Another Magento Imagine has come and gone and man was it fun to see some of our colleagues, clients, and friends again! Between the great breakout sessions, networking events, and organic conversations we had a great time. Here are a few takeaways from the event.
Partners Summit Meeting
- The big news is November 2018 = End of Life for M1. This means that retailers on M1 will no longer receive product updates, bug fixes, patches or support. If you are a retailer and you are reading this on M1, please contact us and we can help with your upgrade and replatform to M2.
- One of the large quotes from Magento was “We are striving to make it easier to do business with Magento”, meaning that they realize that it is has been “frictionful” to work with Magento due to a high pace of technology and acquisitions, many staff changes, and overall direction changes for the company (as they move upstream). It was nice to hear them stand up and own up to a weakness of the company and say they are committed to fixing it.
General Sessions
- One of the more insightful and exciting talks was a general session talk from the CEO of Stella and Dot, Jessica Herrin. She was insightful, full of knowledge, and a great public speaker. I left her talk amazed at her knowledge of eCommerce, her industry, and the ways times have changed in business over the last 10 years. If you ever get a chance to hear her speak it is a “must do”.
Conference Breakouts
- By far the most beneficial breakout sessions were the “Commerce Conversations”. Commerce Conversations allowed retailers, solutions providers, system integrators, and other eCommerce focused companies to talk about pressing industry issues, where their business struggled in the eCommerce landscape, and how to get help. This roundtable was a way to get directly into the issues and talk directly to what keeps people up at night.
- Our own Gauge teamers Liz and DJ spoke in a breakout session entitled “Sweetening the Deal: Growing with MailChimp’s Multichannel Features”. Tony Simon from Mailchimp walked through our client OldTimeCandy’s story with Mailchimp and Facebook Ads. The talk was well attended and the audience asked some very insightful questions. Overall we are proud of Liz and DJ’s talk and can’t wait to see what else Mailchimp has in store for our clients.
- The migration from M1 to M2 is still a hot topic and many breakouts centered around how we are going to accomplish the mass exodus from M1 to M2. There still isn’t a great toolset out there to migrate clients (due to the variability of everyone’s installation) but there were two great tools announced: Git Hub Code Migration Tool and Git Hub Data Migration Tool. These two tools focus on the data portion of your store but you still have to recreate or refactor all front-end and extension functionality and that still remains a huge question mark for all stakeholders.
Keynote
- Serena Williams was the keynote this year at Magento Imagine 2017. The goal of the talk was to get the crowd inspired and personally, I think it accomplished that goal. The format was a fireside chat and talked about Serena’s rise to being the best in her sport, how she focused on her goals day in and day out, and how she is doing now with her brands and other non-sport’s business. Similar to last year’s Magic Johnson talk it was inspiring and everyone in the room loved having someone outside of eCommerce come and talk. Oh, and our COO Mark Lubbers took a tennis ball off the face (no joke).
Networking
- One of the main goals I had this year was to see what everyone else was doing in terms of M2 builds. Turns out that most of community is doing the “best they can” and that it hasn’t been easy for anyone. While this can be a bit of a let down we still see M2 as a business opportunity and look to build on the platform in 2017. You have to remember that when M1 was 2 years old it was still hard to work on as well. These things take time…
Product Releases &/or Future Products
Personally I really like Imagine because Magento holds back on new features and future releases until they can get on the mainstage and announce them for the world to see. Each Imagine there are new promises for features, functionality and a new release version. Imagine 2017 was no different and they came with many new features that excite me and our clients.
- Wholesale B2B Functionality
- RJ Metrics aka Magento BI
- BlueFoot CMS aka Magento Advanced CMS
- Magento Shipping (available with Cloud and Commerce Order Management)
- Magento Social
From top to bottom Magento Imagine 2017 was jam packed full of breakouts and great conversations. We truly enjoyed our experience and look forward to 2017 on the platform. The Imagine 2018 conference was even announced to be taking place at the Wynn again in 2018.
Gauge will see you there and until then, happy eCommercing!
Reference: Magento Imagine Agenda
