After an entertaining night with awards, a quiz and a few beers, we entered day 2 of SUGCON. Again, quite a few concurrent sessions running which were tough to choose between, but I was not disappointed….
POWER OF CONNECTED DATA
Todd and Lars started the day off by giving us a run through of the power of connected data and how data, such as CRM information, will provide a more personalised customer experience. With another example brand, Todd and Lars took us through a trip management application and through xConnect events; it takes a user’s upcoming trips and provides a customized itinerary and suggests car rentals through notifications. Through the creation of a calculated facet, data about the flights, airport, city etc. were migrated into xDB to create content personalized for it, whilst at the same time, triggering off goals for every visit.
Mapping all off this data together, it could be easily exported to Excel or software such as PowerBI, for further analysis. This can help you identify the actions and personalisation features that need to be put in place, though that might take quite some time to manually create. Here is where the Marketing Automation comes in, where custom conditions can be put in place to watch new itinerary items — listeners can then query details such as flight status and trigger off push notifications through custom activities.
EXM LIVE! THE MAGIC OF EMAIL AUTOMATION
Next we had Pete’s amazing, and surprisingly interactive, session on Email Exchange Manager (which I’m still getting emails for — anyone?!!). After a quick run through of EXM’s history and bumpy years, it’s clear that the suggested implementations to use are 3.5 upwards. In version 9, EXM is now part of the CMS and is closer then ever to the rest of the ecosystem.
The lack of documentation, breaking changes and bugs through the years have made this module quite problematic, but it seems that Sitecore have managed to work through most of these and have now also introduced a robust service bus — more focusing for automation and a tighter integration with Forms. Prior to 9, as all developers are aware, we had to manage and create all automated emails, but now with the tight coupling with Marketing Automation this can be easily customized through the drag and drop screens.
The demo that Pete took us through was one of the most interactive I’ve seen — through a hosted site we all signed up for emails and put ourselves through different campaigns by selecting if we’re a friend of Akshay or part of Corey’s stache fan club. According to your selection, the whole audience was processed through the automation plans Pete has setup and started receiving emails accordingly.
The demo itself was quite easy to setup, and as always issues were found.
As mentioned, a bug was also raised with Sitecore during this setup — the component personalisation isn’t resolving the Contact correctly. Hopefully Sitecore will release a patch soon.
Scaling is a common issue that a lot of developers have had to deal with, but that 4 million emails a day campaign seems possible . At Pete’s suggestion, this should be done by slowly warming up the SMTP to the scale that you need, but also heavily testing and tweaking the configuration of the dispatching server, potentially putting multiple dispatchers in place. Using Sitecore Email Cloud Delivery Service instead of introducing a new SMTP also helps. If using Azure PaaS, it was clearly highlighted that you do not scale out, but instead, setup multiple web app services.
A clean contact list is always helpful as EXM and the list manager runs checks during sending and this slows down the process. And lastly, GDPR — with the new EXM tightly coupled to the CMS this is now using xConnect and the new opt out marketing options for validations. Even more reasons to keep those contact lists clean.
Code used for the demo is available on sitecorehacker.com.
SITECORE INSTALLATION FRAMEWORK
Thomas Eldblom, product owner at Sitecore for SIF, gave a deep dive session into the purpose of SIF and how it can be used to install Sitecore 9 and Commence. This new framework allows for fast and flexible deployments that are consistently repeatable and scalable. Sitecore provides us a whole library of readymade scripts, but these are meant as a framework only, so make sure you configure them before just running any scripts.
Clearly Sitecore’s relationship with Azure is growing and this deployment framework is the way forward — in fact, Sitecore have provided pre-configured samples for any topology supported. Before running any of the scripts it’s important that all pre-requisites are met — both software required and the version number.
The 7 demos that Thomas took us through could easily sum up to over 70+ roles, but the focus was on rolling out a local development environment. This included XM Scaled (which is optimized and roles are split out), XP Single (where all roles combined) and XP Scaled (roles scaled out).
The main takeout from this session, other than reading through the provided documentation, is to plan your installation against the requirements necessary and not just pick a random topology. You should make sure you understand what the architecture is actually made of and learn the tools that are being used for these scripts.
Documentation is available online — with new updates coming out including GDPR and privacy.
The video series can be found online on the Master Sitecore’s YouTube Channel.
Code samples found on github.com/Kieranties/SIFSug
SITECORE COGNITIVE SERVICES: A WEB OF INTELLIGENCE
Potentially one of my favourite sessions (and if AI is your thing, make sure you read my How to realise the potential of AI through Sitecore post), Mark Stiles gave us a great overview of Cognitive Services starting off with a great origin story of Alan Turing’s work in the 50s. Turing always stated that we could potentially have machines that think and we’re now in a place where this might now be possible.
With many companies investing in AI, costs are coming down and commercial AI-driven marketing is become more viable with the likes of Microsoft, Google and IBM providing us with a ready set layer of integration services. Have we reached Turing’s point where machines can now solve the impossible problems?
As Mark explained, if you’re on a large-scale solution, personalisation and A/B testing can scale out quickly and it starts to become quite difficult to manage and will require much more time and vigilance. By adding a straight forward text crawler, tools such as automatic tagging suggestions, spell checking, and translation have become more accessible and these can be implemented easily into Sitecore.
ENRICHING SITECORE EXPERIENCE ANALYTICS WITH POWER BI
Continuing to build on the data heavy day, Benjamin and Boris from Avanade discussed how to leverage data from multiple sources into PowerBI, especially Sitecore data. It become clear through earlier session that having all the analytics data is well and good, but it’s even better when this data is merged in with data from other sources, such as CRM.
Microsoft announced PowerBI in 2006, but the final release exited preview in late 2015, and now it has become synonymous with data analytics. It allows you to not only connect data from multiple sources, but also transform and model the data in a better shape, so it can be visualised and shared with the rest of your team. Many assume it’s only applicable to data analysts, but in reality this reporting tool can be used by IT, developers and the business team.
Using Sitecore endpoints, including xConnect Client API, the data sources can include both contacts and the interactions. This might migrate in quite a large number of data, so it’s important to consider the granularity and the level of actual data you need to migrate in — and you’ll need to try and normalize this as much as possible. Once in PowerBI, tools here will allow you to tweak this data before getting into the visualisation phase.
PowerBI comes with a large number of out of the box visualisations, but custom ones can also be created and a whole market place is available to purchase community-driven ones. Once happy with the visualisation from the desktop application, this can be published out to the Cloud where it’s available online and on the mobile app. Pushing for data can be set from the desktop version so that data is pushed from Sitecore into PowerBI to allow for the most up to date reports.
Lastly, AI comes in to play a role again — not just via the visualisation, but also through a natural language Q&A that allows for users to ask questions regarding the data, such as ‘What are the total sales for last year?’ Then users will be prompted with insights from Sitecore and any other application plugged in.
IDENTITY IN SITECORE 9
George Chang provided us with a deep dive into the new federated authentication process that is now available in Sitecore 9. Contrary to popular understanding, these features are available for both authentication in Sitecore and any end-user facing application.
We kicked off the session with an understanding of what identity is; in reality this is not my username or account number, it’s just that you are recognised by a trusted party, similarity to how a passport works in real life. A passport identifies a person but doesn’t have all of your information, and realistically it’s not very secretive, but it only works because one country trusts another that is has approved its citizens.
Usual validation works between the site and the user. In federated authentication we have made this between the user and the authentication party by creating claims that I am what I am. This has been built using .NET Identity 1 and OWIN.
The pre Sitecore 9 authentication works against an SQL dataset that is unique to Sitecore. With the new claims identity, an OWIN pipeline has been put in place that can use AD and social media to authenticate with — and then link this data back to the contact or user in Sitecore through xConnect. This makes it great as it allows for an SSO to be present across all your platforms, users will no longer require separate credentials and all credentials are stored in a centralised application. From an end user point of view, storing these in xDB will also allow for further personalisation tools. Additional tools, such as 2 factor authentication, are now also available and can be extended as required.
The Active Directory module has been updated for Sitecore 9 but this only works with on premise AD. This will not support SSO and only will be connected to one provider.
Code samples and documentation can be found on github.com/georgechang
FROM FORMS TO RICHES
I suspect everyone was excited about the new Forms module and Kamruz Jaman and Mike Reynolds gave us a thorough run through of this new platform.
Thankfully, WFFMs is dead — well, kind of. You can still use the additional module in all versions, but the new Forms comes out as part of the core application, similar to EXM and Marketing Automation. As most of the community is aware, not a lot has gone well with the current module, and the fact that the documentation is basically non-existing, doesn’t help. Thankfully Forms now has been rebuilt from the ground up using MVC, with a new drag and drop layout built around bootstrap to allow for multi-page forms — and it has been heavily documented.
Finally, all details of the forms are being stored as items and in the Content Tree, tidily. Unfortunately, it does not support multi-site at the moment, so all forms of a multi-site solution will be in one Forms folder (under /Sitecore — although folders can be created within it to categorise it). Analytics has also been increased, and now you are able to collect form level metrics and field level metrics — allowing editors to A/B test forms properly.
The default data provider has now been switched to SQL, but data providers are available to switch to MongoDB or Azure if required. In terms of extensibility, all actions are managed through pipelines — these can be customized accordingly. Custom fields can be defined as usual (and it’s suggested that new ones are created instead of customizing existing ones), although it’s necessary that this is done through Sitecore Rocks.
Several things are missing, and although some might be on Sitecore’s roadmap, some are quite a blocker for going to production at the moment. These include:
- Some fields — although you can build your own custom ones
- Rules Engine
- Submit Actions — but again, you can create custom actions
- Experience Editor usability is still lacking some tasks
- Multi-site support
- Workflow support
- No event queue
LATEST GOODNESS SITECORE JSS
Last but not least, we had a great presentation from Alex Shyba and Adam Weber on the latest updates of JSS with a great interactive demo.
Still in Preview 3, and no t-shirt canon this year, the latest release has created support for Angular 5, React (for native apps and personalisation) and Vue.js. Other goodies plugged in include Typescript, code first capabilities and server side JS debug from VS Code.
There are basically two approaches for using JSS — Sitecore First or Code First. Sitecore First allows you to create all your content and templates into Sitecore and then add npm packed for placeholders and fields components while connecting to JSS APIs. For Code First, front end developers will be able to work completely unplugged and mock up local content in manifest definitions and when ready, JSS deploy into Sitecore — which will in turn import any necessary templates, content items, layout details and render items as requested. In a nutshell, rendering-level JavaScript is an alternative approach to the application level Javascript. This allows for build and render individual JavaScript components, and also server side rendering within Sitecore environments.
The roadmap looks pretty healthy with a Preview 4 currently in progress and a finalised release hopefully later this year. They are also moving away from Sitecore.Ship for app deployments, including React 16.3 support!
As Peter Brinkman closed the conference, it was clear how much everyone valued this community. Thanks to all the speakers for the mountain of information they have provided and thanks to the Sitecore User Group Council for all their year-round effort to allow the community to come together.
See you in London next year for SUGCON 2019!
