SitefinitySummit 2017—This Time, It’s Personal

Recently, about 150 partners and customers gathered in Boston to discuss all things Sitefinity. If I had to summarize the event in one word, I would say it was “personal. “

 You may think that I’m talking about the industry’s focus on personalization. If you read some of the SitefinitySummit blogs from our partners, you may think this is a reference to the suite of features on our roadmap. Or maybe I’m referencing the personal relationships we form with all of our partners and customers. Well, I’m referring to all of the above.

 Let me start with the partner/customer relationship as this is the most important aspect to me. The Sitefinity team remains committed on our relationships with our partners and customers—we take this personally! There were plenty of insightful and passionate conversations about using Sitefinity, and we had many discussions regarding both how Sitefinity is great and how it can improve. Hopefully, everyone understood how much we value our audience and how important Sitefinity is to Progress when John Ainsworth, SVP of Core Products, delivered his “Sitefinity is Everywhere” presentation. For me, two slides really demonstrated how personal we get with our relationships. The first one was simple and to the point.

“Sitefinity is part of the Progress Family” means more than just changing a logo. Since coming onboard, John has led the charge to strengthen our core. We’re focusing on our relationships and delivering a whole product—not just pieces of great technology. We’re leveraging the strengths of Progress to build an incredible portfolio of products that support one another. This is perfectly illustrated in the second slide that defines our objective of strengthening the core.

After kicking off the event on that note, the personal theme really took hold when Progress Sitefinity Product Management lead Anton Hristov presented the Sitefinity roadmap for the next few releases.  For the rest of the year, Progress Sitefinity will be delivering features for both Marketers and Developers.

Starting this summer, we will be focusing on enhancing lead generation and personalization features, followed by a release of functionality to further optimize experiences. All of this leads into next calendar year, when Sitefinity will release a completely redesigned content management experience—our team calls it Web Content Management Reimagined. The Sitefinity product teams are focused on delivering technology that helps tame the chaos associated with delivering personalized, engaging experiences.

All of this led to an insightful and fun session, led by Progress CMO Loren Jarrett. As a marketing nerd, it was fun to hear Loren talk about her experience leading several different companies through the evolution of digital experience management. One of my favorite aspects was the discussion about the future of multi-channel, which was illustrated simply in a slide that showed three specific areas where experience will evolve.

But for me, the most powerful message in Loren’s presentation were the statistics that illustrated how much organizations still struggle with personalization.

The session was closed out by a fun and insightful panel discussion on how three organizations have used Progress Sitefinity to implement omni-channel experiences and execute personalization, which pushed them to the final frontier—high-touch B2B.

As you can see the event was personal; not just some cheesy title I decided upon for this blog. Progress is focused on investing in the personal relationship with partners and customers, enabling personalization via technology and partnering with you to execute a vision that empowers organizations to deliver personalized experiences.