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Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Content and Growth are the Focus at Episerver Ascend 2019

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Each year Episerver organizes the Ascend conference to showcase achievements and accomplishments for the product, the company, and the community. They also layout their roadmap for the future. Each day kicks off with a keynote that is usually intriguing, thought-provoking, or inspirational. A series of breakout sessions, developer labs, and networking opportunities follow. It's a great way for developers, partners, customers, and Epi employees to connect and learn from each other's experiences in the Episerver market.

Now that Ascend 2019 is over, these are a few of my takeaways:

Growth Continues

During the Day 1 Keynote, Justin Anovick, Episerver's Chief Product Officer, and various other Episerver leadership, took the stage to talk about product and community growth. Statistics showed the conference growing by upwards of 200 more attendees over last year. There are now more than 4000 domains using the Episerver platform, and the number hosted on DXC, Episerver's Cloud offering, has increased by more than 200%.


There was also a special focus on the growing Episerver Community, with all the eMVPs in attendance - approximately 34 of them - taking the stage. Between 2018 and 2019, the eMVP community almost doubled to 56. For me, as an eMVP, this attention on the eMVP program was especially exciting because it emphasized the value that Episerver sees with having experts actively involved in their community. It also provides an incentive for others in the community to grow their Episerver knowledge and community contributions.

Content Connects Us

Ascend 2019 followed the same formula as past years, but with a slightly different focus. In the past, a strong emphasis has been made on Episerver being a powerful Commerce platform. Last year centered around the growth of Commerce in a competitive market, and the tools that enable businesses to serve unique experiences to their Commerce customers. This year, as Dean Barker delivered his Keynote on the value of Content and how it connects us, the emphasis shifted. Dean was recently hired as Episerver's Senior Director of Content Management Strategy. His keynote highlighted his passion for content, and the value of good, quality content when it comes to creating human connections. It gave a good indication of where his focus will be during his tenure at Episerver.

The various breakout sessions that followed focused on utilizing Episerver to improve the quality of content delivered. Some sessions reviewed tools for marketers to improve SEO and deliver personalized content. Others demonstrated ways for developers to improve the authoring experience for editors to deliver more meaningful content more easily, especially in the context of the page. While there was a little bit of something for everyone, the underlying theme was about improving the quality of content, and the experience creating it.

A Strong Foundation Is Essential

Episerver released the Episerver Foundation project to the community at Ascend this year, to aide those stuck with the guesswork of, “where do I start?”. Laying a solid foundation is critical to the construction of a house, as it ensures the final success of the resulting product. With a poor foundation, the house will not stand the test of time and can even become a money pit of repairs and frustration. Building a successful website is similar, and a poor foundation can yield similar consequences. A well-developed architecture serves as the foundation for success.

While many of the seasoned developers and partners in the community have their own approach, newcomers are often struggling to figure it out. They're often searching among the community for an answer. Episerver recognized this and introduced Episerver Foundation to aide. It’s being released as a reference for establishing solid architecture for anyone looking for that guidance. For newcomers unsure of where to begin their project, it might serve as a starting point. For some developers, it might just serve as a reference point for recommended practices. For others, it could help provide solution options to commonly encountered problems. The great thing about it is anyone can use it in the capacity they need.

Episerver Foundation is hosted as an open-source project through GitHub, monitored and reviewed by the Epi product team. Episerver will work to continue growing Foundation through quality community contributions and will work to maintain feature updates in it as well. They will be releasing content packs to help demonstrate product strengths in different verticals, and it will have many Epi Add-ons pre-installed. This will make it easier for customers and partners to demo and experience the full product suite Episerver offers. It’s a great offering to the community and a great way for various community members to help contribute to further growing the platform.

DXC Keeps Evolving

The Digital Experience Cloud (DXC) is Episerver's cloud offering and is one of the more mature cloud hosting options for CMS' available. DXC has experienced strong growth in the past year with an increase of over 200%. Episerver is committing more resources and efforts to continue growing and maturing the platform. That commitment involves making it easier and more efficient to utilize and manage DXC environments. Part of the way they are improving efficiency is granting DXC users more control through the self-service portal. Cache purging and application restarts are now available features, as are additional logging and WebJobs updates. Another update involves the release of a new deployment API in Q1 2020 for improved CI/CD pipelines for Azure DevOps and Octopus Deploy users.

Even more interesting is the Smooth Deploy feature planned for Q1 2020 for Episerver CMS. Designed for zero-downtime deployments to Production, Smooth Deploy will create a read-only copy of Production in a maintenance slot on the Production server while a new deployment takes place. This ensures the visitor experience is never interrupted.

Headless Isn’t Going Away

Headless and Hybrid systems are all the buzz, and buzz-words, these days, and Episerver is trying to make sure their users aren’t left out. Last year, Episerver released the Content Delivery API. They also released the Music Festival demo as a reference site built with Vue.js to go with it. This year and going forward Episerver will continue to expand the support for and capabilities of the Content Delivery API, taking input from the community and users utilizing it.

Even as they work toward .NET Core support, Episerver is taking the approach of a disconnected “management app” that uses the Content Delivery API to serve content to either ASP.NET Core templates, or a front-end framework via React, or Vue, or similar. This means more and more attention will be paid toward the Content Delivery API serving as a well-integrated API. According to Episerver, this will allow them to put server-side and client-side rendering at the same level going forward, ensuring continued support for headless implementations.

And Then There Was .NET Core

Discussion of this started about 4 years ago when Episerver announced exploration of migrating Episerver CMS to .NET Core in some fashion. Then a whole bunch of “stuff” happened at Microsoft and .NET Core evolved, grew, changed, and confused people like an ADHD teen experiencing growth spurts. During the rollercoaster ride of .NET Core and .NET 4.8, 5, and Standard, Episerver was still working on how to migrate to the new framework. During that time, they also started moving to .NET Standard libraries in CMS 11.

Many of us thought the existing platform would just be ported over. At Ascend, Episerver instead announced they are building a new stack utilizing a “Delivery Core” that will pull data from a “management app”. As mentioned previously, it will utilize the Content Delivery API to deliver content through .NET Core MVC. It is being built completely from the ground up, and they are saying it will follow .NET Core principles, meaning it should be leaner, and more scalable on the delivery side. In addition to .NET Core MVC, they want to support the ever-changing world of front-end frameworks. Building the new stack around the Content Delivery API allows them to place the decision of which approach to use in the hands of the customer. What this means in practice is yet to be fully understood as it’s still a work in progress, but it is a work in progress!

Looking Forward
With the conference over and the roadmap on the horizon, we now get to play with some of the new ideas like Foundation, and try to figure out what others mean, like the .NET Core approach. Whatever some of it leads to, it is clear that Episerver is continuing to focus on improving their customers’ experiences with their products. Additionally, the hiring of Dean Barker and the underlying theme of content quality and ease of creation at this year’s Ascend means there should be much to look forward to this coming year.

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