Tuesday 19 November meant a grand day out for Stephen and myself with a trip down to London for the EPiServer’s Customer and Partner day held at the Hyatt Regency. We spent the day learning about the new features of EPiserver 7.5 followed by an awards ceremony with a rather nice surprise at the end of it!
The day started with an introduction and inspiring presentation from the UK CEO about the state of the market including ubiquitous paradigms, market phase and customer experience management. It was clear that if you’re not looking at the customer experience/journey you’re going to be left behind. Then came the EPiServer presentation on the new version 7.5 which connects digital marketing and e-commerce with the same editor experience. At the Developer’s sessions I was interested to learn that the media items are now treated like content types – so much more customisation is possible which brings it inline with other CMS like Umbraco. This makes it possible to add a built in file preview with Google Docs Viewer. EPiServer will not now need to be installed on a server and the virtual file folder will not be required so deployment will be a lot easier in the next version.
Another new feature is Find – Elastic Search, with a good example demonstrated with products on Google Maps using the Geocode component from Nuget. It also allows faceting and filtering.
In addition the improvements to the EPiServer eCommerce functionality include a more unified experience for editors like the media item improvements. In the Connectors and Add-ons session we looked at how to use Nuget to produce packages of functionality for easy deployment and starting points. Pages and blocks can be packaged.
The last session covered how to avoid pitfalls in your eCommerce implementation by following basic project management and getting the payments provider approved and working first. The Product Roadmap version 7.5 should launch before Christmas.
Finally, the day ended with the EPiServer Awards 2013 where EPiServer announced the winners of its annual UK Partner of the Year awards in the UK.
- Associated Partner of the Year – Delineo
- Solution Partner of the Year – Amaze
We are very pleased and proud to have won Associate Partner alongside our Manchester neighbour, Amaze who also picked up an award!