this will be to your advantage.

Most recently a customer of Danish CMS vendor Sitecore told me that they had fired their system integrator and were now dealing directly with Sitecore. For a small additional sum the customer now had direct access to engineering and support. Interestingly Sitecore pride themselves on working exclusively through partners. To quote the Sitecore website:

Sitecore is completely dedicated to the Partner channel and has developed a program to maximize profitability for Partners with Sitecore solutions

In another case, Swedish CMS vendor EPiServer teamed up with their system integrator to try and convince a prospective customer that the system integrator was responsible for delivery and should therefore also be responsible for license delivery.

Apart from my usual concerns about corruption, here's why you should buy your software licenses directly from the vendor:

  • it will be easier to divorce your system integrator
  • closer relationship with the vendor, potentially with better support and direct engineering contacts
  • increased likelihood of getting a better price as you take out the intermediary

The only disadvantage is that this might take some escalation and negotiation. Also, your system integrator might be left unhappy, but remember that the customer is always right. Right?

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Use EPiServer for your website and keep SharePoint behind the firewall

Posted on December 21 2008 by Janus Boye
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Congrats to DSB, our former monopoly railway company in Denmark, on a recent relaunch of their website at dsb.dk using Swedish CMS vendor EPiServer. DSB seem to have come up with a successful recipe by adopting EPiServer for their public website and keeping SharePoint behind the firewall for knowledge sharing and collaboration. If you take a closer look at the site, please note the harmless URLs. Also, Urchin Software by Google is used for website analytics.

EPiServer opened their office in Denmark early in 2007. This represents a major milestone in terms of establishing local presence. I've talked to many customers around Europe who use the same combination of EPiServer and SharePoint. In some organisations they are closely integrated, e.g using EPiServer Connect for SharePoint, while in other organisations the 2 overlapping products simply co-exist. Both products are based on the same underlying technology, but many editors and business users considers EPiServer easier to use and implement, at least for public websites. In general, if you have requirements like accessibility or multiple languages, you'll probably need an alternative to SharePoint.

EPiServer has grown in recent years, yet it can still be hard to find experienced implementation partners  outside Sweden. I witnessed an extreme case of this last month, in Geneva where I met an English and a Swedish consultancy pitching for the same project and both offering EPiServer. If you don't mind travel costs, there is always the option to put consultants on the train and have them travel to you.

Finally, it is interesting to note that DSB is still listed as a featured case study on FatWire's website. FatWire CMS used to be the engine behind the DSB site and the English part of the DSB site is still based on FatWire. If they also migrate the English site, I expect that the link will stop working as it is vendor specific. FatWire no longer has an office in Scandinavia, so perhaps that's why nobody noticed that they actually migrated the site. This does not reflect particularly well on FatWire and serves as a useful reminder to the rest of us: be careful with where and when your let yourself use as a reference. Successful cases studies are extremely valuable for vendors and this is worth remembering, in particular when you negotiate discounts.

Update Dec 23: DSB is no longer listed as a customer case study on the FatWire site

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Smart practitioners have harmless URLs

Posted on December 15 2008 by Janus Boye
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I'm not that technical, but I'm frustrated that the problem with harmful URLs doesn't seem to want to go away. Microsoft's very own Jon Udell started 2008 with a very well written comment on .aspx considered harmful, but .aspx is still the standard default used in most SharePoint 2007-driven public websites. Over at CMS Watch, I did follow up on Udells comment with a posting on Location matters: URLs should be short, meaningful and permanent.

Today, many Web CMS vendors are actively promoting what they call friendly URLs, short URLs, nice URLs or whatever. Here are 2 quick examples:

The problem with the above examples is that they are technology and vendor-specific. They are highly unlikely to work in late 2010 as technology and vendors change. Sitecore might natively deliver URLs that Google likes, but bear in mind that the .aspx will not be state-of-the-art forever (just like it predecessor .asp) and once a new technology comes along, you will either end up with many broken links or you will need to spend time carefully managing redirects.

I'm sure you've experienced the dreaded Page Not Found 404 error. It happened to me earlier this evening on a large shopping site. When an enterprise presents a customer with a "404" the consequence is typically:

  • less sales as customer cannot find what he/she is looking for
  • user frustration due to expectations not being fulfilled
  • low rankings in Google search results
  • a browser bookmark or e-mail does not work, forcing the user to spend time finding the content (again)

Here are some good examples of harmless URLs from 3 different Danish organisations:

Try to take a closer look at the URLs on their sites for inspiration on how to get it right.

Note: Some vendors are worse than my 2 examples. However, to be fair, some vendors get it, e.g. EPiServer and eZ.

Do you know any other vendors that have got it right? Have you got any examples of vendors that still provide really nasty and harmful URLs? Likewise, let me know if you disagree and think this is not an important issue.

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Swedish CMS-vendor EPiServer keeps growing – still without setting foot in the US

Posted on November 11 2008 by Janus Boye
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I've been tracking Swedish CMS vendor EPiServer since late 2005. Many milestones later the company has now expanded far outside beyond its home shores, but unlike other ambitious and growing vendors, they have so far resisted the usual European temptation to attempt venturing into the US market. Quite unlike local competitor Sitecore, which have built a very visible presence in the US over the last few years.

In recent news from EPiServer they announced the release of the second edition of EPiServer CMS 5 in early October 2008. CMS 5 R2 has several improvements for editors and also a few more business user reports. Moreover, in October, EPiServer World reached 5,000 registered members, which is quite impressive for a CMS vendor community.

As a Microsoft ASP .NET 3.0-based Web Content Management system, EPiServer CMS seems to have been able to successfully fight off the immense interest in SharePoint 2007, even for public websites. Now 2 years after the release of MOSS 2007, my impression is that even Microsoft has recognised that their portal product has some shortcomings, and until Microsoft significantly improves the product, there is still a large market for website vendors like EPiServer.

Still, if you are considering EPiServer CMS for your projects, I would recommend that you set aside adequate  time to select the right implementation partner, in particular if you are based outside Sweden, where competent help may be harder to find. Some European countries, like Austria and Switzerland, still don't have any local EPiServer partners according to the listing of partners. If you are in a country without a local EPiServer office, interesting things have sometimes been known to happen when you talk to system integrators that have proposed EPiServer. Some might pull in help from HQ in Sweden, while others may work with another regional office.

Finally, I recommend taking a closer look at the detailed EPiServer evaluation in the Web CMS Report from CMS Watch.

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