Use EPiServer for your website and keep SharePoint behind the firewall

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.”

— Tim Parfitt, February 3rd, 2009 0:17

Swedish CMS-vendor EPiServer keeps growing – still without setting foot in the US

I’ve been tracking Swedish CMS vendor EPiServer since late 2005. Many milestones later the company has now expanded far outside beyond its home shores, but unlike other ambitious and growing vendors, they have so far resisted the usual European temptation to attempt venturing into the US market. Quite unlike local competitor Sitecore, which have built a very visible presence in the US over the last few years.

In recent news from EPiServer they announced the release of the second edition of EPiServer CMS 5 in early October 2008. CMS 5 R2 has several improvements for editors and also a few more business user reports. Moreover, in October, EPiServer World reached 5,000 registered members, which is quite impressive for a CMS vendor community.

As a Microsoft ASP .NET 3.0-based Web Content Management system, EPiServer CMS seems to have been able to successfully fight off the immense interest in SharePoint 2007, even for public websites. Now 2 years after the release of MOSS 2007, my impression is that even Microsoft has recognised that their portal product has some shortcomings, and until Microsoft significantly improves the product, there is still a large market for website vendors like EPiServer.

Still, if you are considering EPiServer CMS for your projects, I would recommend that you set aside adequate  time to select the right implementation partner, in particular if you are based outside Sweden, where competent help may be harder to find. Some European countries, like Austria and Switzerland, still don’t have any local EPiServer partners according to the listing of partners. If you are in a country without a local EPiServer office, interesting things have sometimes been known to happen when you talk to system integrators that have proposed EPiServer. Some might pull in help from HQ in Sweden, while others may work with another regional office.

Finally, I recommend taking a closer look at the detailed EPiServer evaluation in the Web CMS Report from CMS Watch.