Our highlights

We started with an easy-to-use Magento shop - the blugento webshop, which has been adapted to the special German requirements and comes with an intuitive design manager.

This blugento webshop was later expanded with the blugento data hub. Via this central interface, we can connect other systems such as ERP or PIM to the shop relatively quickly.

Our latest solution is the blugento shop factory. It is particularly suitable for manufacturers, producers or franchisors who want to quickly create independent Magento shops for their own product worlds or for their sales partners without losing control and the overview.

Since Magento comes from the USA, it is not immediately ready for use due to the special requirements of the German market. We have developed a Magento version that configures both Magento CE and numerous extensions required for Germany in just one installation process. This includes, for example, the German language package, German tax rates and an invoice layout adapted for the German market.

Today there are localized Magento editions for the following countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia and Vietnam. Like the Meet Magento conference series, we have outsourced these to the Meet Magento Association, where they are further developed together with local partners.

Since Magento itself did not allow selling Magento extensions on its own Magento Marketplace at that time, we decided in 2013 to open our own marketplace for Magento extensions: nr-apps.com.

Here we offered our own extensions as well as mostly paid products from other developers. The market seemed big enough and numerous discussions with developers who did not take care of the sale themselves and wanted to deal with the associated bureaucratic requirements strengthened our plan.

In 2012 we founded the Netresearch App Factory AG and put the Magento extension marketplace nr-apps.com online in 2013. Success did not materialize though, and in 2016 we decided to close our marketplace again.

This officially recognized our involvement in the Magento community, which has shown itself in the organization of several Meet Magentos since 2009. We were very happy about this recognition and responsibility and had new team shirts printed for the occasion :)

The winners were rewarded with the Magento Community Builder Award for their outstanding commitment to the European Magento community. Netresearch was thanked for organizing the Meet Magento conferences and the Magento Developer's Paradise, among other things.

The payment provider Ogone, now Ingenico ePayments, followed a year later. We were able to convince through our experience and specialization in Magento extensions and our extensive range of services.

Marcus Lilienthal, Channel/Strategic Alliance Manager DACH at Ingenico ePayments, says about our cooperation: “With Netresearch we have had a reliable full service Magento Extension Partner for years. As the world's leading provider of payment solutions, we are faced with constantly changing technological and security-related challenges. The digital economy has permanently changed global trade. Netresearch is a reliable partner who supports us, our customers, and business partners in providing the flexibility required by global trade at a high quality level at all times. We look forward to working successfully with Netresearch in the future."

For both DHL and Ingenico, in addition to developing the Magento extensions, we also take on extensive support services for dealers, developers and agencies who integrate the module. For this purpose, we created branded support portals for DHL and Ingenico, in which users can find useful FAQs on the extension and create support tickets.

The Developers Paradise took place for the first time in 2010. Netresearch organized the first four events. The organization of the last Developers Paradise in 2016 was taken over by the Meet Magento Association, which we initiated and is now independent. The small international Magento developer conference was very popular and was a mixture of collegial leisure activities, evening coding and lecture sessions. There were summer editions on Mallorca and Ibiza as well as winter editions in Kaprun, Austria. The first Developers Paradise took place in Palma de Mallorca and gathered 130 Magento developers from 22 countries. The keynote speaker was the then CTO of Magento, Yoav Kutner.

The first coding contest took place in 2011. During the small competition, students and graduates could test their knowledge of PHP with a few programming tasks from the comfort of their own home and win exclusive prizes. The award ceremony took place in our offices and in good company in Leipzig bars. The coding contest took place four times.

In addition, lack of human resources can be compensated more quickly. For this reason, we joined the e-commerce cooperative Towerbyte eG from Jena in 2009. It consisted of 28 companies from the internet and new media sector; there are currently 14 companies.

Soon, Netresearch and four other media companies founded an e-commerce cooperative called Towerbyte Leipzig eG in Leipzig, the establishment of which was celebrated on June 20, 2009 at the 125th anniversary of the Leipzig cotton spinning mill. The anniversary was opened by Angela Merkel, who praised the impressive area with its inspiring industrial charm.

Today we are no longer a member of the cooperative, but we continue to maintain some partnerships there.

Together with Rico Neitzel we set up a concept and program that delighted 250 visitors and still attracts numerous Magento enthusiasts such as online retailers, developers and agencies to Leipzig today. Meet Magento continued to develop year after year, grew, changed location within Leipzig and became more and more international. It is now taking place in over 40 countries, organized with local partners.

Due to the growing importance and size of the event and the Meet Magento institution, we decided in 2016 to found the Meet Magento Association as a non-profit organization and to outsource the event from Netresearch's agency business. Today the association operates completely independently.

The Magento Enterprise edition has been around since Magento 1.3. As everyone knows, you pay a license fee for Magento Enterprise compared to the Community Edition and thus receive “extensive support with guaranteed response times, warranties, bug fixes and patches with increased priority,” said Thomas Fleck. Today we no longer differentiate between enterprise and community customers, which means that everyone benefits from the same first-class support. In addition to the support and maintenance advantages, enterprise customers also benefit from some exclusive features. This included, for example, setting up shop areas that could only be used by certain customer groups.

Thomas Fleck said: "With current stock market developments, it is particularly important that investors receive reliable and current information first hand. Current news and price information are a matter of course here. This is exactly what TYPO3 is perfect for. The cooperation with Bayerische Börse was great, pleasant and productive. We look forward to further joint projects. " And these followed soon.

The next job included the website greenmarket-exchange.com, which has since been discontinued. It provided information about trading in CO2 emission certificates.

This was followed by the website relaunch of Bayerische Börse AG itself. Here too, TYPO3 was used again due to the new requirements. The new page has been expanded to include various personalized login areas. In addition, the website was linked to a customer relations management system in order to automate sending newsletters. In addition to these website-typical extensions, various stock exchange content such as real-time push prices, sample portfolios via the price data provider Teletrader and watch lists were integrated.

The latest project with Bayerische Börse is the marketplace www.gettex.de, which is also based on TYPO3. Gettex provides investors with the latest prices for stocks, bonds, funds, ETFs and ETCs in real time. Here, too, the necessary data is integrated in real time via an interface from the course data provider Teletrader. In addition, the marketplace provides information on the latest developments in important markets in the form of charts and news blocks.

At www.gettex.de, investors can find in real time the current prices of stocks, bonds, foreign currency bonds as well as funds, ETFs and ETCs. The associated data is supplied by the data provider Teletrader via an API connection. In addition to current prices, investors can also find the latest developments in the most important markets, which have been integrated into the TYPO3 website in the form of charts and news blocks. In 2016, the range of functions was expanded to include certificate trading.

The travel agency, which at that time was still the first point of contact for travelers, didn't suffice because information on travel destinations, prices and other things was increasingly provided via the Internet and mobile phones. The travel providers had to upgrade heavily here in order to withstand the competition.

With our TYPO3 travel edition we hit the nail on the head and received a lot of popularity at the ITB fair in Frankfurt. In the Travel Technology Hall, which was specially introduced for trade visitors interested in technological solutions for the tourism industry, we made many interesting contacts and, with the TYPO3 travel edition, laid the foundation for our continued success in the tourism industry. “The content management system TYPO3 has proven to be a very good solution for our customers in the tourism industry. Almost every customer request can be fulfilled and implemented comparatively inexpensively. As open-source software, TYPO3 can also be expanded as required with other other applications and IT systems. With the company Diginetmedia, for example, we have implemented TYPO3-based virtual 360° tours for cruise ships and hotels” explained Netresearch Managing Director Thomas Fleck. Since then we have also been able to develop projects for other companies in the Costa Crociere / Carnival Group.

Our first university customer was the University of Leipzig, which has been one of our customers since 2008. For them we carried out the relaunch of the TYPO3 website on the occasion of their 600th birthday. The agency Heimrich & Hannot took over the conception and graphics, the ifabrik revised the existing databases and we implemented the new specifications with the open-source CMS as a TYPO3 special agency.

The next university followed in 2009 and we took over the relaunch of the website of the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration and Justice in Hof – FHVR for short (today the University for Public Service in Bavaria).

Since the University of Leipzig was always satisfied with our services, the next job followed in 2010 for building a new website for the economics faculty of the University of Leipzig. For this we copied the main page of the University of Leipzig and adapted it to the individual needs of the faculty as an independent system at the customer's request.

Our newest customer in the university landscape is the Leipzig University of Telecommunications (Hochschule für Telekommunikation Leipzig – HfTL). In 2017 we took over the TYPO3 update from version 4.5 LTS to 6.2 LTS. The 60 TYPO3 extensions were a particular challenge. After a thorough analysis, we were able to remove over 20 of them and thus enormously improve the update capability of the system. In addition, a responsive design was implemented. Torsten Büttner, Public Relations Officer at the HfTL, said about our collaboration: “With Netresearch we have found a reliable partner for our TYPO3 content management system. During the entire project, Netresearch was at our side with advice and action and we were able to generate valuable impulses for the further development of the website. We look forward to a further, fruitful and cooperative partnership."

Netresearch has been using agile development since around 2008 and has been enthusiastic about the results that can be achieved with it ever since. Since we would like to pass on our knowledge and also want to enable other companies and partners to get to know and use the advantages of Scrum, we organized a workshop together with items AG in 2010. "We have been planning a SCRUM developer workshop for a long time and are very pleased that we have succeeded in winning the SCRUM 'guru' Joseph Pelrine," said Thomas Fleck at the time. Joseph Pelrine was one of the first Scrum trainers to be authorized by Ken Schwaber and who at the time had around 15 years of experience as a trainer. We were also able to take some new things with us for our daily work.

Since 2012, our TYPO3 team has implemented all projects with Scrum. All Netresearch teams have been using Scrum since 2015. To support our day-to-day business, we have brought in professional help in the form of a Scrum Master, which consistently supports us in making optimal use of agile methods. In addition, we also visit various workshops and events such as the agiLE Barcamp.

Scrum enables us and our customers to react better and faster to changed (market) conditions during development. In addition, our developers and project managers can take on more responsibility, the teams can be put together individually depending on the project requirements and the exchange of knowledge between colleagues can be promoted. We will definitely continue to work on the optimal Scrum framework for us and our customers.

Both the range of functions and the technological basis of the modular software architecture, the possibilities of search engine optimization, the community functions and of course the integration of payment systems were convincing. In April 2008 Netresearch became Germany's first Magento Platinum Partner. We had direct contact with Magento right from the start. As a Platinum Partner, we and our customers benefit from the quick support from Varien, the original manufacturer of Magento, for inquiries and problem solutions.

The focus of the event was not on the agencies, as was the case at similar events, but on their customers, being medium-sized companies, the industry and public administration. Overall, the TYPO3 User's Day took place four times from 2006 to 2009 and around 80-100 people gathered per event for an efficient exchange of knowledge.

In 2009, we developed an Internet Booking Engine (IBE) on behalf of AIDA to enable website visitors to book directly online. AIDA was one of the pioneers in the industry.

In 2013 we relaunched www.aida.de within four months. The TYPO3 system contained over 3,000 pages and numerous e-commerce applications such as product catalogs and the IBE we developed.

One year later, we were then commissioned to combine the various information systems for the guests of AIDA together with kreuzwerker GmbH in a cross-device system and to expand them with additional functions. After two years of development, the AIDA Boardportal was created, which can be accessed on a wide variety of devices on board, from cabin TV to public computers to mobile devices that guests bring with them. The AIDA Boardportal offers guests a wide variety of functions. For example, they can find out about the current position of the ship, the weather or upcoming ports, reserve restaurant seats or book an excursion.

In addition to the Leipziger Messe and many other customers, 360° panorama photography brought Netresearch to another major customer in 2004 - BMW - albeit differently than expected. For the new construction of the plant in Leipzig, the car manufacturer from Munich did not want 360° photos but a time-lapse film and a live transmission of the construction progress on the Internet. We took on this challenge with full self-confidence, developed a self-sufficient, wireless and solar-powered WebCAM solution together with partners and created a new business area from it.

Good thing that during this time the founders' center of life increasingly shifted to Leipzig due to their studies. There was a new market here to be conquered. While there was still no competition in Zeitz, the situation in Leipzig looked completely different and the founding team quickly learned that you have to offer your customers something special, a Unique Selling Point. The first customers in Leipzig were the municipal marketing initiative “Leipzig is coming!” - a predecessor to “Leipziger Freiheit” or the Business Innovation Center in Karl-Heine-Str. 99, where the young company opened its first Leipzig office.

At the beginning, the founders wondered how they could finance a then modern, digital ISDN connection for the shared flat while still being paid for surfing and using the new medium. It was not far until a company was founded that advised other companies on Internet matters and the business was registered in the summer of 1998. The first customer (customer number 98-001) was hairdresser Schmidt from Zeitz, who was so enthusiastic about this topic that he made his hair studio available to the young founders for an initial information event and invited selected entrepreneurs from his customer base . This event was a complete success and the young company had almost 10 new customers.

From this time, not only hairdresser Schmidt remained as a loyal customer, but also the courage for unusual advertising measures and the firm belief in being able to achieve something as entrepreneurs.