Author Archives: admin

Minnesota Licensing in Tridion

This project was the first Tridion project for Deloitte US. As we all know Tridion is currently ranked as the lead Web Content Management System by Forrester (login requirerd). As Tridion is executing its push into the US market it was only a matter of time before Deloitte US would be engaged in a Tridion project.

The internal Deloitte network led them to me. I went over there for one week to share the knowledge we already had on Tridion. I feel the following quotes speak for themselves:

“Albert helped us ramp up very quickly with Tridion’s solution and best practices. The information he shared with us was insightful and got us prepared for a week long workshop sessions with Tridion and the State. Demonstrated excellent communication style and customized the discussions based on the auidence i.e., provided high level summary as well as dove deep as needed.”

“Just wanted to drop you a quick note that Albert is doing a great job supporting our team here in Minnesota as a Subject Matter Expert in Tridion.  His insights and best practices document are very helpful to us and he has already earned the respect of the lead technical team members.  We’re looking forward to having him to continue supporting us remotely and potentially even a return trip to Minnesota if necessary.”

Minnesota Tridion implementation

Kamer van koophandel website

Role description: Tridion Architect, team lead
Techniques used: Tridion, Prince2, .NET, SQL 2000
Period: 02-2007 until 12-2007

At the Dutch Chamber of Commerce I was issued the job of getting a failed web project up and running. … was the implementation partner. I have been directing their efforts and straightening out the Tridionarchitecture and FO for a successful go live. In addition I set up and gave a Tridion course for the web editors (30) at the Chamber of Commerce.

The problems that were at the base of the failing project were at every level: Tridion Blueprinting, Tridion installation, DB performance, code quality, functional mismatches, HTML templating.

The biggest problem was caused by a wrong choice for the blue print architecture. It involved making copies of the content publication for each regional chambre. The practice of copying content should never be done other then for another website or another language. Making copies of data is essentially wrong and should be done with great consideration of the consequences.

The site had its go live in december 2007 www.kvk.nl. One of the great achievements is getting 40K pageviews an hour out of just one Tridion presentation server. In addition generating the 13 different navigation files is done in under 5 seconds.

WABO datadictionary

Role description: Data analyst, team lead
Techniques used: UML (Enterprise Architect), WSDL, XSD, XSLT, excel
Period: 09-2006

Advisor datadictionary for the ministry of VROM. The goal was to aggregate and minimize data from 30 licenses for which the 400+ governmental agencies granting them had developed a large variety of different forms. I needed to identify and categorize the essential data into a datadictionary, which could then be used to create one form to be used by all agencies.

During this project I supervised the work of a few junior project members. For this project I used a tool called Enterprise Architect which was able to generate WSDL and XSD’s to be used for the definition of messages. In addition I wrote an XSLT program which transformed the XSD into a human readable datadictionary.

Equens merger

RoleDescription: Tridion web programmer
Techniques used: Tridion, VBScript, CSS
Period: 09-2006

In the days before the merger of Interpay and Transaktionsinstitut I was called in to help a colleague to do some last minute template tweaking. The goal was to reuse the existing website template’s to create 3 internal websites and 3 external (Dutch, English and German) websites.

The deadline was met with three hours to spare (no champagne for me: a go live for the UWV in the wee hours of the night). The day after the Equens merger we were presented with a magnum bottle of champagne for a job well done. Within one month and with very little effort we were able to create 6 new websites by effectively using Tridion blueprinting.

In addition to this showcase of Tridion blueprint Strength (6 websites live within one month) I also added a few small features to the site.

UWV external and internal websites

RoleDescription: Tridion web programmer
Techniques used: Tridion, XSLT, VBScript, JavaScript, Sharepoint 2003, Utraseek, C#
Period: 09-2005 until 11-2006

The goal of this project was to continuously improve and develop new functionality for www.uwv.nl and the UWV internal website. It was a classic ASP website where the Tridion templates were written in XSLT. The publication model was the “static” type where complete pages were published to the webserver.

One of the bigger projects was concerned with importing manuals into Tridion. There were in total about 80 manuals that needed to be imported with some books taking up over 20K components in Tridion. The biggest challenge here was in generating the navigation in Tridion. Most Tridion implementations suffer from the time it takes to generate navigation files. Where a typical implementation does not contain more then 20K content components the manuals alone contained over 150K content components. I found a solid solution to this problem which generates the navigation files over 100 times faster.

Yamaha Motors

Role description: Web Editor
Techniques used: Tridion, HTML

My first Tridion experience was in restructuring exisiting content (Italian, german, french) and importing it into Tridion. Very much a last minute effort which started one week before the go live and finished in the nick of time.

Philips CFT Robocup

RoleDescription: Programmer (intern)
Techniques used: C++, Programming patterns, Real Time Linux, Motion Control
Period: 02-2002 until 06-2002

In the final phase of my first bachelors education I took part in a research project at Philips CFT. The goal was to find out whether it was possible to create Runtime Configurable Motion control using RT linux and C++. It was part of the Philips CFT Robocup project. An initiative which goal it was to make things better. During this project I learned that motion control and embedded software engineering is not my piece of cake and I found myself struggling to keep my attention focused.

However my efforts were fruitfull and I was awarded a very nice grade and received my bachelor’s degree.

Sail Simulator

RoleDescription: Programmer (intern)
Techniques used: Delphi, DirectX, VRML, 3DS
Period: 09-2000 until 01-2001

During my first bachelors degree I did an internship at a small but innovative company called Stentec. Stentec is a small software firm which is heavily specialized in simulation software. Their most successful product, by far, is Sail Simulator. During my internship I was given the opportunity to work on their DirectX simulation engine which makes it all possible.

It was a turbulent time for the company in which it struggled to get the alpha demo of Sail Simulator to the markets. The project was delayed by a considerable amount of time and the investors were keen on seeing results.

In spite of all the turmoil my counsellors, Ramon Beiboer and Egbert Bron, found the time to guide me on my path of discoveries in the realm of 3D programming, DirectX and general software team skills. I admit to a lot of mistakes in pointer programming and rebooting my system at least a dozen times per day. It taught me to be precise when it comes to taking care of the small details.

CRM 101

Introduction to Customer Resource Management. Introduced were the different CRM suits:

  • SAP
  • Siebel on Demand
  • Epiphany
  • Siebel

The differences between the different CRM suites were explained and a demonstration of the main functionality was given.