Three Tridion Years

It's been three years since I joined SDL (seven since my first Tridion project). Here are some of the highlights since my start in SDL.

Tridion Technical Community

The community is so active I can't even keep up with everything. I had to automate much of my Tridion-in-30 Seconds video (and double it to 60 seconds!).

I also joined the Tridion MVP selection panel awhile back when we lost someone in PS (and gained a Product Manager).

With great verbosity comes great responsibility. Remember, I don't choose nominees. Someone else nominates you for sharing, and I put in a yes or no vote if it was enough for the past year. If you'd like, I could vote if you shared as much as I did. :-P

I recently became a pro tem Tridion Stack Exchange moderator.

I've also had some great experiences beyond the community.

Industry

I presented at SDL Innovate this year! I blew up the event's Twitter feed as part of the selfie contest, which was kind of scary for some reason. The typo on the website was awesome.

Promotion to Training Manager? Nah, I just filled in for the real deal.

I also improved my SEO skills and connected with the bigger picture and SDL's larger audience. As of today, I show up high for non-personal Google search results for "Creepy CXM." The blog also broke 200,000 page views (though Yet Another Tridionaut beat me to 100k first).

I connected with, or otherwise engaged, honest-to-goodness Content Strategists on Twitter and in blog posts such as Tridion Can Poop or Training Your Tridion CMS.
Despite fun and growth in the community and industry, I've had a blast in the main thing.

Career as "Just a Functional"

Knowledge Shared. Helping our internal knowledge sharing days was also awesome, having the chance to make ice breaker games to explain Customer Experience Management and getting to design this (it's even Carbon 2.0 complaint).

Don't tell anyone, but we had just enough publicity to get a jealous remark ("hey, what's that? Who gets to go?").

Travel Everywhere. I still had travel across the US but also more international trips including Bucharest, Amsterdam (again), Gothenburg (Sweden), and Lyon (France). I fly for Paris next week.

Learning languages and about cultures in school didn't help me with work and business directly, it's helped me connect with the people at work and business.

Customers Everywhere. Related to the travel for clients, I also see our customers' products in banking, insurance, retail, and entertainment everywhere and not just because the Web knows I'm visiting their websites. I have to double check if an email is from my bank or work for my bank or if the special is for the local amusement park or the one I have to travel to work for. ;-) 

Here are some images that may or may not remind you of projects we may or may not have done together.

Images aren't just images when they're licensed IP (intellectual property). Picture: Barcroft Media via The Telegraph.

Dimmer or dimer? I can't pronounce certain types of light switches anymore.

3-D flowers were cutting edge... in 2012. The hardest thing to do in a consultancy of Tridion Professionals? Taking them off projects to update content. :-) 

Forget Tridionaut Consultants, Furbysultants FTW!

Not project related, but some of my former colleagues and I get excited over Minions. We'll share pics from Minion knitted caps to "look what I bought" moments.

The best part of it all isn't Tridion, but (new) friends and (new) family. Since I've started this latest career, we've moved three times, we saw Allana grow up into a First Grader, and were joined by Caden. I've said Allana looks like me, but pretty like her mom. Allana's also quite sharp, but Caden worries me with that brain and smile of his. There's something about a baby/now Toddler, that can make the guys go, "hey what's up little guy?"

The family's also joined me on two out-of-town trips (San Antonio and Orlando) and we'll have other opportunities for us to travel together. As one of my colleagues might say about these first three years: "it was awesome."

I'm looking forward to the next three.

Here's a recap of previous recaps::

• Year Zero in October of 2011 was a flurry of activity. Everything changed.
• My First Year was awesome.
• Year two was awesome and busy, but I did manage 14 blog posts in October of 2013 including my fifth "humour" post.

Training your SDL Tridion CMS

First read Eileen Webb's post, "Training the CMS" for background (thanks Paceaux, for the great recommended reading).

Done?

Awesome. She describes exactly what I'm hoping, encouraging, or looking for in my SDL Tridion functional designs and setups, but in a technology-agnostic way for any CMS. As a thank you and contribution to the discussion, here's how to accomplish her points but with Tridion per her prompt in the comments (see the great comments as well):

"Everyone, please feel free to share any tools, modules, plugins, or tutorials you’ve come across for your favorite CMS that can help improve the authoring experience!"

Content Type Overviews

Tridion's Content Manager Explore, the "back office" interface, is much like any other business system (folders and forms following desktop software expectations). Its in-context GUI (Experience Manager), however, lets editors preview and update a "Staging" version of a website.

System admins can create sets of content types based on example prototyped content (Components in Tridion). It's all configurable through check-boxes and selections, the real challenge is making sure the business and technical teams work together to set these up.