LBi was proud to host the UK Umbraco meetup on 6th August 2009, organised by consultant and Umbraco enthusiast, Darren Ferguson, and attracted a 55+ people crowd enough to fill the auditorium. With a guest appearance with the man himself and Umbraco’s founder, Niels Hartvig, this was surely to be a great day.

So exactly what is Umbraco? Simply put, Umbraco is an open source .Net Content Management System (CMS), dubbed “The Friendly CMS”, with an ever growing dedicated community that are always willing to help.

Darren opened up the event with the days proceedings, with yours truly giving a warm LBi welcome and introduction into the wonderful things we do. Not wanting to hold-up the proceedings, we swiftly moved on with Niels giving a recap on this year’s Codegarden ‘09 back in June (the annual Umbraco developer conference), reporting on latest developments and milestones on the Umbraco roadmap.

The morning session continued with a presentation from Douglas Robar on “What I Wish I’d Known in my First 30 Days with Umbraco” - an extremely insightful look at best practises, techniques and concepts for all levels of Umbraco developers.

After lunch, Paul Marden gave his lively account of developing a multilingual website, followed by Niels and Darren building a ‘mystery’ application in Umbraco - a great live demonstration on building a package to export and import members from the attendees list. By creating a simple app that randomly selected attendees, swag was handed out to those lucky enough to be selected, a “Everybody loves Umbraco - Except Chuck Norris” t-shirt. Unfortunately, the LBi crew did not get chosen.

The rest of the afternoon consisted of an open mic session with presentations from Adam Shallcross, Chris Houston and Gregory Roekens. We finished off the serious part of the day with an open Q&A session with Niels, Doug and Gregory on the panel.

Then the fun began. We headed to the Vibe Bar just across the road at Brick Lane and, despite the rain, we discussed the joys of open source, XSLT, projects that we all deliver on time and on budget and much much more…

A big thank you to Marcus McDonnell, LBi Office Services Manager, for ensuring that everything went smooth; to Darren Fergusson, for his enthusiasm and hard work promoting the event; and to the speakers and participants.

So not content with being in this week’s OK Magazine (yes, really), the CRM team have been busy sharing their thoughts on segmentation and the like with NMA in last week’s Customer Relationship Management special.

It’s an interesting article that looks at the (relatively) long established discipline of CRM with a fresh pair of eyes and asks “what’s more important to customer relationships: triggers or Twitter?” It discusses a view shared by the CRM team here - that ‘traditional’ CRM needs to evolve and make use of new, social communication methods, media and technologies.

“CRM 2.0″ or “social CRM”, as some are calling it, is about engaging with consumers on their own terms - joining their conversation. It means talking and listening to your customers at times and in places and in a way that they are comfortable with. From this perspective, the underlying principles of CRM remain true; ensuring relevant and meaningful conversations and interactions (”the right ‘message’ at the right time in the right place”). The proliferation of channels and media just make this a tad more complex!

This new approach to CRM is not just about ‘adding in a few more channels’ - its fundamentally challenging traditional CRM practices (i.e. segmentation and communication strategy) and technologies (i.e. multi-channel campaign management and marketing automation) - requiring them to evolve to accommodate the need to respond to real-time experiences and conversation that consumers expect through interactive channels.

There’s no doubt social media and technologies present real opportunities to better connect and build relationships with customers. Whilst a lot of attention is being paid to the marketing part of CRM, perhaps the greatest potential for improving and advancing relationships is through the service channel. For example, sites like getsatisfaction.com are turning customer service on its head: with customer support evolving into a community conversation between users and the brand.

Read more “Expert Views” on innovations shaping CRM, including my two-penneth! Enjoy!

Pipa

In need of some instant fun we decided to have a Kemp Folds inspired session. Take two pictures of Hard Man, Ross Kemp fold and enjoy.

Once we’d warmed up we took random photos of our colleagues and held a fold off. Each person took a random print from the table, folded it as required then with baited breadth revealed it next to the same image folded by another colleague. The biggest gasp, laugh, shock won.

Great fold. Fold on.

This friday fun was suggested by the Dan ‘Hold the Fold’ Holder - who now has his own personal tribute site - Folder of the Holder