2011 reflections on Telerik’s Sitefinity CMS

I’m publishing this for Sitefinity customers who might be interested in a Telerik insiders’ perspective on this past year.  Hopefully this provides some context and a glimpse into what’s coming in 2012.

Rewind, back to January 2011

I can’t address the significance of 2011 without talking about the release of Sitefinity 4.0.

Sitefinity 4.0 was a huge milestone for us and its release marked a transition to a new chapter in Sitefinity’s evolution.  Sitefinity 4.0 changed everything.  This isn’t marketing babble, this is truth.  Not one line of Sitefinity 3 code was used in Sitefinity 4.  Furthermore, in addition to rebuilding the product, we also introduced a new licensing and pricing model.

If you’re thinking “that looks like a lot of change to navigate”, then you’d be right.  Saying Sitefinity 4.0 was “disruptive” would be an understatement.  We were prepared for some measure of this, but it took a lot more time than expected to fully assimilate these changes.

Why was all this change needed?

For those who don’t know, I was a Sitefinity customer before I was an employee.  When I discovered Sitefinity (back in 2007) this was the tag-line:

At the time, this tagline matched my mental model.  I was a “developer” and I needed to deliver a website that could be managed by “end-users”.  Sitefinity spoke to me with this message and the product walked the talk.  I loved it!

However, this message now looks simplistic to me.  “End-user” is just a generic bucket where we dump everyone who isn’t us.  If you talk to those “end-users” you quickly discover real people with rich skillsets and objectives.  The CMS belongs as much to them, as it does developers.  Managing a modern website requires collaboration between multiple audiences and a good CMS enables this collaboration while simultaneously empowering diverse audiences throughout the organization.

This trend is a natural by-product of the web’s popularity.  An organization’s website is no longer a piece of technology, but instead a vital communication conduit.  As a result, the website impacts the entire organization and CMS stakeholders are diversifying.  Consequently, Sitefinity needed to engage beyond developers to address complex organizational challenges (governance, communication, collaboration, syndication, etc.).

Historically Sitefinity was an $899 product marketed and sold to developers.  If we wanted to move beyond this model, then substantial changes were required to the product and our organization.

Getting from here to there

I understand there could be debate about whether the premise outlined above is correct.  Some organizations still view the website as a “technology resource”.  As a result, CMS selection continues to be driven exclusively by the IT department and “users” simply inherit their decision.  For those scenarios, an $899 developer-focused product continues to be very attractive.

However, these scenarios are diminishing.  Internally, we became convinced Sitefinity needed to evolve beyond its historic market positioning to remain relevant.

This led to 3 conclusions:

1. We needed to rebuild Sitefinity from the ground-up.
2. We needed to double+ the size of the Sitefinity team.
3. We needed to change Sitefinity’s licensing.

I could write very long posts exploring each of these 3 decisions; instead I’ll try to quickly summarize:

• Rebuilding Sitefinity – When Sitefinity 3 was conceived, .NET 2.0 was the predominant framework.  A lot has happened since then and it was becoming difficult (hacky) to evolve the platform.  Rebuilding on .NET 4 enabled us to utilize a lot of newer technologies (WWF 4.0, web services, LINQ, etc.).  In addition, Sitefinity 3 was built on Nolics and Nolics is dead.
• Doubling the team – Rebuilding and then extending the product takes a lot of manpower.  In addition, selling a CMS to non-developers takes a very different sales organization.  Not to mention support, partner managers, etc…
• Changing the licensing – I could simply refer to #2, but it goes beyond that.  A flat $899 price would not fuel product development at our current pace, nor support the large customer projects that we were engaging with.  The new tiered pricing was implemented to provide a more sustainable & accessible licensing framework.

We knew these decisions would cause discomfort for existing customers and none of us felt happy about this.  However, we viewed this as a necessary transition needed to evolve Sitefinity.

Weathering the storm

We underestimated what it would take to assimilate all of this change.  It’s like dropping a boulder into a pond while you’re sitting in a boat.  You expect some waves and brace for them, but in this case the waves continued for months.

A big part of 2011 was devoted to stabilizing Sitefinity (the product, the organization, the community) after this change.  This included a stream of product releases, license extensions, extensive support, etc. It’s been an exhausting year.

However, under difficult circumstances the team has pulled together to deliver the best possible results.  We’ve made massive headway in 2011.  Today, Sitefinity is seeing strong adoption and customers are now delivering a stream of results on Sitefinity 4.

With our recent upgrade initiative, we’re largely closing the book on this difficult transition.  Of course it’ll never fully be done, but we feel good about where we’re starting in 2012.

A quick word for the developer audience

I already expressed our desire to engage beyond developers with Sitefinity 4.  In practical terms, this meant a heavy emphasis on usability.  It also meant a lot of features like scheduling, layouts, workflows, granular permissions, a form builder, rich classifications, etc., etc.  These features are designed to empower people throughout the organization.

However, in the midst of empowering non-developers we complicated things that .NET developers loved about Sitefinity 3; this primarily being the accessibility of Sitefinity’s extensibility.  My phrasing is very precise here.  Sitefinity 4 has obscene amounts of extensibility, but to a developer with a tight deadline (most of us) this extensibility isn’t easily grasped or utilized.

We’ve addressed this through “teaching resources” (Sitefinity SDK, extensive documentation, webinars, videos, blogs), but it still takes too much time to absorb.  Our goal in Q1 2012 is to create an extensibility framework that is naturally intuitive to .NET developers.  We’ll do this primarily through the Module Builder and with Sitefinity Thunder (roadmap).

Expect to hear more about this in January and February.  We’ll iterate on these tools rapidly until extensibility is widely accessible & utilized.  After all, developer productivity is what Telerik is widely recognized for.  It’s time for us to reclaim this benefit.

Wrapping up…

As many of you know Telerik is based in Sofia, Bulgaria and most of the Sitefinity team resides at this office.  I personally work from our Houston office and I visit Telerik HQ each year in October.  I chat with my co-workers constantly, but I only get to see them (in person) once a year.  This provides me a chance to view a time-elapsed perspective of this team and their growth.

Here is the team in October of 2010:

Here is the team in October of 2011:

This past October I left very optimistic.  My optimism didn’t stem from any grandiose idea that I saw prototypes for.  Instead, my optimism stemmed from the maturity and discipline I saw in action.  It was great to listen to their scrum meetings, their testing conversations, their planning meetings, etc.  The difficulties of this past year have made this team stronger and wiser.

Of course, we still have a lot of work ahead of us.  But we’re closing the book on 2011 and with it the high-volume of change that we needed to assimilate.  In 2012 we will finally get to explore the capabilities of this new team and product we’ve created.  As an evangelist, that makes me excited.  As a customer, hopefully it makes you excited too.

Happy Holidays and we’ll chat next year!  :)