Swedish Police rounding up violators

If someone was to ask me what the difference is between EPiServer Content Management System Versions 4, 5 and 6, the three words in this post’s headline stand out the most. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many ‘license violation’ warnings on a software install than our recent roll-out of EPiServer 6 and its associated add-on modules. At times, I’ve half expected the Swedish police to come crashing through the doors and windows as the latest black on yellow warning notice flashes up 😉

As commented by John Goode on Twitter and in his recent ‘Profit Imperative’ blog post, the reason for EPiServer’s significant changes to its licence model earlier this year became clear, with its acquisition earlier this month by IK Investments.

This prompted me to look back at previous comments I’ve made relating to EPiServer in this blog over the last couple of years that started following a visit to Stockholm. In doing so, the following comment, written after attending the 2009 UK Customer Day stood out…

As with many activities and tools where you spend a fair amount of your working life, ‘familiarity can breed contempt’ and I think the real test for me will be EPiServer and its partner bases’ ability to recognise and address key pain points and bugs quickly. If developing the latest and greatest functionality comes at the expense of improving the core web content management capabilities that make for a reliable, productive and effective user experience, then EPiServer will risk turning off established and loyal customers who are its best advocates and often help to do the marketing job for them.

hmmm… so having selected EPiServer based on very positive experiences in two previous projects, I have to say I’m disappointed with the direction things have been going with things in the last six months or so.

Over the years I think I’ve developed a bit of a gut feel when it comes to evaluating software and whether it represents value for money and will deliver a Return On Investment.

When I first used EPiServer, it exceeded my expectations. It was a user friendly, adaptable and flexible solution that was a solid platform for consolidating multiple international websites into one environment. There seemed to be some flexibility in the licensing model that helped keep the product affordable for achieving ambitious global goals and adapting to changing marketing demands. I was also impressed with the speed of innovation and the ability of the company to deliver some big chunks of development such as the community and ecommerce capabilities through smart partner/community development, acquisition and partnership.

Having started to use and experiment with open source content technologies in recent years, I think what also appealed to me a lot about EPiServer, as an organisation, is that it seemed to be evolving into a potentially powerful hybrid of a well established and proven commercial developer that was increasingly adopting open source philosophies and best practices. As there is a growing trend within open source towards commercialised operations ie; Drupal/Acquia I think it’s healthy to see commercial operators heading for the middle ground from the other direction.

Sadly then, other than some largely cosmetic changes to the interface, the only difference I’ve really noticed with EPiServer 6 are repeated ‘license violation’ warnings popping up all over the place. Whereas in the past, I’ve felt keen to experiment and stretch the solution in new business and marketing scenarios, the frequency and prevalence of these license violation warnings make me feel extremely cautious about planning subsequent phases of development as I get the sense they are going to come with bigger and bigger price tags attached.

A year ago, I wrote a piece about the ‘future of Web Content Management’ in which I emphasised the importance of user experience. A classic example of this is the layer upon layer of dialog boxes that you have to click through to undertake core content management functions such as adding images and links. These are things that impact productivity and ease of use, particularly if you have to remember where to click to achieve a particular task. In that post, I linked to this article on the age of user experience and I’ve summarised the key points below…

1. More features isn’t better:
2. You can’t make things easier by adding to them:
3. Confusion is the ultimate deal breaker:
4. Style matters:
5. Only features that provide a good user experience will be used:
6. Any feature that requires learning will be adopted by only a small fraction of users:
7. Unused features are useless and diminish ease of use:
8. Users do not want to think about technology; what counts is what it does for them:
9. Forget about the killer feature: the new killer app is a killer user experience
10. Less is difficult; that’s why less is more.

I particularly like the explanation of point 10…

Do well what 80% percent of your users do all the time (and don’t worry about the other 20% who want to do more) and you create a good user experience.

I’ll finish this post with a link to another recent article by John Goode, which emphasises the importance of ‘customer advocacy’ in software development and provides further illustration of the points above.