German software vendor Staffbase is eying the broader market for corporate communication and indeed many talks and themes on the agenda at their VOICES 2024 conference in Berlin went far beyond the usual intranet topics.
Known for changing the game with their employee app approach, Staffbase has made it to the top of the charts for delivering modern intranets in a packaged solution. Or to be blunt: An alternative to the SharePoint intranets that tend to come up short and which historically has been loved by few.
We’ve followed them since the early days a decade ago, when they were called eyo and mostly delivered features like forms, calendars, and menu plans. Still back then they did more than just ship features, but looked broadly at the pain points of internal communication.
With ‘Inspiration’ as the key theme at VOICES 2024 coupled with some major product announcements, you don't need to be a seasoned industry analyst to see that they are going after a bigger market. Also, similar to the movement we are seeing from other software companies, winning the hearts and minds of the agencies is key and Staffbase also used their conference to share a new partner program. This also resonates with customers increasingly turning to their trusted agencies to make vendor decisions.
Based on conversations and the presentations I watched in Berlin, I'll share my perspective on the conference, key takeaways from some of the major customers who shared their experiences and finally how the Staffbase narrative is changing and what it means for you.
Read moreWith a new promise to deliver “an unparalleled return on your content”, CMS vendor Kontent.ai takes a different approach in a marketplace where many vendors, for good and bad, have turned to tech talk on AI, composability and going headless.
Recently they’ve introduced Mission Control, a dashboard for your content value chain, and now they’ve also completed a remarkable rebranding positioning them to firmly carve their place in the crowded marketplace.
Kontent.ai is certainly a VC-backed vendor looking for next level growth, but besides product launches and marketing changes, I also sense they are accommodating the changing ways how enterprise customers select a CMS.
A focus on your content requires changes to how you manage content, so let’s start with looking at what they’ve delivered in the product.
Read moreWe live in an era when healthcare is getting more complex, not less. Health literacy is low, due to a combination of the complexity of the system, the complexity of the human body, and the state many people are in when they get to their providers.
Patients and their families or friends are stressed, scared, and struggling to focus at the times they most need to use our websites, read our articles, or interact with our devices. This can lead to anything from higher costs to misused prescriptions.
Where do content creators come in? In our digital world, content strategy can be the key to educating and guiding patients and families, helping them to better work with their healthcare providers.
Marli Mesibov works as a content strategy lead at life sciences firm Verily and in a recent member’s call, she introduced us to the concept of health literacy and shared examples of how content strategy can impact health.
Read moreAdobe Experience Manager (AEM) is widely recognized as one of the market leaders in the enterprise CMS space and they don’t seem to be resting on their laurels.
Last year they released Edge Delivery Services, which had a big impact for AEM customers to help deliver websites at top performance and also Project Helix (earlier referred to as Franklin) enabling marketers and content teams to use their favorite tools, such as Word, Excel, Google Docs, and Google Sheets with GDrive or Sharepoint, to create stunning, responsive websites with perfect lighthouse scores.
Fast forward and Adobe unveiled the Universal Editor for AEM with Edge Delivery Services at Adobe Summit 2024 in late March. With Universal Editor, they’ve changed both how content creators and developers interact with the CMS.
As you might expect with a new component model there are migration challenges and the previous AEM components do not work with the Edge Delivery Services in the Universal Editor.
Adobe recommends using one authoring method; for most existing organisations shifting to the new world there are many changes to be made, this is similar to replatforming your website, if your organisation uses multi-sites then all sites must be migrated at once.
Let’s look closer at why the Universal Editor matters and the implications for customers.
Read moreAcross all industries, organizations are exploring how to leverage the power of Generative AI. Everyone is talking about AI today, but how can you take advantage of this in the content management world? How can you leverage all the content you’ve created and combine that with AI to provide a great experience for your customers?
In a recent members’ call we heard from Nicole Rogers from "Generative AI Copilots" - startup ai12z. Nicole shared how Generative AI can be combined with your content and your CMS to enhance your site visitors’ web experiences. Examples of how you can incorporate this technology right on your website includes:
A chatbot in the corner of your website to answer your site visitors’ questions about your products and services.
Digital assistants (aka “copilots”) to help them along their journey, providing personalized recommendations and assisting in completing tasks like making a purchase.
AI-powered search to respond to your users’ search queries with detailed summaries.
Read moreDigital product equity is at the intersection of futures thinking, inclusive design and product accessibility.
In a recent members’ call, Toronto-based UX researcher Christina Scriven from our design leadership community looked at how the tech industry leaders are approaching the concept, and offered ideas about how you could bring product equity practices into your organisation.
Christina most recently worked as Customer Segments Manager at Scotiabank reporting into the Head of Accessibility and Digital Product Equity.
During the summer of 2023, Christina did an extensive industry scan of digital equity best practices to both consolidate key themes and to better inform customer experience leaders on industry approaches and in our call she shared her findings.
Read moreIt's now been two months since CMS Kickoff 24 in January in Florida and for a recent member's call we heard reflections on the impact of AI from seasoned CMS consultant Tom Cranstoun who joined us from the UK.
While CMS Kickoff 24 wasn't all about AI, the speakers made Tom rethink AI's role in content management. Given the translation, bias, regulation challenges and lack of trust in AI, one needs to employ reviewers and editors to correct the content; AI is better suited for consuming content.
Let’s think that the current state of AI creating content is a beta experiment, best left to the tech guys; we have a business to think of.
In this call, Tom shared how AI Simplicity affects your business, the need for better content modelling and also the key responsibility of an emerging team role: The AI evangelist.
Read moreSelecting the right CMS has never been easy and the marketplace remains confusing, crowded and full of new buzzwords.
At the same time, selecting the right one has probably never been more important with increasing demands and expectations both internally and externally. A good website and a good digital platform to power it five years ago doesn’t necessarily cut it in 2024. Many organisations have found themselves with massive technical debt and forced to migrate to another solution.
In a recent member’s call we heard an interesting non-profit case study from Web Team Leader Genc Kastrati at The Global Fund in Geneva. They’ve been using commercial open source CMS Umbraco to power their multilingual website for over 7 years and are quite happy with it.
The Global Fund is a Geneva-based worldwide movement to defeat HIV, TB and malaria and ensure a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all. Let’s start with a big picture of the Umbraco setup at The Global Fund.
Read moreThe hype around that thing called AI can be deafening and it’s quite overwhelming to try to stay on top of all the seemingly relevant AI developments.
To help us untangle what’s really happening and the impact it is having, we recently invited digital platform product lead Seb Barre from TELUS in Toronto to walk us through how he sees the big picture and notable changes.
Seb made the interesting point that we are entering a new do-it-yourself era for generative AI. While the first wave (last year) was dominated by large, proprietary offerings, including OpenAI, today other options have arrived on the scene, which allows organisations to seize new use cases and also approach it with more flexibility and lower cost attached.
As expected, it became a 30-minute packed member’s call on large language models, action models, new devices, privacy, how search is failing us, open source and much more. Seb shared plenty of interesting tools and also shared how to get your organisation to embrace AI.
Read more“The world is in need of better design, and Kozma’s book shows us how to get there.”
Last year Robert Kozma published "Make the World a Better Place: Design with Passion, Purpose, and Values".
The book has been well received and presents an insightful and hands-on discussion of design as a profoundly human activity and challenges us all to use design to transform the world for the better. The book explains how and why the design industry lost its way, and how to re-ignite the idealism that once made it a force for good.
Robert Kozma is a San Francisco-based author, researcher, and consultant with over 40 years of experience in technology, education, and social development. As an emeritus principal scientist at SRI International, he has collaborated with ministries of education, national agencies, multinational organizations, and high tech companies on how to use information and communication technology to transform education and support economic and social development
Make the World a Better Place describes a set of moral principles, based on our shared humanity, that can be used to create “good” designs: designs that reduce harm, increase well-being, advance knowledge, promote equality, address injustice, and build supportive, compassionate relationships and communities.
Read moreWe all have a responsibility to make sure we are implementing green, responsible systems of the future.
In a recent member's call, Andy Eva-Dale from UK-based digital agency Tangent shed light on ICT emissions and where we sit as an industry in the global carbon emissions story.
As the Technical Director at Tangent, Andy mentors a 45+ strong department, creating cloud-first, scalable, robust, secure, globally distributed applications. Andy is active in the community, championing sustainable system design, diversity in tech and dyslexia awareness
In the call he took us through “10 Do’s and Don’ts of Sustainable Systems” with actionable ideas and features of green system implementation and design. He also drew attention to the parallels between performance, scalability, cost saving and carbon with real-world metrics from some of the projects they’ve delivered at Tangent. In addition, we looked at what the big hosting platforms are doing to tackle the problem, as well as how best to measure your systems from a carbon and cost perspective.
As a final bonus, Andy provided a brief progress update on the new Umbraco Sustainability Team.
Read moreCan Arnold Schwarzenegger somehow help us make digital experiences better? This question was on my mind as I left the Ibexa Global Partner Conference 2024 held on the sunny Spanish island of Mallorca.
With over 200 participants joining, mostly from Europe, but also from further away, CEO Bertrand Maugain took the stage in his opening talk with an update on how the business keeps growing and how Ibexa now fits into the larger QNTM Group composable ecosystem.
Let’s zoom out: Ibexa is a well-established DXP vendor, who focused on B2B e-commerce and has grown from their roots in Norway to now in particular having a stronghold in Germany and France.
Read moreCool dashboards are not something we are used to seeing among CMS vendors, but it’s one of the things that stood out from the winning Directus demo at the prestigious CMS Idol 2024 contest held last week at CMS Kickoff 24 conference in Florida.
Directus is an open source composable CMS and CEO and Cofounder Ben Haynes did the one-man-show which won both big majority of the votes and also the stamp of approval from the three judges.
With each vendor being given only six minutes to their pitch, Ben managed to mix his time with both a few slides to set the stage and the live demo.
Read moreOpen Source technology, practices, and thinking have revolutionized how we innovate, collaborate, and do business. The impact goes beyond our daily work and paying our rent. Open source is everywhere; we won! But there's a downside.
The open source community has been so busy with our success that we have forgotten to tell people what makes us and Open Source different. We must remember how radical and important Open Source is. It is extraordinary that we build international communities of experts sharing our best ideas, building businesses, and creating value.
Open Source — and we — have the potential to create more positive change in the world. And we need to tell the world ... again. Right now, proprietary systems and vendors are winning pitches in government and elsewhere that should be no-brainers for Open Source solutions.
In a recent member's call, open source evangelists Jeffrey A. "jam" Mcguire and Mathias Bolt Lesniak reminded us about the open source value proposition, told us what comes next, and how to make sure we can continue to make a positive difference with Open Source in the future.
Read more"By standing together, we can build a better version of the tech industry."
Ethan Marcotte published a new book back in August and it's all about improving the industry that many of us work in.
Ethan is a web designer, speaker, and author. He’s perhaps best known for creating responsive web design, which helped the industry discover a new way of designing for the ever-changing web.
In his new book - You Deserve a Tech Union - he shares a how-to guide, a history lesson, and a manifesto all in one.
In a recent member’s call Ethan joined an talked more about the resurgent labor movement in the tech industry, why unions matter and why you—yes, you—deserve a tech union.
Read more