Why Every Entrepreneur Should Work in Europe

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Working in another country can make you a better thinker and business person. For those who make the jump across the pond, working abroad offers many advantages, yet can challenge even the most seasoned professionals.

I’m a serial entrepreneur from the startup mecca of Austin, Texas, and I recently relocated my family to Basel, Switzerland to join Magnolia as the Chief Marketing Officer. 

The transition has been the most rewarding and influential step of my career. While my technical skills have been tested, learning to adapt to the culture and language has been the most rewarding.

The experience has fundamentally changed my approach to business in ways offered only by living and working in a foreign country. Here are five key reasons why I believe every entrepreneur should work in Europe during their career – all based on experiences I’ve learned from along the way (and trust me, every day is a learning experience):

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Magnolia Announces Record Growth

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Magnolia International, the company behind the open Java CMS, Magnolia, today announced its record global growth. Magnolia has doubled global revenue since 2012.  This growth was a result of significant sales increases in all Magnolia offices. Worldwide headcount has also doubled during this period. Additionally, Magnolia announced key additions to the executive management team, adding a Chief Financial Officer and Chief Marketing Officer.

In 2013 alone, Magnolia’s global customer base grew by 25%. The U.S. market is the fastest growing market, accounting for 30% of new licenses in 2013. U.S.-based customers include  Nissan, Virgin America, Abbott Diabetes, US Navy, and Vision Service Plan.

Magnolia’s revenue and client growth has spurred additional global expansion in Beijing, and satellite offices in Gothenburg and Helsinki. Office expansion and additional headcount is occurring in every office, including Miami, U.S., Madrid, Spain and Kromeriz, Czech Republic.  Due to this record growth, Magnolia will soon run out of space in the current Basel, Switzerland headquarters. The company is building a new headquarters in Basel, with move-in scheduled summer 2015.

Magnolia Adds New CMO & CFO to Executive Team

Magnolia also announced two key hires, with Christopher Justice coming on as Chief Marketing Officer and Alain Kugelmann as Chief Financial Officer. Justice, a serial entrepreneur and advisor to multiple U.S. tech startups, has designed, developed and marketed enterprise software and content management solutions since 1996 with Computer Associates, IBM, Vignette, and with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He will champion Magnolia’s brand through effective marketing, community management and technical communications.

Read more at Venture Beat

5 Signs that it Might be Time to Ditch Your CMS

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At times, organizations find themselves making excuses for delays in publishing, re-configuration or heavy customization of their CMS. Fueling such excuses are a series of product-level issues that separately could be annoying. Collectively, these issues can defuse a company’s ability to use their site as a weapon in their marketplace.

Here are a few telltale indicators that it may be time to change your CMS.

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Agile Marketing: Is your CMS ready?

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Today’s marketplace is in constant flux. Social media and always-on instant mobile connectivity have resulted in users browsing, sharing and clicking constantly…and what they’re tweeting, +1-ing and liking is shaping your marketing like never before. To succeed, marketers must stay on top of this conversation and regularly adapt their marketing strategy to reflect fresh information.

Agile marketing is the idea that marketers should respond quickly to changes in the external environment, rather than sticking blindly to a predefined plan. Ashley Friedlein calls it the 70-20-10 rule: “10% of your marketing is purely responsive”. This sounds great until the day you sit down to try it and realize that your website just isn’t built for the speed, collaboration and data-driven decision making that agile marketing demands.

At Magnolia, we’ve seen companies struggle with the transition to agile marketing and we’ve learned from the challenges they face from an ill-performing CMS. This article highlights some of the key patterns and how an agile CMS helps overcome them.

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Magnolia Conference 2014: Talking about Digital Marketing

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Magnolia, an open source Java CMS company, is continuing to gear up for its June conference which is being held this year in Basel, Switzerland. This week, Magnolia announced that they have received an overwhelming response to its first ever digital marketing track. The new dedicated digital marketing track was announced last month, in response to the growing number of digital marketing professionals within the Magnolia community. Key speakers have immediately come forward from US software giant Atlassian, ETECTURE@Ogilvy (the technology arm of Ogilvy and Mather UK), and Switzerland’s largest retailer, Migros.

These speakers will join senior analyst Tim Walters from Digital Clarity Group, who will open the digital marketing track with a keynote on Customer Experience Management. “The key speakers that we’ve secured will ensure that attendees leave with a wealth of knowledge on how to tackle today’s digital marketing challenges – most of all, they’ll know how to create an optimized customer experience”, says Christopher Justice, Head of Marketing at Magnolia. Justice will also be taking part in the new marketing track, presenting how to create trackable digital experiences with Magnolia CMS.

Read more at CMS Report

The pros and cons of building your own CMS

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It’s common for your developers to listen to a vendor proposal for a Content Management System (CMS) and say, “We could just build that ourselves.”

And the developers are right. Many companies have opted to use their internal talent to build a CMS, resulting in a terrific product. However, from seeing companies switch from their DIY solutions to our commercial CMS over the past decade, we now recognize some patterns.

Here are some of the things we’ve noticed about the pros and cons of rolling your own CMS versus buying a commercial off-the-shelf product.

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The top 10 pitfalls of large scale website deployments

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Your enterprise website needs an overhaul, and your development team has been asked to make it happen. Your ability to simultaneously move all four of the project pillars—technology, infrastructure, team skills and communication—will have bearing on the success of the project. Of all the different IT projects an enterprise can undertake, perhaps none is as challenging as a website deployment.

We have seen these challenges come in different shapes and sizes at Magnolia, ranging from migrating existing content to making sure that developers who are actually implementing the project (you) are adequately trained. Understanding what to expect will help you to create an effective risk-mitigation plan and ensure that your website project doesn’t go down in flames.

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