Squiz

In the beginning

Before I started at Squiz I'd never even heard of a CMS.

When I started, I was employed as an implementer, someone who would build websites in the CMS. Although in all my time at Squiz I never implemented a clients site. I was however ask if I would do some training. In the, almost, 13 years of working at Squiz I trained over 1000 of their clients on how to use their growing product set.

Development

Over the years that I worked at Squiz I was mostly left to work on my own and manage my own time, which I relished.

It wasn't to long before I was promoted to Training Manager for the UK, at this time I was training 3 days a week, every week.

I was then made Head of Training, which meant that I was not only Training but working as part of the London Senior Management team.

I was asked to take over the role over Security Manager as well as doing many other things, and this lead to my job title changing yet again to Head of Change.

During this time the Managing Director of the London Office left and while we looked for a replacement I was asked to join a team to help run the London office.

Over the remaining years, I spent my time focusing on evangelising, speaking and training on Squiz's products.

Travel

From my first week at Squiz travel was a thing, on my 3rd day I had to travel to Oxford to train 20+ Librarians from Oxford University's Bodleian Library.

Squiz gave me the chance to travel not just in the UK but all over the world, I got to spend many weeks in Gibraltar, not my favourite place in the world, once you've seen the monkeys once you don't need to again.

I got to go to Australia on multiple occasions to speak at the yearly User Conference, where I visited Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.

I got to spend 2 weeks in Toronto, training Toronto City Council on how to use Squiz Matrix and Funnelback, I went in January and it was -27ºc.

I went to Amsterdam on multiple occasions to train one of the biggest and oldest publishers in the world.

I got to go to Tel Aviv numerous times, which is one of the greatest places I've ever been to in the world.

I've visited the Squiz Scotland office more times than I can count and always been made super welcome every time I've been there.

Finally I've been out to Squiz's Polish office, Szczecin, on multiple occasions.

Products

When I started at Squiz, they had one main product, MySource Matrix (CMS) and a legacy one MySource Classic (CMS). Over the past 13 years their offering has grown, to cover a range of online services.

Matrix

Squiz Matrix, is their longest running product, it is a Enterprise level Content Management System. It has been rated by industry analyst as one of the best in the market. It is a very powerful tool focusing on making the content creators role as easy as possible.

Funnelback

Funnelback, was acquired by Squiz from CSIRO in 2009 and is an enterprise Search Engine. At least that is what it was back in 2009. It has since been developed to also be an Analytics engine, looking at Content and Accessibility and now has a built in Knowledge Graph, for dynamically linking and search data and content from many different systems.

Datastore

In the pipeline for the past 18+ months, Datastore is way have creating Data APIs from Blueprints to store Data as CMS would store content.

Connect

Again in the pipeline for the past 18+ months, Connect is an integration tool that allows easy connection from one tool/system to another, for example connecting Matrix to Salesforce.

Workplace

Workplace is an out of the box Intranet for large companies/organisations. It is built on top of Matrix and Funnelback. It includes Social Tools, Governance, Document Storage, search, Communities.

Edify

Edify, is the new kid on the block, released just over a month ago and is a Student Engagement platform. It allows education establishments to manage a students whole life cycle.

People

If you ask anyone who works or has worked at Squiz, what's the best thing about Squiz they will all say "The People". For me Squiz is about the people, I've made some of my best friends at Squiz, people I still talk to every week even though we've not worked with for years. The people are the biggest thing that I shall miss, not working there, but I'm still in contact with a vast majority of those people and feel I always will be.