Mark Edgington

I’m very proud as  syzygy was awarded the EPiServer Award for Best Partner UK 2008.This prestigious accolade adds to our already expert status in Content Management Systems  having created sites for Setanta, Wyeth and Mazda and we are working on a new site for an exceptionally high profile luxe brand.

• EPiServer is a leading Content Management Solutions company; who deliver there CMS, through a partner network, of which  Syzygy are a premium partner.

• Syzygy is the company i’m technical director for and were a European top 5  full-service interactive agency group and WPP Associate company, employing 270 people, including 145+ in the UK. Based in Europe, and located in London, Hamburg and Frankfurt, the group specialises in all forms of interactive marketing from first touch to repurchase: search marketing, online media planning and buying, site design and build, usability and analytics, CRM and data management. Its client list includes high-profile organisations such as Mazda Motors Europe, DaimlerChrysler, Siemens, De La Rue, Avis, Littlewoods, Sky, Channel 4 Television, Deutsche Bank, Essent Trading, Orange Business Services, Fujitsu Siemens Computer and Wyeth.  Also were a  Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and hold AAA-ranking by Dun & Bradstreet since 2000.

The idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas within the course of one night. Therefore the 20×20 Pecha Kucha format was created: each presenter is allowed a slide-show of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. This results in a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 second.  After just one you get a feel for the constantly moving nature and the need to think in a  concise manner.  I can’t wait to get the chance to use one again.

Not having the time to code in Java as i once did, i thought that i decided that it was about time to have a go at a new language.  I selected Ruby and the Rails framework as i had enjoyed the debate i had at QCon and felt that it would help me understand how best to utilize this type of language and framework (  we already use Groovy which is similar  ).  After just a few hours of playing around i could see the draw and after only a few more i was sold.  It is truly liberating to be able to  create database models and code over these on the fly.  I know that there are similar tools in Java, .Net, PHP and others, but the way the whole Ruby on Rails package fits together is great.  Add to this the integration with the InteliJ IDE (my favourite) and you have a great environment and the ability to use JRuby and get all the Java integration as well; my Groovy colleague would argue ‘ why not just use Groovy on Grails‘ and I must say i don’t have the answers at present, but time will tell.

My Team, recently launched a site to show off the new Mazda5 . It’s built on the EPiServer platform and written in .Net 3.5 with a flash,HTML interface (with some nice simple javascript).  I like this site, as it has great integration between CMS and flash.  The editors edit in the HTML version and it updates the flash instantaneously.  All data collected is feed through to web-services which pass the data onto a number of source including  the Sieble Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system across 20+ countries.

After creating two major sites for the Mazda 6 and Mazda 2, Mazda made the commitment to purchase the EPiServer Enterprise license. This will now be used for most of the sites we create and  in-line with this EPiServer  circulated a press release, (which had a comment form me in it) so i made a simple yahoo pipe to see how many sites took it up, so far we at 12.