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.

Installing EPiServer and VMWare ESXi

Wednesday this week our group IT manager Gordon brought us some new hardware to play with in the form of 3 HP DL308's (two G4's and one G3) which I think and hope we're going to consolidate our jumble sale of a server room onto for the most part with the use of VMWare's wonderful ESXi (version 3.5 because version 4 requires 64bit hardware and the VMWare compatibility list says the G3 and G4 are only compatible with 3.5).

I caught Matt just in time as he was about to install Windows 2003 on one of the G4's and got him to let me install ESXi on it. Which I did without hitch (except for when I couldn't get the networking to work, then I realised the Ethernet cable wasn't plugged in). Then it was a cinch to download the Infrastructure Client from the box and spin up a new VM and get Windows 2003 installed. Within an hour I'd got a new virtual development server up and running. Happy man.

Next up I downloaded and installed SQL Server 2005 Express, which didn't go quite to plan as the installer kept complaining that the SQL Native client installer package was missing. This was fixed by going into add/remove programs and uninstalling the (failed) Native Client install and starting the whole thing again.

Then came installing EPiServer CMS which was a completely painless task comprised of logging into EPiServer World and downloading the latest stable release (CMS 5 R2) and installing it, I then used the Deployment Centre utility to install the demo site for the team here to have a play with.

Job done!

Over the coming weeks I'm going to be posting a bunch more articles about my trials and tribulations with EPiServer which I'm looking forward to and hope will provide a nice chage from building brochure ware sites for purfume brands.

Getting to grips with EPiServer

A week ago I was in London for a 3 day training course for EPiServer CMS.

I really enjoyed the course and learning about the CMS, it looks like EPiServer could be one of the best commercial CMS's out there.

It comes with integration packages for Visual Studio which make using the features a doddle and I'm looking forward to using it on some projects in the future.

Watch this space for any tips and tricks I pick up along my way.