Last Friday, a few of our team attended the inaugural Kentico Partner Conference for the UK and Ireland partners. It was great to meet some of the team from Kentico that we chat to via email on a daily basis.
Around 70 other partners also attended, and we really enjoyed the opportunity to chat with them about their experiences too.
Opening Keynote - Petr Palas
The conference opened up with a informative update from Petr Palas, Founder and CEO of Kentico Software. It was impressive to hear that Kentico is now used on 6,000+ websites in 86+ countries, and that the rate of growth was increasing.
A major factor behind this growth is the Partner Network, with 1,200+ global partners all using Kentico CMS. By comparison, Sitecore and Episerver have around half that number, with the other competitors even less.
Petr went on to explain Kentico's vision, their future marketing plans and their impact on us, as Gold Partners. We were all invited to give feedback on the proposed changes (which we'll certainly be doing), and everything considered we think the changes will benefit the partners going forward.
A landmark date was also announced - 18 April 2011 - as the launch of the new UK Office. We're keen to learn what value this can bring to both our existing clients, and with pitching for new business.
Kentico 5.5 R2 Intranet Solution - Michal Neuwirth
Following Petr on the podium was Michal, the Product Manager from Kentico. He spent 30 minutes running through the new Intranet Solution that comes with version 5.5 R2.
The are some impressive features that come 'out of the box', such as document libraries and management, support for work groups, social networking support, project management tools and support for the WebDAV protocol.
I have a few reservations about the new Intranet Solution, partly because I've yet to see it working in a commercial environment, but more importantly because I believe that most Intranets are so bespoke that trying to cater for all in one product will result in a monster that is a nightmare to update.
Hopefully, Kentico's structure of CMS Modules, Document Types, Web Parts and Widgets will make this easier, but the thought of applying a Hotfix or Upgrade makes me uneasy at the moment.
Selling Kentico Against Open Source - Wayne Jasek
Next up was Wayne, one of the Account Managers at Kentico, and a very outgoing and enthusiastic character. I've spoken to Wayne previously about this exact topic, so it was interesting to hear some of the statistics that Wayne had researched.
Although Distinction are Kentico Gold Partners, we actually choose to use open source solutions for some projects. As Wayne explained, the crucial factor to consider when deciding which CMS to use should be the total cost of ownership, not simply the financial cost of a license.
It's vital, therefore, that we as Partners convey the benefits of using Kentico CMS as a viable, cost-effective, long-term solution to web content management.
An Agency View - James Cannings
After an excellent lunch, James the CTO and Joint MD from MMT Digital took to the stage to discuss how they approached Kentico development.
James explained how they choose between developing with Modules or Custom Document Types, and between Webparts or Widgets, and showed how they wireframed their solutions using Axure.
It was great to hear how similar our own decision and development processes are to those of MMT. James went on to show how easy it is to create a 'bad' website (using any CMS, not just Kentico), and emphasised the role of training both for your internal teams, and the clients.
We echo his 'call to arms' for all Partners to design and develop with Kentico more responsibly in order to benefit us all.
What's New in Kentico 6.0 - Martin Hejtmanek
Martin, the CTO of Kentico, stepped up next to talk through the new version 6.0. You could hear a pin drop during Martin's talk as people listened intently to the huge amount of new features that are planned.
The new features warrant a blog post in their own right, but a few that we're really looking forward to are the online marketing modules, improved ecommerce module, the integration of LINQ and 'K#', plus all the smaller enhancements that together make Kentico even more usable.
We'll certainly be downloading the CTP version to have a play around. It's just a shame we have to wait until September 2011 before it's released...
Windows Azure Platform - What, Why & How? - Simon Davies
The last talk was from Simon, a Windows Azure Technical Specialist from Microsoft, who must have seen a few tired faces in the audience and kept his talk fairly light.
Windows Azure includes computing, storage and network services provided by the Windows Azure platform. Despite Michal's great post on cloud computing, and Dominik's introduction to Windows Azure, it was good to hear how easily Kentico can work on the Windows Azure Platform directly from Simon.
Azure, along with Amazon EC2, is sure to feature heavily in our future developments with Kentico CMS.
Networking
To wrap up the event, there was an opportunity to network with fellow Kentico Partners over a beer or two! We've hopefully made some good connections that we'll look to build on at future Kentico conferences.
In Summary...
We've taken inspiration from Sam Brown and decided to put together our experience graph, collating the experiences of Greg, Adrian, Andreas and myself into one chart.
Take a peak below and let us know how it compares to your own experiences:
Finally, thanks must go to Kentico and MMT Digital for organising the event.
Posted: 04/04/2011 09:00:00 by
James Bloor
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