Past CMS Experts meetings

The CMS Expert community goes back over a decade. We started in 2008 with the idea to bring customers, analysts, vendors and agencies together in this forum. In 2011 we then also launched a local chapter in North America.

This page is created in the spirit of the famous quote by American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan:

"You have to know the past to understand the present”

Enjoy some of the highlights during the years below - more to come. Get in touch if you are missing something or have a fond memory to contribute.

For 2025, see the page with Past 2025 CMS Experts meetings

2024 CMS Experts sessions

In October, we held our first ever group meeting in Montréal as a follow up to the sold out CMS Connect 24 conference. Sid Lee hosted us and Nika Karliuchenku from TELUS shared a brief summary.

After over a decade of active membership, Jonathan Healey at idhl in Leeds finally got to host us in early June. He opened with an honest talk about about agency challenges (second generation leadership, vendor expectations) and much more. Also on the program was:

• WordPress wunderkid Ryan McCue from Human Made who reminded us how important Google is and alerted us to some of the recent big changes in SEO land

• The Life Of An Optimizely Developer by Graham Carr from 26 DX

• A marketplace update by Nick Condon at Squiz. Squiz is clearly making waves at the moment in both the US and Europe

• A path to find the true North of Content Management and a call to easier systems to use and support by Gavin Colborne from Little Forest

May in NYC…which was including a session on Universal CMS by Preston So

and Berlin…more coming soon

Also in April, Amsterdam…more coming soon

New insights can also come from meeting in new places and our growing Toronto community took it to the next level in April, where we met at Curatus, a cool wine club. Thanks for Chris Bryce from dotfusion for making it happen.

Ken Gray from Konabos shared these three key takeaways:

• Cathy McKnight from The Content Advisory started us off and shared many insights and provoking questions. I particularly liked, "content needs to be treated as a strategic function of the business."

• Sana Remekie from Conscia.ai was in her usual thought-leadership form and shared how their DX Graph and DX Engine are helping to future-proof the martech stack and connect disparate data into unified and enriched datasets.

• Mark Ruddock, CEO of Kontent.ai shared some key insights on how we need to be thinking about a "CMS" present/future that includes AI and how in the next few years we may simply "talk to our CMS" and within minutes have a landing page up and running on all desired channels!

We also had a guest star appearance from Ann Rockley, who authored Managing Enterprise Content - A Unified Content Strategy in 2003. The 2nd edition came out in 2012 and we shared reflections on the importance of content strategy, now more so than ever with the growing demands on content.

It's more confusing now to be a buyer than just 5 years ago. This was one of the key points earlier in April where we held our first ever meeting in San Jose. Thanks to Lucie Hyde & Titus Woo and colleagues for having us at the impressive PayPal HQ.

Among the key take aways were how difficult it is to navigate the ever changing marketplace. Expectations keep going up and the real challenge is how to leapfrog to the next level.

Our first European meeting was held in London, where MMT Digital hosted us and the room was packed. Among the participants were Paola Roccuzzo, who facilitated a a brilliant conversation on the "race to the middle", that is the perceived blurring of features and market fit between headless and traditional CMS. She made the following points:

• author experience in the 20ies cannot be just modelled on the long-form content lifecycle

• the content design/UX writing profession is either sidelined or cut out from the 'means of production': Figma, design systems and code repos

• none of them is a solution fit for content management anyway, so lots of companies aren't getting enough value from these disciplines: they just get what they often perceive as an expensive add on for prototyping who can't even check what's in production until too late

• they don't even know that headless could help, because nobody is telling them, and there's a shocking lack of case studies and best practice to be inspired by

• in the meantime the "design to production" market is full of Figma plugins, poorly thought through design system and DS tech, with a handful of heroes like Kate Kenyon bootstrapping content operations with ingenious solutions (but not everyone is lucky enough to have a Kate)

• and last but not least, sure, there's a need to check things before they go live, but how much static site generation do we see in this bold bright LLM-driven future? Maybe we need to shift the paradigm.

As per tradition, we started the year with CMS Kickoff 24 held once again at the Pink Palace at St. Pete Beach, Florida. This time we grew to about 80 participants and brought together participants from Europe and North America. One of the European participants, were Benjamin Mack who shared Being TYPO3 at CMS Kickoff 2024.

2023 CMS Experts sessions

What does AEM Franklin & Movable Type have in common? In October, we held our first ever meeting in Sacramento and with Adam Kalsey, Deane Barker and Mark Demeny looking both to the past and to the future.

As the quote goes:

"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it"

Thanks also to everyone who shared on the program:

• Greg Dunlap for focus on editorial experience. Can't wait to read the book on designing content authoring experiences

• Jeff Dillon with an update on Squiz including search, DXP, higher education challenges and more

• Makram Mansour from Intuit with an update on their Customer Experience Optimization Platform

• Matthew McQueeny with a fresh update from Kentico Connections in Nashville

• Nicole Rogers for talking copilots and AI. Good luck launching ai12z, a new start-up focused on empowering your business with generative AI.

• Sam Bhagwat for bringing copies of the Modular book and making us think about what we might learn from larger market categories like CRM

A great first ever session in Sacramento. We'll be back!

We also had good times in Toronto for our 1st ever Canadian CMS Experts meeting held in July! We talked about content model pollution, headless struggles & how composable leads to reorgs.

Thanks Dotfusion for hosting us, to our speakers Andrew Kumar from Uniform, Nabil Orfali from TechGuilds and case studies by Metrolinx and TELUS

….more to follow up European meetings in 2023 and also the Chrysler Building session in NYC…

We started the year with the inaugural CMS Kickoff 23 in Florida and we wrapped up the Q1 London meeting with an informal lunch

2019 CMS Experts sessions

2018 CMS Experts sessions

In Europe, we met in late January in London for a fascinating visit to Channel 4 where Dan Jackson hosted us and we saw the innovative implementation of video on demand, websites on Acquia (managed Drupal) and a quite complex architecture.

Another customer story we heard about was from the GSK digital team, which showed us their FECA measurement framework (Familiarity, Engagement, Conversion, Advocacy).

Progressive Web Apps was also big theme. Essentially websites that work offline, except for on iOS at the moment.

As a guest speaker, we were joined by Cleve Gibbon from Cognifide with a thought-provoking session titled: “Being platformed”. In short: A management framework, a systematic & sustainable approach to grow and scale digital.

In the Americas, we moved our annual Washington DC kickoff to Florida and started the year with our North American members in Miami, where Magnolia hosted us.

Here’s what we laid out as the key topics for 2018:

• the new B2B and B2C buyers

• delivering amazing customer experience

• conversational design

• privacy

• accessibility

2017 CMS Experts sessions

"Curiosity is my driver"

That's how we started our Frankfurt session in September 2017 with content technologists and CMS experts hosted by Christian Köhler at byte5 in their friendly office

Big themes were:

• discipline of execution

• gamification

• millennials with different expectations

• speed and time to market

And Boris Kraft (co-founder Magnolia) quoted Charles Eames:

"Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se."

2016 CMS Experts sessions

On June 23, we had a great and warm day with digital leaders in Basel meeting at Magnolia HQ. Talking cloud, developers, mobile, personalisation, constant launch mode and other topics.

Quite impressive was the insights from our host Boris Kraft who co-founded Swiss software firm Magnolia. From 0 to hero in our book.

As per tradition, we met in Boston for our US meeting in September.

Jeff Cram hosted us in charming District Hall and we had Eric Hellweg, Managing Director, Product Management and Digital Strategy at Harvard Business Review as our guest speaker.

2014 CMS Experts sessions

Sitecore hosted us in Copenhagen on February 4, 2014 where we walked to the Danish Parliament, known from the TV-Series Borgen.

2013 CMS Experts sessions

In February we met in London with UCL as our host in the famous Cruciform building. Unfortunately there was no heat, so it was quite cold. Alan Pelz-Sharpe gave a highly rated analyst talk and among the participants were Kentico founder Petr Palas, Magnolia founder Boris Kraft and Sitecore founder Lars Fløe Nielsen.

We finished 2013 with a session in Utrecht where Oracle (!) hosted us and Rasmus Skjoldan gave a memorable update on the state of the inline debate.

2012

….coming soon

2011

In March we launched in Americas with a kick-off meeting held at the Danish Consulate on Manhattan. We had Bob Boiko (author of CM Bible) and Seth Gottlieb among the speakers.