The early days of web content authoring

With the arrival of Greg Dunlap's recent book on 'Designing Content Authoring Experiences', we are seeing a renewed interest in actually improving the experience for those authors, editors, marketers and others working with content.

As you know, the World Wide Web is based on a markup language called HTML, but perhaps you didn't know that in the early days of the Web, browsers were actually not read-only. If you had permissions, you could edit directly in the browser. That got lost and many years later, you have to log into a CMS, navigate to the content item, make your changes, click publish and wait.

In this members' call, we'll be joined by Web pioneer Steven Pemberton, who will talk about the very early days of web content authoring

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Five hard truths about AI in healthcare content and marketing

6 healthcare leaders (and me) attended the kickoff in the new healthcare content peer group in London a few days ago.

We naturally covered AI and here’s five hard truths:

1. Great AI solutions start with a bottleneck.
Everyone’s building tools, but few are solving the right problems. Don't ask how can we use AI. Ask what's still broken.

2. Best use cases are boring.
Forget flashy stuff like hyper-personalised content. Think smarter segmentation, faster insights, better messaging. Quiet improvements that add up.

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What a difference a year makes for the Adobe Universal Editor

Content teams know the frustration intimately. Monday morning starts with updating product descriptions in Shopify, switches to publishing blog posts in WordPress, then moves to campaign pages in Adobe Experience Manager. Each platform demands different skills, separate logins, and disconnected workflows. By lunch, three hours have disappeared into context switching rather than creating compelling content.

Managing content across disparate systems (e.g., AEM, e-commerce platforms, WordPress) creates operational nightmares. One global fashion retailer's content team spent excessive time navigating interfaces instead of content creation and strategy, requiring lengthy platform-specific training for new hires.

Over a year after the initial release, Adobe's Universal Editor has evolved into a unified editing layer for diverse platforms like WordPress, headless CMS, and traditional AEM, allowing teams to manage content through a single interface.

Solving the multi-platform content chaos is just one aspect. In this update, I’ll also share how the Universal Editor is removing the infamous learning curve tax associated with most CMS projects and how it is different when it comes enterprise control. I’ve also included some implementation considerations based on my experience and will wrap up with some recommendations for your implementation.

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Best Practices for Adopting a Secure Agentic Process Automation Setup

Did you ever watch “Minority Report”?

This post is inspired by the Future-Facing Lessons of the memorable movie with a look to business automation. In an age where automation is becoming increasingly autonomous, Agentic Process Automation (APA) represents the next frontier—intelligent agents that don’t just execute but reason, collaborate, and decide. As usual: With great power comes even greater security responsibility.

This future is not unlike the one portrayed in Minority Report, where a pre-crime system powered by predictive agents governs law enforcement decisions. While futuristic and efficient, the system's failure under ethical scrutiny reveals the critical need for secure, transparent, and accountable agentic operations.

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React Bricks wins European CMS Idol 25

“Can we have true visual editing coupled with a powerful headless CMS?”

This is the opening question that Matteo Frana, Founder and CEO at Italian-based React Bricks asked when he opened his winning six minute live demo at the CMS Summit 25 conference in Frankfurt earlier this month.

Held as a part of the European CMS Idols contest, React Bricks went up against five other vendors and Matteo convincingly answered his question using a new feature that was shown for the first time to the world. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a six minute live demo (no prerecorded stuff was allowed) gives you even more to tell what a system is capable of.

React Bricks competed against Hygraph, Kentico, Plate, Sulu and Webiny and won both the votes from the conference participants and the expert jury consisting of Baddy Sonja Breidert from 1xINTERNET, Jam from Open Strategy Partners and our North American peer group leader Matthew McQueeny.

So what did Matteo actually do to win?

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How to leave the doubt and excuses behind

Let's dream big again. This is the slightly unfashionable, yet timely theme that Düsseldorf-based digital leader Jasmin Guthmann explores in her new book titled If There Is a Will, There Is a Way.

The book covers getting big things done whether in business, life or sports and really resonated with me. I also know about the feeling of being stuck and working on leaving my self-doubt behind. Whether at work or in life, the ideas that Jasmin shares in her book will help you tackle excuses, turn doubt into something useful, break through challenges and achieve your goals.

Does that sound like just another motivational book? It’s not, it’s more personal, it’s more useful and in a recent member’s call we celebrated the new book.

The book is hot off the press as it came out on April 25. It’s a perfect summer read at just over 100 pages, so you can easily bring it to the beach or bring it with you on that long train ride.

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Why I've joined the CMS Experts

I had actually heard about this community for a while and after the inaugural Vancouver meeting in late March, I decided to formally join as well.

Here’s my four reasons:

1. Learning is the goal

We’re here to learn, share, question, uplift, and dig deep. You get back what you put in. Whether you're working through a challenge or sharing something your team accomplished that could help others, it's a space for honest exchange.

There are also opportunities to build or strengthen skills, like presenting, writing thought leadership pieces, demo’ing, and more.

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Content is King, but UX is the Scepter

Vendors have always claimed that their CMS or actually any digital system is easy-to-use, but is that actually the case? 

During the early days of 2025, we’ve seen several initiatives to further improve the user experience, some vendors have started to talk about "UI obsession," while others talk about "a race to usability," but how do you really wield the power of a truly remarkable good user experience?

In a recent members' call, Senior UX Designer Shannon Mølhave from Stibo Systems in Aarhus, talked about the importance of user experience and will focus on actionable ways to increase user satisfaction. We heard about reducing clutter, how consistency builds trust and quite a bit more…

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Lessons from The Terminator: Building Trust Between Humans and Agentic Process Automation

In the evolving landscape of automation, businesses are increasingly integrating autonomous AI agents into their workflows. However, the biggest challenge isn’t just implementing automation—it’s building trust between humans and AI.

Just as the relationship between John Connor and the T-800 evolved in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where distrust gave way to collaboration and reliance, organizations must foster a similar trust between employees and APA systems.

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Single use food packaging. Good for the environment?

One of the best things about being in an agency is the privilege of peaking behind the scenes in a wide variety of businesses and sectors. Being constantly delighted to discover that the world is a far more nuanced and interesting place than you ever believed it to be.

It turns out some things can be counter-intuitive. There was the call centre who launched an initiative to improve customer satisfaction, delivered all the right metrics, and saw customer satisfaction tank. There was the national healthcare chain who almost ruined their business by improving their website design & UX. And the global ecom brand who found they could shift palettes of expiring stock fast simply by putting it on their homepage.

Some years ago when the media outcry over food packaging was particularly intense I sat with a client concerned about the impact this was having on their business. Especially frustrating to them was….

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Digital sovereignty - bringing data back to Europe is not enough

Data sovereignty has become a big topic recently and it’s all about getting control of the data you generate, including where it can be stored, who can access it, and how it can be used.

In a recent members’ call, we heard from Mathias Bolt Lesniak, Oslo-based Project Ambassador at open source CMS TYPO3, who zoomed out from the current hype and talked about what digital sovereignty really means — the ability to act independently on all digital matters without undue influence from third parties.

What can we do as businesses and organisations and even as individuals to achieve digital sovereignty, and how big is this problem really?

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Introducing a new networking book: From Workout to Last Call

Whether you are introverts or extroverted, we can all level up their networking skills.

"From Workout to Last Call" is a new book due out by our Canadian networking expert Paul Abdool and the book title is analogous to always being ready to represent you and your company. 

The concept is simple, if you are awake at a conference, you should be “working”. When Paul says working, he is not saying that you should always be selling or pitching, but you should be ready to network by showing up from sunrise to the last opportunity to converse with someone. 

In a recent members' call, we heard more about the upcoming book and Paul kindly shared a few recent networking insights.

You can currently pre-order the book on Kickstarter and the book is due out in June. Networking is clearly a very relevant topic to this community….

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Recap of Vancouver CMS Experts kickoff

I had a great time and met some fantastic, knowledgeable folks at the inaugural Vancouver peer group meeting in the global CMS Experts/Digital Leaders community, held at TELUS on March 25.

Hosted by Paul (Toronto) and Janus (Denmark) from Boye & Co, the event brought together a cross-section of digital leaders to share ideas, explore emerging challenges, and discuss what’s top of mind in the CMS and digital services world.

My brain was buzzing with inspiration and ideas when Jodie Delore shared TransLink’s journey, and the strategic approach they’ve executed in translating content for riders whose first language isn’t English. And I was equally captivated when Morten Rand-Hendriksen from LinkedIn dove into the future of AI with some philosophical insights thrown in.

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Storyblok and accessibility - progress, pains and plans

“Awareness of the importance of web accessibility is increasing - and with good reason. For too long, people with disabilities have been overlooked. As developers, it's our responsibility to create inclusive experiences on the web - for everyone.”

This quote by Josefine Schaefer is on the accessibility statement at CMS vendor Storyblok. While born with a developer-first mindset, they have made a commitment to making the web a more inclusive, accessible space for everyone.

We recently invited Josefine to share their progress and roadmap for accessibility in a members’ call. Josefine works as an Accessibility Engineer to improve their products accessibility and it’s a role that very few CMS vendors have.

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Bridging Open Source & Enterprise - AEM, Composability, and the Future of DXPs

I've spent over 13 years implementing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) solutions for some of the world's most recognised brands. As Technical Design Authority for EE's AEM implementation, I led the creation of an 8,000-page help website and trained over 150 stakeholders in AEM usage. At DigitasLBi, I led a team of 30 global architects on the UK's largest AEM implementation for the Nissan/Renault Alliance, eventually targeting over 200 websites in 30 languages across five brands.

My work with MediaMonks brought me to projects for Twitter, Genesis USA, and McLaren, where we pushed beyond traditional AEM frameworks to create richer experiences. At Cognizant Netcentric, I advised on headless AEM implementations for Ford, and at Inspired Thinking Group, I consulted on Jaguar Land Rover's migration to AEM from Tridion CMS.

Then onto Ford Motor Company with Netcentric, where I architected a completely headless AEM implementation using React.

Latest endeavours include investigating Adobe  Edge Delivery Services (Franklin), a high-performance document-based authoring system with a modern build system, that is being integrated into AEM.

Throughout these experiences, I've witnessed first-hand how AEM has evolved from its open-source foundations to a comprehensive enterprise platform, and I'd like to share insights on where it's headed in an increasingly composable future.

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