Whew! What a weekend. Over the span of 48 hours I was frantically working for 42 hours…and I wasn’t alone. There were 20 teams and 20 charities at the Dallas We Are Microsoft Charity Event and it was incredible to watch the final presentations made by each of the exhausted teams.
Lots of great work was done by all. Huge congratulations to everyone involved!
Telerik/Sitefinity lends a hand to Charities
Just like last year, Telerik donated Sitefinity CMS to any charity team that decided to use it. I was delighted that most of the charity teams decided to use Sitefinity for their projects.
Easy to use? Prove it!
One of key benefits of Sitefinity is that it’s easy to learn & customize for both developers & end-users. These charity events are a great test of this claim.
Over 48 hours .NET developers are introduced to Sitefinity CMS and then use it to create a web site that addresses a charity’s very specific organizational goals. After that, the charity’s organizers (end users) are trained to manage the web site.
It is extremely difficult for a product to look good under these conditions.
Sitefinity performs extremely well under these demanding conditions. Each of the teams that used Sitefinity were able to create some incredible web sites. Furthermore, these weren’t generic cookie-cutter web sites. I was astounded at the diversity and level of customization these teams were able to deliver in this short time-frame.
Even more importantly, each of the charities were delighted with results and felt empowered to manage their own web sites.
Lessons Learned
I always come away from these events with a lot of lessons. As easy as Sitefinity is, there is always room for improvement. All of these lessons help Sitefinity become a better product. I’m very grateful to all the people who offered suggestions for product improvements.
Anyway, we were delighted to be involved with this event and look forward to next year!