"DX" Training Day

At Jahia, we like to spark innovations. It can be a morning coffee between colleagues, an event visit, or just a new market insight that leads to a great product feature, a new social media campaign, a new sales targeting plan etc. To better understand other teams and how they work, we initiated an exchange program for our employees: the best way to get a fresh set of eyes into how we work and what we do.

This is the story of what happened when a team of three marketers got under the hood and worked with the development team. The development team decided to welcome the marketing team for a training on DX (our CMS Platform).

Through this interview, Alexis, Junior Digital marketer tells us about this experiment:

Why did the marketing team have a day of training on DX ?

Earlier this year, the marketing team welcome a few developers for a morning session in which each marketer has presented is his missions and how he proceeded to achieve his objectives. We also ran a feedback session on our website to understand their point of view as developers on our communications (We got great insights!). So, it was therefore completely normal for them to welcome us into their own space. However, this was not only to give us simple explanations about their role in the company. Our dear developers had the excellent idea (it is not sarcastic) to invite us to know our flagship product Jahia DX better and to know how to install and use it. In addition of being a rather unique experience for us, the dev department would benefit from valuable feedback on our experience. Our slogan being “Making Digital Simpler”, it was logical that certain tasks, even for someone who knew nothing about them, should be easy and intuitive.

Nice! How was your day ? Give some more details.

The day began with an animated presentation of our product, the possibilities it could bring to companies as well as technical vocabulary allowing us to communicate more easily with developers.

Then it was time to move on to practice. After installing Java via Oracle. The launch of DX was via the use of the Terminal application on Mac. Terminal? But what is it ? Good question, I had never opened this application before ... Lines of codes on lines of codes offered to us. Fortunately the developers were there to help us ... otherwise, the experience would have shortened.

There we were,  autonomous, in front of a blank page that would become our playground and more precisely our first website (if we can call it a website).

What did you think about the DX possibilities on the “Front End” of your website ?

The morning and early afternoon was dedicated to the whole “Front End” part of our website. I was really curious, trying new things, looking at all the possibilities, creating different content for each page. The whole “Front End” part seemed really accessible and intuitive. I would like to point out that my website nevertheless looked more like a joke than an artist's work. However, for my novice level, I was very happy and so were the developers (they kept encouraging us). Once our, more or less solid, “Front End” was established, the developers decided to take us into the “Back End” to create properties on some of our pages.

Did the “Back End” was easy and intuitive as the “Front End”?

I don’t think so… I learned that the “Back End” is everything you don't see on a website. Never having coded in my life, I was totally lost... To tell you, I wanted to change dollars in our lines of code into euros, thinking that the price of the items offered on my website would then be in euro (facepalm). They quickly understood that the Java language was not for me. They then decided to create the properties for me while taking the time to explain to me why and how. Nothing to do, I did not understand anything but it was all interesting and enriching because I had never accessed the “Back End” part of a website.

Did you see something else on DX after the “Front-End” and Back-end?

Yes, to finish this day in beauty, the developers decided to make us install modules. The task was much easier and more intuitive. I finally understood our marketing positioning: "Making Digital Simpler".  Many elements on DX were accessible with a little bit of curiosity and patience. So I created a page where you can play to the emblematic "Snake" thanks to a module incorporated in DX (available on our app-store).

Some final words? 

I would like once again to thank the whole team of developers for this day which will definitely remain engraved in my memory. Besides learning a lot, I hadn't had a laugh like that in a long time.

Julie Asselin
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