Thom joined Kentico late last year as a Product Evangelist, and already we are seeing formal training and certifications appearing, regular webcasts and instructional videos being made available, new discussions surrounding best practice kicking off, and Kentico beginning to speak of an enterprise solution with good reason and the material to back up the claim.

Much of this comes as a direct result of Thom, and of the depth of experience he brings with him.

With a career at Microsoft spanning somewhere in the vicinity of 10 years, Thom started out in developer platform evangelism as one of the very first Microsoft evangelists, eventually moving to corporate eveangelism where he was responsible for various elements of Visual Studio.

The move to Kentico was prompted by both changes within Microsoft, and a desire to get a bit more hands and make change personally.

“Microsoft is a fascinating company with so many cool technologies but it’s easy to become complacent when youre dealing with product releases that are so far away.

When I left we were dealing with Visual Studio 12, which is due out in 5 years. I wanted to see the impacts of what I was doing hit the market, and I wanted to see them a little bit quicker than 5 years from now.

Kentico is an opportunity for me to reconnect with my roots and to do things that I can see the results of right away.

As a senior director with Microsoft I tended to run large groups, which kind of separated me from my core element, my core audience, and I really wanted to get back to the technology. I wanted to be able to do things, It was fascinating for me to be able to install visual studio, and show stuff off, and do stuff. It was fanatastic and fun.”

Thom sees the role of Product Evangelist as one of education.

“People don’t always know what a CMS is, or why they’d want one. And take Version 5.0, people don’t yet know what widgets are, they don’t know about UI personalisation. An evangelist builds awareness, answers questions, presents new features and disusses the roadmap... you know, spreading the love. That’s what an evangelist to me is really all about.”

But it’s also about making sure that, as he puts it, “customer voices are carried.”

“I’ve already been interviewing and working with customers, drawing feedback, and preparing what will be actioned in 5.5. You’re going to see a lot of that coming through. One of the things that really attracted me to Kentico was that I was seeing a small company that was willing to listen, and that was really willing to action things, and that’s kind of very unusual.

“Petr is an amazing visionary with an ability to make things happen. We talked a really long time before I made the decision to come over to Kentico. He and the company as a whole are impressive in that their system functions and they really are getting stuff done. What they hear is being actioned.

“He also really cares about customers and that’s the thing I was most interested in, that in good times or bad he’d want to continue caring about his customers and wanna continue doing the right things.

“The fact that Kentico is a worldwide company means that its super important when thinking of how to scale, we realise that we have to scale through partners. And Petr does a great job of making sure we do the right thing by our partners, that we’re always listening to what they’re saying.

“I was just coming aboard when Petr was going through the Version 5.0 pricing, and it was impressive in the sense that he really listened. There was a lot of discussion about the best thing to do. I’m always impressed when any company listens and is willing to make changes based on what they hear.

“I mean like anyone we’ve got revenue targets and we wanna hit them, but at the same time we have to do whats right by our partners and our customers, or we won’t grow.”

But it’s the education side of things where Thom is really making waves right now. You only have to take a look at Kentico DevNet to see that 4 out of 5 posts are put together by Thom - instructional videos, white papers, and discussion pieces. He’s like some sort of crazy publishing machine.

“Well, I have to keep moving. I have to get this stuff out there. There’s so much that people are still looking for. At the same time, I don’t wanna boil the ocean. I’m aware of the fact that I can’t do everything right now. I wanna provide some basic materials at first and work up to the more difficult stuff.

“You know, something I love to hear is a partner telling me they don’t have enough about X, because I’m like, OK lets go and write some stuff about X.

“I’m answering a need right away, and at the same time building the foundations for the rest of it.

“Right now we’re identifying customers that will enable us to find out what people are using and how and why, you know, what their needs are, how the bigger partners are working, what the key enterprisey tools are. I think a lot of this is going to come from the partners. These are the guys already using it and getting things done.

“Then it’s gotta get written so we can validate it - Are people doing this? Are there better ways of doing it? - And then we’ll eventually try to validate it in a lab or directly with a customer. I’m a big fan of grey papers – you write it, and then you validate it.

“From a best practices perspective I’m thinking in terms of a developer. How do I handle a large team environment, source code management, development? How do I handle continuous builds? How do I stay agile? The list goes on.

“I’m probably going to use a lot of it for the magazine. It’s a great forcing function pushing me to get a lot of it done. Something im really kicking around is whether we go down the Prestrictive Architecture Guidance (PAG) path, which basically means we go into a lab, we build out a team system, we tear it down, and we build it up again, figuring out what we need to do along the way. It’s kind of a very detailed, very prescriptive way of doing things and obviously a much longer path, so I think the first couple of rounds are going to be about collecting basic practices, putting them together, and then starting to roll those out while we move forward from there, putting them into more effective documentation. Eventually I’d like to have something up on DevNet around enterprise guidance.

“I think that we know enough now that we could make some PAG that we can roll out in the next couple of months. With Version 5.0 we did a lot of testing, and its like, how do we present that testing and performance to the public? How do we create a set of topics so that when we go out to a large company who tell us that we can’t handle scalability and that they have 10 million users, we can point them at guidance documents outlining the infrastructure needed to get them going, and demonstrating that we can actually handle their requirements?

“I mean I’m not a fan of boiling the ocean. I’ll take what we have and build out the topics. We’re starting to get together with partners around what they’re currently doing, and then building up the information that comes back. We’re offering to have them write white papers, and we’ll see how that goes.”

As our latest contributor, Thom was keen to know what would work best with our readers.

“A monthly best practice for the mag? OK, do we solicit questions, like ‘Whats the best practice for change manage- ment?’ and then cover that for a month or do we write an article each month and see how it goes? I mean whats the best way to work with your readers? Do they want questions or answers?”

And honestly, without having had a great deal of criticism so far, it was difficult to answer.

“I think its worth putting something out there that’s you’re understanding of a given topic at this point - a statement, right or wrong. Think of it as a grey paper, something set up to solicit discussion, something to use that as a starting point. Invite commentary, and evolve the topic over time. If you keep the topic simple, it can be used as a talking point, stimulating discussion and improvement, which then allows the piece to evolve and become a white paper.”

Thankfully, this works well with Thom’s idea of the grey paper, and ties in well with his feelings about boiling the ocean, so we can look forward to regular writings, heated discussions, and the beginnings of some really significant guidance docs.

We’ve already discussed a need for large team best practice - concurrency, version control, testing, management, and deployment - and the need for breaking these topics down, but Thom puts it very simply.

“I don’t think youre going to put together an article on testing. Youre going to put together an article on unit testing. You keep it small and easy to take on board.

“I also think of it in terms of how you should do it and why you should do it. You know, what is this thing, why would you do it, and how would you do it? There’s no point understanding how something is done if you don’t know why you’d do it in the first place.”

This is great stuff, and I for one am really looking forward to it.

Thom brings with him a wealth of experience in this space, the full backing of Kentico, the dedication and passion of someone with a new toy, and the time that comes with a fulltime role, all of which allow him to do what a lot of us have been wanting to do for a long time - put together the material that shows that the Kentico CMS is a solid product and that the horse that we’ve saddled our ponies to is worth the ride.

And honestly, although it will take time for this all to come to fruition, I’m glad that we all have a chance to be part of the process. We all bring something to the table, and although Kentico build the platform, it’s the partners that use it, so it’s awesome to see that we’ll be part of the mix.

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