Congrats to DSB, our former monopoly railway company in Denmark, on a recent relaunch of their website at dsb.dk using Swedish CMS vendor EPiServer. DSB seem to have come up with a successful recipe by adopting EPiServer for their public website and keeping SharePoint behind the firewall for knowledge sharing and collaboration. If you take a closer look at the site, please note the harmless URLs. Also, Urchin Software by Google is used for website analytics.
EPiServer opened their office in Denmark early in 2007. This represents a major milestone in terms of establishing local presence. I’ve talked to many customers around Europe who use the same combination of EPiServer and SharePoint. In some organisations they are closely integrated, e.g using EPiServer Connect for SharePoint, while in other organisations the 2 overlapping products simply co-exist. Both products are based on the same underlying technology, but many editors and business users considers EPiServer easier to use and implement, at least for public websites. In general, if you have requirements like accessibility or multiple languages, you’ll probably need an alternative to SharePoint.
EPiServer has grown in recent years, yet it can still be hard to find experienced implementation partners outside Sweden. I witnessed an extreme case of this last month, in Geneva where I met an English and a Swedish consultancy pitching for the same project and both offering EPiServer. If you don’t mind travel costs, there is always the option to put consultants on the train and have them travel to you.
Finally, it is interesting to note that DSB is still listed as a featured case study on FatWire’s website. FatWire CMS used to be the engine behind the DSB site and the English part of the DSB site is still based on FatWire. If they also migrate the English site, I expect that the link will stop working as it is vendor specific. FatWire no longer has an office in Scandinavia, so perhaps that’s why nobody noticed that they actually migrated the site. This does not reflect particularly well on FatWire and serves as a useful reminder to the rest of us: be careful with where and when your let yourself use as a reference. Successful cases studies are extremely valuable for vendors and this is worth remembering, in particular when you negotiate discounts.
Update Dec 23: DSB is no longer listed as a customer case study on the FatWire site
“Thanks for this blog post – it’s interesting to get a top-level insight into the DSB site.
The only point that I strongly disagree with is at the start of the third paragraph: “EPiServer has grown in recent years, yet it can still be hard to find experienced implementation partners outside Sweden”.
EPiServer now has over 250 partners around the world. There are still some countries where partner support is light but here in the UK there are over 35 partners including my company, Netcel, which is one of four UK companies accredited as an EPiServer Premium Partner. We have developed and now support over 15 EPiServer sites for clients. Other UK partners have similar levels of client engagements.
So although I agree that partner support cannot be found in all European countries, your statement that “it can still be hard to find experienced implementation partners outside Sweden” is factually incorrect.”