My Sitecore SUGCON 2023 Takeaways – Day 1

I’ve just got back from and awesome weekend in Malaga at Sitecore SUGCON 2023. If you are not aware of what it is, it’s the developer conference organised by the Community each year to bring Sitecore Developers together in Europe. I’ve been to quite a few SUGCONs over the years but I think this has been one of the best. The talks were really interesting and it was great to catch-up with everyone in the Sitecore Community.

I arrived late on Wednesday at the rather impressive Melia near Malaga – right next to the beach. I’ve certainly been to worse locations for conferences. More venue’s like this for future SUGCONs please Sitecore :-).

The roof top bar was particularly special – but there was some learning to do before I would be able to enjoy the pool.

> DAY TWO - you can read about Day Two here.

Day 1

I had a fairly clear idea of the talks I wanted to see and I managed to stick to it pretty well.

Opening Keynote – Steve Tzikakis and Dave O’Flanagan

The following day after a late breakfast I went to register and then to see Dave O’Flanagan kick off the conference and introduce Steve.

Steve couldn’t attend so was on Video link and he explained that given the Economy downturn innovations such as ChatGPT would be key for diversifying product offerings, Steve then hinted that something was in the works with an integration of ChatGPT with Sitecore.

Many companies such as SAP and Oracle have slowed down to adapt to SaaS and Headless; while Sitecore have grown a lot over the past few years. He said that Sitecore has outgrown Adobe for the past 6 quarters with around 20% growth, Sitecore are 2nd place in industry rankings and aim to catch Adobe.

There is an healthy 16% R&D investment and Steve set out his ambitious target of going from 40,000 Sitecore developers to 100,000 in the market. He said that he felt the tough part (moving to SaaS and creating/integrating new SaaS platforms) was now over and Sitecore are ready to move forwards. Sitecore intend to lead by innovation and partners and developers need to be onboard to continue investment and growth.

Dave then took back the stage and stated that Sitecore want to lead with Composable DXP and be the best in the market. He also confirmed that DXP is not going anywhere and 10.4 is currently in the works. There are clients who are restricted geographically with what they can do with SaaS or the want full control of their data and platform so there is still a place for self-hosting with DXP.

Then Dave his us with a bit of very welcome honesty. He said that the SaaS products that Sitecore have procured/integrated and built over the past couple of years are now in a good place but he acknowledged that the documentation, marketing, information on migration and features is not great and Sitecore are going to work on this ASAP. This was great to hear as I think that there is some confusion right now for current customers and potential new customers with all of the different SaaS offerings and XP/XM. I feel It’s quite tricky to understand and the messaging from Sitecore needs improving, especially around the migration path to SaaS.

Dave went on to say that there are no new product announcements this SUGCON, instead Sitecore will slow down and help customers understand the new products better and explain how to migrate to them. It was good to hear that Sitecore understand there are many customers heavily invested in XP and that it’s not that easy for them to just jump ship to SaaS and that they want to know more about how they can help customers with this journey.

The discussion then turned to the Content, Engagement and Commerce clouds and the work Sitecore have done here with huge investment, especially in Content Cloud – of which XM Cloud is key part and is getting better by the day.

Content Hub 1 is Sitecore’s answer to a full headless CMS and they will work on integrating it into XM Cloud to allow you to pull content into XM Cloud seamlessly. Content Hub 4.3 is the last version of Content Hub and all customers are now updated.

Search is a new SaaS offering from Sitecore, it is developed on top of Discover (a SaaS platform Sitecore purchased, originally called Reflektion). It has now been developed further and is able to search all content and is powered by AI. I would learn more about this at sessions later in SUGCON.

When looking at the cost of XM Cloud customers need to consider the TCO of their existing XP/XM (or other DXP platform) and not just the licence, hosting and development costs. I think it’s true that many clients probably don’t consider the ongoing maintenance costs of Azure Infrastructure / AKS / Solr / Redis etc and the cost and complexity of Upgrades, Security patches and so forth. Not to mention the cost of DevOps/Build Pipelines and other services. When you add this all up the cost may be around the same or a bit cheaper. One of the challenges here I think is different budgets in organisations that traditionally just pay for the hosting or licence etc so this may be something to navigate when it comes to the new world of SaaS.

Dave then went on to talk about XM Cloud a bit further and that they do know there are challenges without having an CD instance anymore in XM Cloud (these are instead replaced by Edge Servers – experience edge which just returns the items via the layout service or GraphQL). He said that it is something they are trying to resolve and will look to the Community so potential solutions to this. This sounds interesting so I’ll be keen to follow this idea further and see where it goes.

He mentioned the impressive looking Component Builder in Pages (which I also attended a session on later at SUCON). Dave also discussed that Forms in XM Cloud is something they are working on currently; they have recognised it’s very important and are listening. This is a bit of a gap in the XM Cloud offering at the moment and some clients won’t be keen to use a 3rd-party option for this, so it’s good to hear this is in progress.

Another interesting statement Dave made was that the feedback from front-end developers was that JSS is Complex and not something they really want to learn, it has a lot of complexity baked in which some feel is not needed. Therefore, Sitecore are looking at how they can simplify this. I wasn’t exactly sure what was meant by this (I’ll try and find out more) but reducing complexity and barriers to entry is generally a good thing I feel.

Finally Dave discussed Sitecore Connect which is one of Sitecore’s most recent SaaS offerings which allows SaaS products to be integrated via a low code / no code approach.

Dave mentioned connect recipes will be provided to help customers to move to SaaS and these could be taken and customised to fit your requirements. I’d seen a bit on this and how it works from other Sitecore Developers such as this great post by Jeremy Davis. However, I was looking forward to learning more about how it all works later at SUGCON.

Life at the Edge with Vercel and Next.js – Javi Velasco

Next up was a partner talk from Vercel about their platform and different offerings. Javi explained how customers expect a lot more now in 2023 (faster, more dynamic & personalised) and the pandemic effectively jump technology advancements and expectations forward by two years to 2025.

He talked about how computing and innovations in compilers has improved vastly in recent years and how Edge workers can now execute code extremely fast providing similar performance to Static Page Generation as well as Edge Middleware.

I’ve not used Vercel yet but I’ve heard good things about it and Next.js (which they also created) and I know that Sitecore partner with them for XM Cloud so it was interesting to learn more about it all.

Accelerate website builds with Headless SXA and XM Cloud – Martin Miles

We then needed to select our talks for the afternoon. I decided to pick Martin Miles’s talk about XM Cloud and while I’ve learned a fair bit about XM Cloud in the past 4 or 5 months and spoken on it at both the Manchester and Columbus SUGs I still learned a lot from Martin’s talk.

I know Martin plans to share his slides on his blog and the slides are very detailed. So I’ve tried to pick out some key slides which I thought were really useful or had important information that I hadn’t really seen detailed elsewhere.

Auto update and upgrade information & Licensing model:

Some additional limitations I wasn’t aware of:

Further architecture details:

More details about Webhook event handlers:

Some GraphQL details and limitations:

More authentication and authorisation details:

Some more details on Embedded Personalisation & Analytics from CDP:

Docker development details:

Sitecore CLI details:

XM Cloud folder structure, files and folders overview:

I hadn’t really though about how XM Cloud deploys items but it makes sense it uses Items as Resource Files:

SPE usage in XM Cloud:

Some useful developer tips and tricks:

Some really useful migration details for headless solutions:

Two different MVC migration routes:

Lastly some really useful Headless SXA details:

Once Martin share his talk I’ll link it here as there was lots more information that was useful.

SXA MVC & Headless SXA – a MOVING tale… – Jason Wilkerson

I’ve known Jason for quite a while and he’s always an entertaining speaker so I was looking forward to this one. It didn’t disappoint and Jason started with a story about Hipster developers…

Being an predominantly back-end/c#/.Net developer and coming from the Microsoft stack I can really relate to this too. All this new-fangled hipster FE/Headless development is kind of ‘mind boggling’ and a big shift in thinking for those of us who’ve been around since the WebForms (or in my case classic ASP days).

I’ve done some React development with Sitecore and the JSS Training course but I’m still not 100% comfortable with the shift yet.

Jason’s talk was great as he showed us how you would go about building an example ‘Spotlight’ component in Class SXA/MVC and how that differs when building an JSS Headless component in React.

Here are a couple of slides from building the MVC Component, I think this is pretty well understood by most Sitecore Devs:

There were some learnings that Json Shared with us around the differences with doing this for JSS instead:

The rendering variants setup is quite different for MVC:

Then the JSS variant, this looks quite a nice approach:

There are limitations of JSS Renderings which are that the search component of SXA are not available, also if your using SSG then you can’t use forms. There are also personalisation restrictions too:

Lastly Jason also had some training links he shared for those new to this and need to know a good place to start.

XM Cloud and Content Hub ONE Battle Royale – Rick Bauer & Richard Seal

The final session of the day for me was Rick and Richards talk which was positioned as a battle between the two platforms. It made for a pretty fast-paced and entertaining talk.

Pretty much all the info was on the slides so I’m going to just drop them all below:

At the end there was an final summary that confirmed that XM Cloud and Content Hub one are different products and are positioned separately in the market to meet different requirements:

End of Day 1

It was then time for Dinner, catching up with friends from the Sitecore Community and the MVP awards ceremony. Unfortunately the MPV awards had got stuck in Customs again (despite Tamas’s best efforts) but we got a few photos and there was an entertaining performance from Rodrigo and Sebastian and also the quiz; followed by a few well earned beers.

You can read about what I learned on day two here.

What I’m looking forward to seeing at SUGCON 2023

I’m really looking forward to SUGCON 2023 in Malaga in a couple of days time and have decided I’d take an more in-depth look at the conference sessions.

At previous SUGCON’s I’ve generally planned the talks I want to go to on the plane flight over, so this time I thought I’d try and do so up-front and share my thoughts on why.

Bear in mind that I’m a Sitecore Developer and Consultant so I naturally lean towards more technical tracks. You can find the full agenda here and you can read more about the sessions here.

Thursday

After the Opening Keynote by Steve Tzikakis and Dave O’Flanagan and the other initial sessions we need to decide on which of the parallel talks to attend. As usual there are a few clashes here, but these are my selections for the rest of the day:

Selected Talk Title	Rationale	Notable Alternative
3:10 pm – 3:55 pm *Martin Miles* Accelerate website builds with Headless SXA and XM Cloud	Martin has been Blogging a lot on XM Cloud over the past year and has a lot of Knowledge to share so I’m really keen to learn more about how to build headless websites with Headless SXA and XM Cloud and what Martin has learned from doing so.	Andy Cohen Innovations in Deploy
4:40 pm – 5:25 pm *Jason Wilkerson* SXA MVC & Headless SXA – a MOVING tale…	Jason is always a really engaging speaker and I’m intrigued to know more about transitioning MVC-based SXA sites to a headless implementation of SXA.	Thomas Stern Hacking Sitecore
5:30 pm – 6:15 pm Rick Bauer Richard Seal XM Cloud and Content Hub ONE Battle Royale	This sounds like and interesting session and having learnt a fair bit about XMCloud recently I’d like to know more about Content Hub ONE and how it compares.	Vasiliy Fomichev Crafting rock-solid secure composable Sitecore SaaS-based applications

Friday

There is an Content Hub ONE – Insights session to start the day but these are my choices for the rest of it. The first talk selection was a tough one!:

Selected Talk Title	Rationale	Notable Alternative
9:50 am – 10:35 am Rob Habraken Migrating advanced Sitecore implementations to XM Cloud	I feel this is a must-attend session for any Sitecore developer who might be working on projects that plan to move to XMCloud from XP/XM.	Kiran Patil Sheetal Jain Upgrade path for a Monolithic Developer to a Composable Developer
11:15 am – 12:00 pm Mike Edwards Rendering your data in headless – 101 different ways	Mike will no doubt have a lot of knowledge to share on Headless so I’m interested to learn more about the different rendering patterns and pros and cons of each approach.	Bart Plasmeijer Keep the door open when transforming from Sitecore XM to composable DXP using XM Cloud!
12:10 pm – 12:25 pm Chris Sulham Grappling with the Many Heads of Headless	I’m interested to hear more about the considerations for headless and benefits and drawbacks to each.	Mark Lowe A Road Trip to Composable Canyon
12:30 pm – 12:45 pm Sarah O’Reilly Leverage Sitecore Connect for Sitecore CDP	I don’t know very much about Sitecore Connect yet (other than that it’s based on Workato) so I’m keen to learn more about it and how it works.	Himadri Chakrabarti What is Flexibility Over Features Philosophy in Sitecore OrderCloud Architecture
12:50 pm – 1:05 pm Kingsley Hibbert Mathew Evans DevOps Composability in a Composable World	This session sounds very informative and not something I’ve really considered too much.	Nicky Vadera Using External Components in Content Hub 4.2
2:20 pm – 3:05 pm Ramkumar Dhinakaran Elakkuvan Rajamani Leveraging XM Cloud APIs and Webhooks to powerup integrations	Webhooks are a new feature in XMCloud and Sitecore 10.3 so it will be cool to see some examples of these in action.	Daniela Militaru Katharina Luger Women in Sitecore Roundtable
3:15 pm – 4:00 pm Sebastian Winslow Jesper Balle Sitecore Search: Real case PoC	Search is tricky in a Headless world so I’m looking forward to learning about potential solutions and approaches to different search.	Sebastian Winter Sitecore Components in Action

Hope everyone who’s going enjoys SUGCON and hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

Sitecore SUGCON 2018

Estrel
I’ve just come back from SUGCON 2018 in Berlin and I think it was the best one I’ve been to yet. It was my third time attending the Sitecore User Group Conference (a conference for the Sitecore Community organised by the Sitecore Community). This year I was lucky enough to be going as a first-time MVP and would be collecting my award during the conference.

I arrived early to see a bit of Berlin on the Sunday and catch up with some friends, colleagues and other Sitecore Devs and MVPs and before I knew it it was time for SUGCON to start.

sky

It kicked off with some fancy lights and music and Peter Brinkman with the opening Keynote explaining how large SUGCON has grown since it started in 2016, there were 600 attendees this year!.

There was a lot to take in over the 1.5 days so before I forget it all I’ve summarized below some key learning’s from my two days at SUGCON 2018.

Day 1

Opening Keynote – Pieter Brinkman

There will be two major Sitecore releases every 6 months and (spring & fall) which will contain new features and functionality
Updates / Patch releases will only contain fixes and not features/breaking changes.
Releases will be a full delivery including code, training and documentation

Sitecore releases

Great news for all Sitecore developers and customers who have been frustrated with this in the past.

Commerce + IoT In Powerful Ways – Jason Wilkerson & Richard Seal

Next up was well known MVPs Jason Wikerson and Richard Seal who created a fictional SitecoreLand complete with wristbands to access the park to demonstrate how IoT can be used with Sitecore .

Previously this was only possible by building most of the functionality yourself buy it is now possible out of the box with xConnect + and IoT Hub and IoT Listener.

Store the least amount of data you need to achieve what you want to do for your customers.
With SXA, Experience Commerce, xConnect, EXM, xDB and Marketing automation you now have all the tools you need to create these kind of experiences for customers with Sitecore. Your imagination is the only limitation.

Impressive stuff and a real show-case for what’s possible with Sitecore. Speaking to Jason afterwards he said it took longer to Photoshop in the memes of Longtime MVP Jeremy Davis who got trolled hard in the talk. This wasn’t to be the only time today either :-).

Uber-modern Apis For Sitecore – Kam Figy

Kam has been building the CLI for JSS and underlying APIs and took us through some of these focusing heavily on GraphQL.

GraphQL is:
- Strongly Typed
- Queries only the specific fields you need (no overfetching)
- The response matches the query (so you know what you are getting)
- Is discover-able
- Batches queries and catches and returns errors
Kam demo’ed an app he’d built that used GraphQL and mimic’s the database browser in Sitecore.

It’s possible to extend the GraphQL API using Query Extenders and add additional fields. These are than patched in using config.

extender

All-in-all some interesting stuff to experiment with here, since I’ve playing about with JSS too this is something I plan to look at in more detail.

Sitecore XDB & GDPR Applied – Rob Habraken

Rob opened by saying this was a dull subject. That it may be but it is also a very hot topic and something many clients need to implement very soon so this was a very insightful session for me.

Sitecore 9 has GDPR features out of the box and Sitecore 8.2 Update 7 will also have them.
6 Steps to follow to implement GDPR With Sitecore:

It is recommended to build a preferences form which allows users to view and edit the PII profile data.
It is important to consider GDPR is not a one time trick and could need to be re-evaluated with each release that effects data.
You can read more about Sitecore and GDPR here: https://www.sitecore.com/en-gb/resources/index/white-papers/sitecore-and-gdpr

Azure Round Table – Tamas Varga

The final session I attended was an Azure Round Table where there were some really good insights from those who have used Sitecore Azure:

Using the provided Azure ARM Templates is a good start but can I can be limiting as time progresses so creating your own is the way to go eventually.
There can be problems with CSS and JSS not being published yet when swapping between servers.
Testing an Azure Sitecore setup on a development environment and keeping costs down can be a challenge. MSDN provides free credits for subscribers.
If using Azure the advice is to move to Sitecore 9.x if you can first as that will make things much easier.

Awards, Quiz & Drinks

At the end of Day 1 I had the privilege of going on-stage and picking up my MVP award with the other 2018 MVPs. I’d seen the MVPs collect their awards in previous years but didn’t think I’d be joining them this year, I felt very proud to be sat alongside everyone. Obviously a few beers were enjoyed afterwards to celebrate.

Day 2

Sitecore Install Extensions In Action – Robert Senktas

I hadn’t heard of SIX before but having had some experience of using SIF when installing Sitecore 9 this looked interesting.

SIX has a number of powerful features that make it superior to SIF and it support storing sensitive data in Azure Keyvault:

An early GUI was demo’ed that runs on top of SIX and allowed an Octopus style management of the install process.

This all looks pretty cool and definitely something I’m going to look into further.

White Hat Hackers Guide To The Internet – Mikkel Ole Romer

This was the most packed break-out room I saw over the two days. Mikkel showed some simple Hacking Techniques he’d tried on a list of Sitecore Solutions and the results were quite worrying.

He showed us some simple hack’s he’d tried:

The results of the test were a little worrying…

This session was a bit of an eye opener to say the least. Check your Sitecore installs configuration and patches folks!

Sitecore & The Blockchain – Jason Bert

Since I have some Bitcoin & Ripple and I’m interested in Crypto and the application of Blockchain technology this seemed like a talk I wouldn’t want to miss.

Jason used a number of technologies to store the details of a ticket purchase on the Etherium Blockchain.

Jason used a local Etherium Blockchain testing tool called Ganache but in the real-world this could be slow and potentially costly.

This was an interesting talk that certainly makes you think about how these technologies could be used in future.

From Forms to Riches – Kamruz Jaman & Mike Reynolds

Having talked to Kam a bit about what he was going to discuss I was looking forward to a bit of a deep-dive into the new Sitecore 9 forms module and thats exactly what we got.

The metrics stuff and interface looks pretty cool.

We were also shown how to create a custom field and data encryption was discussed.
But there is some functionality missing as it’s an first release. If you need to you could build some of this yourself.

Latest Goodnesss JSS – Alex Shyba & Adam Weber

Having presented a talk on JSS at the Sitecore Sessions in Manchester recently I had a good idea about most of this talk but there was still some really great stuff to see and hear. I got to speak to Alex and Adam in person too and they were really helpful.

Rendering level JavaScript was what I was really interested in seeing. This is JSS Components running along-side MVC ones in the same page!.

It was really cool to see this in action. I’ll be trying this out as soon as I get chance.

Time to go home

After a few words of thanks to the organisers and attendees for an fantastic SUGCON it was time to head home….After a few more drinks of course.

What did I get out of SUGCON?

This year I was determined to do more networking and spend time talking to people in the Sitecore Community who I’ve spoke to on-line but never/rarely met. I certainly learnt a great deal from the sessions too but getting to chat to fellow MVPs, Developers, Sitecore Employees who I’ve known online for sometime but not met was my favorite takeaway from the past couple of days. If you didn’t make it this year and are thinking of going next year then I’d highly recommend you get your tickets booked for SUGCON 2019 in London on the 4th & 5th of April. You won’t regret it.