Thoughts on EPiServer Customer and Partner Day 2009

Yesterday I was at The Cumberland Hotel in London for this years EPiServer Customer and Partner day. It was the first time I've been to the event so I wasn't sure what to expect but over all I enjoyed the day.

Of the items on the itinerary the highlights for me were:

• EPiServer B2B Adapt and EPiServer B2B Prospect
  These two new products (although based on existing technolgies) offer fantiastic insight and extreamely easy integration with your EPiServer sites.
• EPiServer CMS 6 for Developers (and part 2)
  In these two talks we were shown how some of the new features of CMS 6 work which look like they're going to bring a lot of power and flexibility to the system.
  
  The Dynamic Data Store is built on a BigTable-esque schema and allows you (through the use of a few simple Class and Member attributes) to store and retieve any POCO or other class with ease.
  
  CMS 6 has a new user dashboard and we were also shown how to use ASP.NET MVC to build new dashboard widgets.

There wasn't really much bad stuff throughout the day, it was the usual mix of marketing babble and product releases, with the exception of one event. There was a presentation from the marketing director for SLH and the MD of their digital agency, Fortune Cookie.

I felt this talk lacked a real purpose as it meandered on for 40 minutes. Don't get me wrong, the guys doing the presentation seemed lively enough, but the thousands of bulleted slides didn't hold anything for the two audiences. To me, the Customers (of the Customers and Partners day) would have likes to be shown how SLH used specific features of EPiServer to achieve their business goals, and I don't mean shown like a "demonstration", just saying "XXX helped us achieve YYY", and as a Partner, I would have liked to have seen similar things.

Overall a good day, but I hope they pick a better closing act next time.