See you in Boston: Techphoria414 Dreamcore Preview

The second annual Dreamcore conference is upon us. It's a great opportunity for Sitecore geeks to gather, share best practices, and hear about the latest and greatest product developments coming out of Denmark. Last year's conference was very well done -- a great learning experience, and a great time. This year looks to be even better! Here are my highlights from the published agenda.

Dreamcore Kickoff Meet-up/Tweet-up

Monday Evening
The New England Sitecore User Group is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Sitecore user groups in North America. They hosted a pre-Dreamcore meetup last year as well, and it was a great way to start the conference. It's a good opportunity to meet Sitecore employees, partners, and customers, and to feel the pre-conference buzz. More info and registration are available at Eventbrite.

Dreams Becoming Reality Keynote

Tuesday 8:30AM
Michael Seifert will be doing a big reveal of something Tuesday morning, and with the tear Sitecore has been on for the last two years, it's bound to be something cool. Sitecore Azure and E-commerce are already out to market, so what could be "Sitecore's Next Platform?" My money is on integrated social media tools.

Developer Goodies

Tuesday 11:00AM
Yes, I'm sure there's lots of valuable content on the Business Track -- but that's why I convinced my COO to come along! It's the "developer goodies" that I'm really looking forward to, and I'm sure Lars Nielson will have plenty. For sure, expect an overview of Sitecore Rocks and future plans for it. Beyond that, I'm not sure. Perhaps an overview of APIs in upcoming releases, or my long-awaited announcement of integrated ASP.NET MVC?

The Page Editor Strikes Back

Tuesday 2:45PM
This should be a great presentation by Alexey Rusakov. Sitecore 6.4 revealed huge improvements to the Page Editor, including integrated Page Design and some key usability improvements. The rumblings are that Sitecore 6.5 improves on this further. Sitecore is obviously very committed to making the Page Editor a powerful and usable tool within the product. However it is equally important to make it easy to develop and/or configure -- otherwise implementations will settle for the Content Editor. 

Technology Interact Panel

Wednesday 8:30AM
This was a great session last year -- a chance to pose questions and comments right to those who are shaping Sitecore as a product. It's a bit earlier in the day this time, the morning after the "Neighborhoods of Boston Reception." At least the coffee will be flowing freely. Come well caffeinated, friends.

Project Management: Implementation and Best Practices

Wednesday 9:45AM
I have to include at least one session from the business track, right? I may have to "cross over" for this one, as I'm very interested in Sitecore's perspective on best practices for planning and executing projects with their software. There's a lot that goes into a successful multi-lingual WCM project besides good software implementation. Information Architecture, content gathering/development, translation, testing... the list goes on.

Outstanding Solutions with TDS

Wednesday 11:00AM
If you haven't seen Hedgehog Development's Team Development for Sitecore in action, be sure to attend this session. It's definitely on my list as an essential tool for our next Sitecore project. The efficiencies it can create for the development and deployment processes in a Sitecore project are pretty incredible. Dan Galvez of Hedgehog presents the product well.

Multilingual Solutions with Sitecore

Wednesday 11:00AM
Schedule conflict! What is this, Bonnaroo? You would think so with the rockstar presenters, such as Alex Shyba. Developing internationalized sites is always a challenge, and I'm sure Alex will bring some great insight, tips, and tricks to help with your multilingual implementation. He's done some interesting work with Language Fallback in particular, which I'm sure will be on his agenda. I'm hoping he'll also cover some other common internationalization challenges, such as creation and utilization of Dictionaries / Resource Bundles, and structuring your content tree for localized content.

Workshop: Shared Source Modules

Wednesday 1:30PM
If your travel arrangements allow, you should definitely stick around for this last presentation on some useful Shared Source modules. I'm honored to be presenting with Corey Caplette of Velir and Matt Hovany of The Revere Group. Corey will be presenting on the latest version of Velir's awesome Custom Item Generator, which they have now integrated with Sitecore Rocks. If you're not using this module, you should be. Matt will be presenting on a redirection module of some sort -- I'm not familiar with it. I'll be presenting on the EviBlog module, including a tutorial on integrating it with your site, and importing content using the Xml Importer module.

These are just the sessions that stood out to me in the schedule. I'm sure there's tons of great content in the others as well. It's going to be a great day and a half at Dreamcore. See you in Boston!

-Nick / techphoria414