Kentico 1 on 1 - Consulting

Hi Miro. First, tell us about your background at Kentico?

I joined Kentico about eight years ago while I was still at university studying Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Mobile Networking and Information Technology. I was looking for a summer job in my field, and I found Kentico.  I was hired as a support engineer and worked for the summer, thinking that I would only be here for a few months. After I had finished college, I wanted to stay at Kentico, so, I applied for a full-time position and worked in support for about three years. I was then looking for something more challenging and applied for a Consulting position within Kentico. Before I started, I spent some time in our development department to get some experience with best practices and processes. I worked on several features, including the LinkedIn connector and Google Maps functionality.

After that, I started as a consultant in Europe covering the rest of the world while Karol Jarkovsky was working as a consultant in the US. It was very interesting for me as I started working on engagements in South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and other parts of the world.  Over time, we started expanding our consulting team and many of the requests were coming from North America so I moved to our US office to help with those engagements. We added several new consultants to the program in the US, Europe, and Australia. At that point, I accepted the manager position of the consulting team and am running the program today.

What does the Kentico Consulting team do?

Primarily, our goal is to educate our customers on Kentico, make sure their projects are successful, and that they follow our best practices. In order to do that, we provide our customers with different packages, such as audits and custom training, and are involved in the analysis phase of many projects. We let you know how to achieve your goals by following our best practices.

Does Consulting compete with our development partners?

Not at all. As a part of our consulting services, we do not do any production development work. We rely on our partners to provide that development, and we assist them to achieve their goals. Most of the time, our partners are the ones using our services, especially at the beginning if it’s a new partner. We provide sample code, however, we let our partners do the actual development and figure things out with our assistance. We teach them the basics of our API and with that they should be able to find the answers they need and complete their goals.

What are some good examples for when people should engage Kentico Consulting?

In most cases, we are dealing with questions or situations involving integration, improving performance, and helping customers set up the proper architecture for their projects. It’s kind of like doing a review of their site and making sure it’s running optimally, is using our APIs correctly, and does not contain any security vulnerabilities. Really, anytime a developer or company is stuck on a difficult issue or just wants to make sure their site is set up correctly, Kentico Consulting can help.

What is an interesting issue or project you have worked on since you have been in Consulting?

Most of the time we are trying to push the limits of the system by improving performance or something like that. One project I was recently involved in dealt with translation. For translation companies, you often have to pay for every character or word they translate. What Kentico does is we send a snapshot of a page to the translation services in XML format. Over time, you have multiple versions of the same page because you are updating the title or other small changes. The way Kentico works is it sends the entire document to the translation service because it’s not aware of the exact text or section that was changed. This means there is a lot of extra text being sent for translation when only a small amount has been changed.

In order to save some money for companies who do a lot of translation, we ended up writing a proof of concept custom module using our best practices that created a snapshot of the page and compared it to the previous version to determine what had changed. The module then created the final XML that is sent to the translation service containing only the changed values. This saved the customer a lot of money in the translation process because they were only submitting the minor changes to the service instead of the whole page.  Our custom module was only a sample of how to achieve this functionality, and the customer implemented the final solution, using our best practices and API examples as a guide.  The actual development was done by the customer, and we assisted them along the way.

I have known Miro for many years, and he definitely has some great knowledge on the platform. His experience with different companies and projects allows him to see how developers are integrating Kentico into their other systems and the challenges they often face. I highly recommend engaging our ever-growing Consulting team if you have a difficult project or issue, and they can provide some expert guidance to get you the answers you need.