The CMS Experts Group: A Room Worth Being In

We've been in a lot of rooms with CMS vendors, digital agencies, and enterprise practitioners. Most of them involve someone trying to sell something.

This one doesn't.

The CMS Experts Group, managed by Boye & Co, is one of the few genuinely vendor-neutral spaces in the CMS and content operations world where the agenda isn't being set by a marketing budget. It's a curated community of around 20 professionals per chapter: product managers, CTOs, content strategists, agency leads, and enterprise practitioners, all carefully vetted before they get a seat at the table.

Janus Boye founded it in 2008 with a specific intent: bring the people who actually build, buy, and advise on CMS platforms into the same room, and have frank conversations without anyone pitching. Eighteen years later, that spirit is very much intact.

For Dotfusion, getting accepted into this group was a real moment. Not because of what it signals (though it does signal something: you don't get in just by asking), but because of what happens inside the meetings.

The conversations that actually move the industry

Content operations is what we think about every day. How do you build a website that a team can actually keep up with? How do you scale content output without scaling headcount? How do you make sure a headless CMS implementation doesn't collapse six months after launch because the content model was under-designed?

These are exactly the questions the CMS Experts Group wrestles with. Topics at any given meeting range from agentic content workflows and AI in the content supply chain, to composable architecture debates, to the uncomfortable reality of why so many CMS implementations underdeliver after go-live.

Nobody in that room is figuring this out from a vendor brochure. These are people who have shipped real projects, managed real migrations, and dealt with the organizational complexity that follows a platform decision. The conversations are frank in a way that's pretty rare when vendors are in the room. And the vendors who are in this group have earned their seat by contributing, not by sponsoring.

The people make it

The membership across North America and Europe includes some names you'd recognize. Deane Barker, Staffbase's long-time member and CMS community cornerstone, has called the group "an advisory board of smart friends." Jeff Eaton and Karen McGrane, both well-known in the structured content world, are North American members. Petr Palas of Kontent.ai represents the vendor side in Europe. Enterprise practitioners from PayPal, Intuit, ICANN, and TELUS have participated. Agility CMS, one of our core platform partners, hosted the Toronto chapter meeting just last year.

For an agency like Dotfusion, being in the same room as that calibre of peers, without a pitch deck in sight, is worth a lot. You hear what enterprise practitioners actually care about, not what vendors assume they care about. You pick up signals on where the industry is heading months before those ideas show up at conferences. You get challenged on your thinking, and that's useful.

What Dotfusion brings to the table

We're not in this group to find leads. We're in it because content operations and headless CMS is our craft, and this is one of the best places in the industry to sharpen it.

We bring 25 years of enterprise digital builds to these conversations, along with a real point of view on what's shifting right now. AI is transforming the content supply chain from a publication process into something closer to an agentic system. The CMS is becoming less of a feature-heavy tool and more of a regulated content hub, with intelligent workflows handling the path from ideation to publication. We work through this problem with clients every week, and being part of a community actively wrestling with the same questions makes us better at the work.

There's also a practical dimension: Agility CMS is one of our core platforms. Having direct, non-commercial access to conversations with the people who build and use these systems is something you can't replicate anywhere else.

On Boye & Co

Janus Boye has been in this space since 1998. Before founding Boye & Co in 2003, he was a principal technology analyst at CMS Watch, building the vendor-neutral credibility that is still the DNA of everything Boye & Co runs today. He has consulted for organizations including the United Nations, the World Health Organization, Red Bull, and Nordea. He doesn't pick favourites. He builds communities where the right people can have honest conversations, and then gets out of the way.

That's a rarer skill than it sounds.

The group now runs meetings across both continents, with North American sessions in cities including Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta, plus a dozen virtual calls per year and a members-only Slack channel that stays active between sessions. It's a serious professional community, not a networking happy hour.

If you're working seriously in this space

If your day job involves content management systems, digital experience platforms, or content operations at any meaningful depth, the CMS Experts Group is worth a look. The meetings are in-person and small by design. The conversations are substantive. The membership is capped, vetting is real, and the no-pitch culture is enforced.

We're glad to be in the room. If you're curious about what we've taken away from these conversations and how it shapes the way we think about headless CMS builds and content operations for enterprise clients, we're always happy to talk.

---

Dotfusion is a Certified B Corp digital agency specializing in enterprise headless CMS implementations, Answer Engine Optimization, and agentic content operations. We build on Contentful, Storyblok, and Agility CMS, among others. If your content infrastructure needs work, we'd love to hear about it.