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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Exploring the Evolution of Automation: Introducing Agentic Process Automation

In the ever-evolving landscape of automation, we frequently encounter new buzzwords and terms like Robotic Process Automation, Intelligent Automation, Hyper-Automation, Quantum Automation, and most recently, Agentic Process Automation (APA) has arrived on the scene.

As these concepts grow more complex with advancements in process optimisation, sticking to the KISS (Keep it Short and Simple) principle is essential for understanding and applying them effectively.

Agentic Process Automation (APA) is an open ecosystem of autonomous agents that perform tasks using reusable components and machine learning, enhancing their decision-making capabilities. Unlike traditional automation, APA mimics human teams, making it crucial to onboard, train, assign roles, and eventually retire these agents—just like employees.

To put things in perspective….

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There's a way to do it better, find it

This famous Thomas Edison quote was on the wall yesterday as we held two group meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland.

At one of the meetings our member Stratos Filalithis, Head of Website & Communication Technologies at the University of Edinburgh shared their progress with making AI useful and usable, including how to improve search and to power virtual assistants.

AI is a regular topic at our group meetings and conferences, including all the confusion and overwhelming hype that comes with it. It makes me happy that during the past months, the conversation seems to have shifted from sheer, almost blind excitement, to using AI to doing things better and actually delivering value.

Getting things done has always been a popular topic…..

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Authors are also users - a new book on designing content authoring experiences

Most content management systems fill authors with dread starting at the login screen. That's because the needs of authors are rarely taken into consideration in CMS projects. When content systems offer a terrible authoring experience, people avoid using them. That means they can't communicate effectively with their customers. The result is stale, hard-to-read content that doesn't align with an organization's goals.

Designing Content Authoring Experiences is a new book just out written by content strategist Greg Dunlap. It's a book for the designers, strategists, and developers who build and maintain content management systems and as a community it’s a book we’ve been waiting for and also happy to support the Kickstarter campaign that made it happen.

With practical examples and best practices, the book will show you how to create content management systems that support authors, so that authors can better serve their audiences. the book argues that authors are users that a content management system needs to serve. 

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Ibexa Summit 25: What a difference a year makes

With some 300 participants mostly from Europe, Ibexa and their DXP community took to Barcelona at the end of January for their annual kickoff and it was a quite different experience compared to last year.

Unlike last year, where it was 200 participants and partners-only, this year customers also participated at Ibexa Summit 25 and that was far from the only substantial change. Where the 2024 program looked much more inwards, or if you prefer, was more partner-community focused, this time Ibexa curated an experience that set sight on the broader marketplace, bigger customer problems and even touching on industry challenges as faced by AI and the erosion in trust.

In brief: Ibexa is growing, now also with a North American footprint and importantly, the combination of DXP (digital experience platform), CDP (customer data platform) and PIM (Product Information Management) is setting them apart in a marketplace that is as confusing as ever.

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From Skeptic to Convert: Understanding AI's Role in Modern Development

Last year, I dismissed AI coding assistants as fancy autocomplete tools. After five decades of programming, I thought I'd seen every productivity promise come and go. I was wrong.

My journey started simply enough with vanilla Visual Studio Code. Microsoft Copilot came next, making big promises about revolutionizing coding. Skeptical but curious, I tried that, then Cursor, a VS Code fork that actually delivered when pointed at the right code along with the manufacturers documentation. Adding Claude through Cline opened new possibilities, followed by Roo Code with its specialized prompts for architecture, coding, and code review.

Then DeepSeek-R1 arrived, unlike the other leading AI LLms, it is open-source, meaning anyone can use, modify, or share it for free. matching Claude's capabilities at a tenth of the cost. This constant evolution taught me something: yesterday's cutting-edge tool could be tomorrow's expensive luxury.

5 new tools to learn in one year, it’s what I live for.

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Demo Day x2: Sweaters Change, Lessons Stay

At the CMS Expert group meeting earlier this week, I received what you could call a refreshing crash course in live demo survival - and walked away with some valuable lessons.

The meeting was held at the diconium office in Hamburg with their harbor as stunning backdrop and so at the end of day #1, I started a live demo wearing my pink sweater, and I thought I was thoroughly prepared.

Then I took a creative turn and veered off script. I figured it’d be fun to show something unexpected - until the unexpected hit me back! The result wasn’t what I anticipated, and I was stuck.

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