One of the customers who shared their journey was Nilson Group, and their site Feet First, where they combine brands as Ecco, Din Sko, and Skopunkten under one site. The same code base, but with room for respective brands look and feel, and design. I thought one thing that was important and that is “There will be changes”. Even if you have an extensive specification, and everyone agrees, there will be changes. That is why agile projects is a must, and is 3bits’ model. It is impossible to have everything sorted out from the beginning, and things change during the process. Another tip was to start with backend earlier. It is easy to get caught in design and UX, but it is also important that everything works in the background.
Another partner had gone through the same journey with Varner-Gruppen, where they for now have 5 brands under one code base, of course with special cases for respective brand. They talked about how they work agile with continuous delivery, how they have gone from a first version of their web solutions, and how it constantly changes and adds-on, and how they work getting the solution to a more structured version that is easier to maintain in the next version. One of the things they discussed was how they work with regression tests where they want to ensure that the latest installation doesn’t have negative effects on the customer experience. This is something that we constantly work with since we have installations every week for some customers. To verify all the important cases manually is very time consuming. Tools such as LoadImpact and Selenium makes this process easier, and this is something that we use here at 3bits.
Episerver, like Microsoft for Azure, talks warm about their cloud solution, Digital Experience Cloud. The idea is to build for the future, where you easily can receive a large amount of visitors without thinking of the number of servers or server maintenance. One of the large down sides that I see now are failover and deploys without stops. That is if you install a new version of your site, or if a region at Azure goes down. Then the database is in Read only mode, which means that you can’t receive changes, or for example orders during this time. It shouldn’t be long, but for large-scale customers, it can be very problematic. Development is carried out on all fronts, so this is one of the things that will be solved, the question is just when it can be expected. Today you can’t deploy to production by yourself, this is something that needs to be scheduled with Episerver.
As a summary I can say that I look forward to continue working with Episerver, it is a stable platform with a really nice CMS. We didn’t make it as Partner of the Year (Congratulations NetRelations!), but who knows, maybe next year?