I’ve spent a very pleasant couple of days this week in Sweden attending the EPiServer annual partner and customer event held in and around Stockholm.

Firstly, it was interesting to visit a place so used to operating in sub-zero temperatures and constant snowfall. Unlike the south of the UK, for instance, that grinds to a standstill after a couple of inches of the white stuff lands. The views of Stockholm in the snow were quite magical in places and the myriad of islands, set in frozen seas with their bridges and tunnels made for a very interesting and engaging city experience.

As for the conference itself, I was very impressed with the latest developments of the EPiServer Content Management System and much of what I saw and heard validated the decision to use it for the project I am running in my professional life.

Web Content Management in one form or another has featured strongly in my career over the last 15 or so years – from the utter frustration of helping build and maintain a corporate site in html way back in 1994, to specifying and managing bespoke CMS developments between 1997-2000, helping deploy a global enterprise CMS initiative between 2000-2003, working for CMS/hosted services vendors between 2003 and 2008 and now project managing a global CMS and eCommerce deployment for a consumer products business.

I guess this gives me quite a rounded perspective on the CMS industry, an area that continues to grow and develop and will likely be reasonably recession proof as organisations shift more of their focus online.

The highlight of the conference for me was a keynote by the Forrester Group’s Tim Walters entitled “The end of web content management and other welcome developments”. This title seems to imply the opposite of what I’ve just said in the previous paragraph but was really a pragmatic assessment of how web content management has moved on with the advent of the social web and indeed tools like WordPress here that I am using for this blog.

In fact, you may notice in the archives that this blog started as an idea back in 2006 but didn’t progress from being just that until recently. It is very interesting to see how WordPress itself has developed considerably in that time and reminds of an article I wrote a couple of years back now (which is still being used here) where I observed, amongst other things, how the difference between blogging tools and CMS capabilities was becoming more and more minimal.

Likewise, the EPiServer conference illustrated just how far some of the mid-market CMS providers have come in that time in integrating meaningful social media developments into their systems.

Besides the insight into new developments, the conference  was also a great opportunity to chat with others who have experienced the evolution of WCM since the mid and late 90s and it was encouraging to find very similar conclusions being made on who the movers and shakers are in this industry right now. More on this in future posts.