Al Vino the Connector

While working on a "Year in Review" post, I noticed how I've changed in interacting with the community. Previously, I often shared things I was personally working on which somehow got me to over 300 Tridion-related blog posts by last year.

And as much as I've loved (and continue) sharing myself, I also enjoy encouraging others to share with the Tridion Sites technical community. Many agree it's a Great Idea^TM but some feel I have some special connection and maybe "street cred" with the community. Perhaps they mistake verbosity with credibility? :-)

Anyways, in the end, I'll often connect my colleagues or their work to the larger community. This includes:

• Documentation
• Education
• SDL Community Teasers
• Market Research

Documentation

One nice part of working at Tridion Sites HQ are all the system diagrams. It's not just the occasional BluePrint diagram seen at a client site, but diagrams on all kinds of scenarios, components, and overviews on whiteboards and in digital format.

I was quite excited to offer feedback to a re-envisioned overview diagram with Technical Writer Julie Landman and help solicit feedback on SDL Community.

Education

Having a functional consultant and business analyst background plus being in a product role means lots of questions. It's nice being a called upon as a subject matter expert, but my time and even my expertise on (lots) of topics are limited.

I followed up on a question from Education with some questions of my own on typical content organizations. If you haven't already (it's not that popular of a post for some reason), feel free to describe what you've seen in your day-to-day work or implementations. I'll share the results back with Education and UX.

SDL Community Teasers 

Fellow colleague Bart Koopman and I have been helping manage that small promotional spot on the SDL Tridion Sites group alongside our colleagues in Customer Enablement.

Content promos or teasers always look simple... on the surface.

Hey, it's a contextual editing button for our SDL Community platform (Telligent-powered).

Wait, what do you mean it's not just a list or set of embedded fields?

These call-outs are not managed with Tridion, but they're definitely managed content. We can't take credit for the nice images, though I shared a few things including the marketing survey, the 2013 SP1 Support extension, and Jan Horsman's Community Review (the posts are tagged #community).

Market Research

Working with our User Experience team, I've previously encouraged the community to participate in user research. This year I made a small post to ask for more market research in the form of the August survey from Product Marketing.

Maybe you've participated in the survey or recognize some of your own projects, but do be mindful of confidentiality especially since participants can choose to share the results of their answers at various levels of anonymity.

It's definitely nice to see how our software helps customers solve real problems.

Community Enabled and Empowered

The most refreshing thing about sharing in 2017 is the explicit support of leadership from our VP of Product to Product Management Director, leadership in Professional Services, and the official SDL Community platform. We're seeing more posts, technical webinars, and video content as we shift from our strong organic efforts to the next step in our community maturity.

Connected by Alvin

Oh, I almost forgot to explain the title of this post. By some prophetic coincidence, three of our recent Product Managers have the word "no" in their name (Nuno, Onno, and now Arno). As a joke that maybe I could work towards such a title, I'm adopting yet another nickname: Alvino, which makes a nice pun in Spanish as "Al vino" (to the wine).

Regardless of the title, there's something quite satisfying in working with the team that helps connect SDL Tridion Sites to everything as well as connecting technical writing, education, product marketing, and other groups to our technical community.