From yesterday, in a castle somewhere near Lisbon, the SDL Tridion MVPs have come together to discuss the year past and the year to come. The SDL Tridion MVPs are selected by a community panel and they come yearly, from across the global, to mostly Lisbon to attend the meeting. Everyone flew in on Thursday, with some coming a long way and others making a short hop from near by European destinations and I can say everyone was tired from their travels.
The day was started after lunch with a review of 2012 from Nuno Linhares which covered what the community has produced as well as the work done on Stack Overflow and the campaign to have a dedicated Stack Overflow site for Tridion. There was a brief touch on the community webinars and what, if any changes, are needed for 2012-2013.
From a technology perspective Bart Koopman gave us an overview of External Content Libraries (ECL) for SDL Tridion 2013, which is a way of connecting external content into SDL Tridion for use with your regular Tridion content. This is a further development for the Documentum connector that SDL released some time ago.
It does not sound like much but it took a long time for us to cover and was all interesting. From the sessions, I have many questions and changes that I need to think about. High on my mind is how to expand the reach of the community past the size we have right now, a strong community but it is those on the fringe of the community and how we can get them strong as individuals in SDL Tridion. Not an easy question to answer but something to work on in 2013.