TRIMM grows its skills at Magnolia conference in Basel
TRIMM grows its skills at Magnolia conference in Basel
This June (7th to 9th, 2016) saw the Magnolia conference take place in Basel. This is a three-day event during which Magnolia developers and digital business professionals convene to share, learn, and network. Attending on behalf of TRIMM were Director Jorens Thomassen and developer Jordie Diepeveen. We spoke with Jordie regarding his experiences at the event.
What did you get up to during the Magnolia Conference?
The conference days had a business track and technical track running parallel to each other. So Jorens attended the business track while I attended the technical track. On the first day I visited a workshop about personalization. It explored ways to make content more relevant for site visitors by using personalization. This generally means making the best use of information like a visitor’s country of residence and range of interests.
For example, if it becomes apparent after a first visit that a certain user is Chinese and browsed through quite a few use case pages about portal sites. Then during their next visit they’ll see a background theme that is more in line with Chinese culture, and case studies on portal sites will appear at the top of the webpage. We see the added value for our clients in this, and will shortly be employing this specific form of personalization for several of them.
The remaining two days were filled out with keynotes from several different speakers. IBM presented quite a few interesting talks, one of which dealt with the possibility to integrate IBM’s Marketing Cloud with Magnolia. This enables personalized content based on lead scores. In closing, Magnolia hosted several talks on new developments for the CMS.
My favorite thing about the conference’s last day was the “unconference” track running parallel to the planned activities. This allowed attendees to pitch their own subjects. When a certain topic received enough votes it was awarded its own session during the day. This “unconference” concept was a refreshing way to stir discussion on new developments and to engage with issues that partners face.
What are the most important new developments for Magnolia?
Probably the most important new development is the announcement of Magnolia NOW. Magnolia NOW is a “cloud-based digital experience platform”. The easiest way to explain this is by using a car-building analogy. Right now Magnolia sees itself as the engine and its clients - like TRIMM – build the rest of the car from scratch.
With Magnolia NOW, plenty of the tools and materials used for building are already in place. Practically that means things like hosting and support are already present in the Magnolia environment. This drastically speeds up the starting phase of development and allows for faster linking of modules. It will be focused on the enterprise market and offer plenty of options for “light development”. This is a method that enables developing modules and pages without any knowledge of Java.
Other important developments focus on personalization. For example, as of Magnolia 5.5 single components can be personalized. This removes the need to update content for every single version of a certain page when something changes.
What caught your attention during the conference?
I couldn’t help but notice during several of the technical track’s talks that many large businesses are looking for ways to shrink the gap between front-end and back-end developers. They often end up implementing changes separately due to poor integration, which often leads to doing everything twice. This is a problem we rarely encounter at TRIMM though, because our multidisciplinary teams are very used to collaborating efficiently.
Why is it important for TRIMM to be present at the Magnolia Conference?
First of all, you have to keep learning and you have to keep your Magnolia knowledge up to date. Other than that, it’s great to be among the first to get wind of new developments and trends.
There are also plenty of networking opportunities. Simply by being there you will engage with many other Magnolia professionals, which sets you up for discussions, questions, and knowledge-sharing. We continue this process of transferring information by imparting the knowledge to our colleagues who couldn’t join us in Basel.
Our presence in Basel is also a good thing for the relationship between TRIMM and Magnolia. Magnolia’s team is present at the conference, so you get a chance to talk to their directors as well as learn which faces match which support team members, which is great.
Magnolia doesn’t actually build any websites using their own product, so this makes user feedback extremely important to them. Several TRIMM colleagues are very active in Magnolia’s community by way of feedback and bug reporting. Magnolia’s team really appreciates these efforts. This is why they asked us to create a testimonial video on the way we use “light development” in our process. On the last day of the conference this video was displayed on the big screen, which was awesome!
Curious about seeing Jordie’s video? Click play below to watch it!