Adobe CQ5 2013: Adobe Summit, QCcon13, Evolve13, AdaptTo(), SF‑AEM . . . And Beyond
There has been a lot of cool stuff going on in the office around CQ, so much in fact I haven’t had a chance to write much about it. It has been a good year for Adobe events.
We attended the Adobe Summit in March. Big, well run and well groomed. After years of going to informal open source conferences, it kind of felt like we were sitting at the grown-up table. Marketing-centric, some great technical tracks, The Black Keys played the social and the first conference I have been to that ended with snowboarding (also my first brush with a Luther Burger).
Probably my favorite conference was CQcon 2013 in Basel last June. It was a terrific conference which was helped by the fact that Day was founded in Basel in the 90s and still has a significant development presence. The conference had a simple format, a single hall with talks by influential people in the CQ community. It was a great two days, with back to back technical presentations. It was a bit like drinking out of a fire-hydrant with so much technical information to try an absorb. The heat spell (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and my 10 hour time difference didn’t help much, but it was very much worth the trip.
So fast forward 3 months and like most firms doing CQ development we have been looking forward to the Evolve13 conference. Planned as the first of an annual developer community conference at the Hard Rock Hotel in the Gas Lamp district of San Diego it gave the US CQ5/AEM development community an event to rally around. The conference itself was a good balance of technical talks and case studies with a basic training track, a developers track and a business track. The tracks were high quality and once the coffee and Wi-fi began to flow everyone got into the groove.
To kick start the local CQ community we started the San Francisco AEM users group. The first meeting was well attended with about 30 people and some good presentations. Gary Gamitian from Successfactors presented details on how they are using Demandbase and Marketo to personalize visitor content and Gaetan Marmasse from our office showed how Magento can be integrated with CQ using the Commerce integration framework.
Of course, the best part of all the conferences was the opportunity to hang out and share stories with other people who are developing and using CQ on a daily basis. In terms of attendees, there was an interesting mix of people from both the development and the marketing sides. I think that is probably what makes the CQ community so interesting, as opposed to the more academic open source conferences, AEM brings marketing professionals to the table and is creating the best in class tools to craft user relevant content from the ad agency perspective.
I’m looking forward to 2014, we already have our tickets to Adobe Summit 14 and have two more AEM user group meetings on the schedule.
