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My Sitecore SUGCON 2023 Takeaways – Day 2

> DAY ONE - If you haven't read about Day One you can read it here.

SUGCON DAY 2

The 2nd Day of SUGCON started bright an early so after a quick breakfast and cup of tea at the hotel I headed down to the first session I’d planned to see.

Rob’s session is one of the key sessions I really didn’t want to miss this year. A few clients I’ve spoken to recently (and other Sitecore Dev’s I’ve chatted to at SUGCON so far) are facing this challenge:

‘How do we move to XM Cloud from XP and what do we need to consider?’

– so I was keen to learn from Rob’s experiences.

Migrating advanced Sitecore implementations to XM Cloud – Rob Habraken

Rob started with telling us the differences with XM Cloud and explaining how publishing works differently (given you publish to the Edge):

Rob then shared a typical XP implementation diagram and showed how XP Differs as integrations and functionality is moved into the head application:

He then discussed what is included and not included in XM Cloud in detail. Martin shared some similar slides the day before, but I think these were a little clearer so I didn’t include them in the previous post:

This was also a pretty cool comparison of XP vs XM Cloud equivalent features:

Rob then discussed the Migration approach to XM Cloud. There was a lot of really useful info here about things to consider and how to get your project prepared for the migration and how to tackle it:

Next up was the the different development approaches and workflow. I’ve talked about these before but I didn’t know much about option 3 at all. I guess most Sitecore developers (especially in a small team) will use option 1, but option 3 is a really good approach for being able to use local content for your development without having to push it to XM Cloud:

Rob then went on to explain in detail about how Content Resolvers don’t work if they are dynamic and only static ones do. It’s possible to use some out of the box ones or implement your own GraphQL Content Resolver:

This is an example of Bread crumbs in XM Cloud and a GraphQL search query:

Rob finished his talk with a summary of the benefits of XM Cloud. The shift in Development domain and thinking is the tricky part for a lot of Sitecore Developers I feel:

Rendering your data in headless – 101 different ways
– Mike Edwards

I’ve known Mike for a number of years now and he’s always an good speaker so I was looking forward to Mike sharing his learnings from his headless journey.

Mike started by lamenting how things used to be easy in the World of MVC and server-side development and then with all the JQuery and JS frameworks things became pretty bloated.

Things have moved on a lot now in FE development though and there are now many different options for building Headless websites in Sitecore, some of these I’m aware of or have experimented with – Others I’ve not heard of, such as ‘Island Architecture’.

SPAs bring their own set of problems in terms of page load times and indexability so Mike went into Hydration and Partial Hydration techniques and approaches that try to solve these issues:

Then Mike explained more about Partial Hydration examples and Island Architecture. Island Architecture lets you create your web app with pure HTML and CSS for all the static content but then add in regions/placeholders of dynamic content to support interactive ‘islands’ of content. Given the rest of the page is static it downloads really quickly and is available to use faster.

Mike then covered Resumability, Edge/Serverless and tools such as Storybook and Hydration Payload.

There are some Challenges and limitations which need to be re-address:

Finally Mike ended with saying that this is the future and we need to embrace the new world.

It was a really interesting talk and gave me a lot to think about and research further. The following talks were 15 minute lightning talks until lunch.

Leverage Sitecore Connect for Sitecore CDP – Sarah O’Reilly

I’d heard a fair bit about Connect but I’ve not really seen much about how it actually works. So I was looking forward to this session

Sarah took us through an example of using Connect to import user segment data from CDP into Google Ads.

Once the export was setup to build from CDP the steps were then configured in Connect to sync to Google Ads:

There are tons of Apps supported and different recipes defined and it was impressive to see the options for building logic such as if statements / for loops data mapping and manipulation all within Connect.

This was an insightful session and really interesting to see how it works. I can see how it could be used to help with migrating to XM Cloud from XP or another CMS platform.

Sitecore components explained for your marketers – Ugo Quaisse

The next session was about the Sitecore Components builder in Pages in XM Cloud. I’ve heard a bit about this but not seen much of it in detail. I was hoping to see a full demo of it. I guess at the session was only 15 minutes there wasn’t time, but I still learned quite a bit about how it works.

The Component Builder can be used without any development or code required at all. First Themes are setup with colours, fonts and breakpoints configured.

Then datasources are setup and mapped from either a url or json or GraphQL.

Then the components ‘look and feel’ – layout, dimensions and sizing can be configured in the Builder. This looks pretty neat. Then versioning and publishing is setup for the Component.

Lastly some details were shared around the benefits for digital creatives, it’s possible to get Sites built very quickly and easily using Components Builder.

Leveraging XM Cloud APIs and Webhooks to powerup integrations – Ramkumar Dhinakaran & Elakkuvan Rajamani

After lunch it was time for another session, this time on Webhooks. The use-case here was the XM Cloud Lighthouse Integration which would do an automated quality check of pages using Webhooks and report on it.

Depending on the integration required it might not be best to use a Webhook:

Quite a lot of detail was shared with how this all works and integrates.

There were some links and takeaways shared at the end.

Sitecore Search: Real case PoC – Sebastian Winslow & Jesper Balle

The 2nd to last session for the day was on the Sitecore search (based on Discover) which I was keen to learn about more as I didn’t know much about how it worked.

CEC looks pretty powerful and can be used to manage search, performance is key and widgets can be configured for search and catalog:

Some dev resources and admin info were shared:

The use case for search was a property Site. There is still some features that need to be built.

Some info was then provided on Triggers to get the content, Request and document extractors to process and manipulate the content.

Search API endpoints, results response, API Explorer and ability to refine the widgets.

It’s early days and the search SDK is still not there yet but it’s coming. Be careful with how much content you try and index when testing but there are some significant benefits to using it.

This was a really informative session and gave me all the info I was looking for about how to go about implementing search.

Experiences with Content Hub One – Journey of relaunching our Usergroup website – Katharina Luger & Christian Hahn

Then it was time for my last session of the day on how the Sitecore User Group Germany rebuilt their site as an SPA using Content Hub One.

The slide below was probably the simplest comparison I saw all SUCON of the differences between XM Cloud and Content Hub One.

There are 7 Steps to component creation:

Lastly there were some challenges faced.

This was a really great session and I’m looking forward to working with Content Hub One in the future.

Virtual Closing Keynote by Scott Hanselman

There was then an really entertaining and insightful talk from Scott Hanselman. He had some great advice, wisdom and stories to tell to us and I think everyone in the room was pretty captivated by his talk.

With that it was the end of SUCON 2023, there was a big round of applause for all the organisers. These events take a hell of a lot of organising and a real commitment from everyone involved.

It was time to go and have a few beers and reflect on what was a another brilliant SUGCON.

Hopefully this is useful info for anyone that couldn’t attend this year or had too many beers and forgot what they learned :-).

Manchester Sitecore User Group – September 2021

Back in September I organised the first In-Person Sitecore user group in Manchester in over a year with help from Dom Hurst and Jeremy Davis.

It was kindly hosted by Dept with the Talks on the Big Screen and was great to get everyone together again.

We had 2 great talks and a debate session in the middle which I lead. It was a challenge to organise and promote given concerns around In-Person events. However we got around 25 attendees on the day, so all in all I think it was a success.

I recorded the event but it’s taken me a while to pull the videos off my SLR as needed to find my adapter for my Mac and edit the videos together.

I have finally done this though and you can now view the video of the SUG on YouTube.

Apologies for the sound and video as they are not great quality, we also lost a bit of the end of Jim and My Talks unfortunately. So I will go back to using my iPhone to record future events I think. It’s still worth sharing though I feel.

The Talks

Below is a summary of the Talks as the SUG:

Talk 1 – Shared components with JSS
– James Simm, Head Of Engineering @ Dept

James presented on how Dept used JSS to create a number of shared components to use for the London Marathon website.

Debate Session – Sitecore Acquisitions
– Adam Seabridge, Freelance Sitecore Developer & Consultant @Flux Digital

Adam talked briefly about the recent Sitecore acquisitions (Moosend, Boxever, Four51 etc) and what they are. We then debated how Sitecore might utilise them within their product offering in the near future.

Talk 2 – Exposing assets to any channel with Sitecore Content Hub Experience Edge
– Daniel Ionita, Sales Engineer @ Sitecore UK

Daniel gave an overview of Sitecore Content Hub Experience Edge and a detailed demonstration of combining Content Hub DAM with Microsoft Teams which allowed users to insert DAM pre-approved images into Teams messages.

I’m looking forward to organising the next one of these and for the upcoming SUG in London in December.

Feel free to get in touch on Twitter of Slack if you would like to speak at a future SUG.

Sitecore Symposium 2020 Highlights

On Tuesday and Wednesday last week it was Sitecore Symposium 2020. This year it was all on-line so was a bit different and that was great in terms of catching up on all the content but not so great from a networking and social perspective.

I normally write a fairly detailed over-view of what I learned in the sessions over the 2-3 days; partly to share what I learned with others but also so I don’t forget what I learned either by the time I get back to the UK.
However this time round as most of the sessions are available on https://sym.sitecore.com/ you can watch a lot of it yourself if you missed it. I had an ‘All Access Pass’ so you will need to upgrade to view some of the content I saw.

So instead I’m going to summarise the 6 key themes over the 2 days instead with some links to key sessions I watched. I’ve kept the slides below to a minimum, but please check out my Twitter feed for more screen shots.

1. Pandemic Impact & Agility

The Pandemic has changed how customers expect to interact with brands and companies have had to respond very quickly to rapidly changing customer needs. In the opening Keynote and theme throughout Symposium was that a “Moment to Moment” Mindset is what is required to meet customers needs in these moments and how Sitecore’s innovations can help with achieving this.

Brands need to move a lot faster in the current climate and solve their internal operational challenges responds quickly to customers.

2. Auto Personalisation

The new Sitecore CEO Steve Tzikakis announced that all Sitecore 10 customers would receive access to Auto Personalisation Standard at no additional cost. This is clearly a key innovation for Sitecore going forwards.

There were some demos of this in action across the various sessions and It looks pretty cool. It could certainly take away a lot of the heavy lifting needed for personalisation and allow content editors to focus on other tasks configured and trained correctly.

We saw an example of how this works, how you can identify (and fix) customer ‘clusters’ which have gaps in personalisation and an example of the dashboard you would see showing performance and other metrics.

3. Content as a Service (CaaS)

Steve Tzikakis also announced that CaaS would be available in both managed cloud and Public Cloud. CaaS will deliver Sitecore content to any digital channel required, providing direct access to content in a decoupled way, allowing for faster development and delivery.

In a later CaaS preview session by Alistair Deneys & Andy Cohen we were given a lot more insight into how this will work and also told that it will not require Content Hub to work either as CaaS can be used directly against Sitecore too (via the JSS Layout Service). It’s great to see a full Headless offering from Sitecore using GraphQL to access the data and support for Next.Js too.

4. Content Hub

There were a lot of mention of Content Hub at Symposium this year, Jake the compère and comedian (who was pretty funny still despite having no live audience) joked that we should drink each time we here it. I guess it makes sense we’d hear it a lot as Content Hub is a the Centre of Sitecore’s SaaS approach.
For those that don’t know Sitecore Aquired Content Hub (then Stylelabs) in 2018 and it both an DAM, PCM and CMs with lots of impressive functionality for managing and organising content for all channels in a single location.

It was really interesting is to see how Sitecore are using Content Hub for Sitecore.com and the challenges they faced.

One of the other sessions I watched on Content Hub was from Fellow Sitecore MVP Akshay Sura from Konabos and Sumith Damodaran from Sitecore. This talk was regarding how the new Content Hub Connector allows Sitecore Customers to integrate content from Sitecore XP into Content Hub where they can organise, collaborate and personalise content before distribution.

It was interesting to see how Sitecore fields are mapped on the Sitecore Template to the fields in Content Hub in the CMP connector and then how this displays in Content Hub.

CMP is available for Sitecore 9.2 and 9.3 currently and it may be merged with the DAM Connector in an upcoming release.

5. Containers are the Future

Container support was released as part of the new DevEx with Sitecore 10 and it will soon become the defacto way to develop locally for Sitecore. Whilst Containers do bring some complexity they also provide a lot of benefits such as portability, consistancy, being able to quickly destroy and re-create Sitecore instances and having multiple client instances or versions on a single machine.

However another one of the drivers for using containers is that they can be used in Production and you will soon be able to deploy to AWS, Google Cloud, your own Cluster or AKS! This means you will no be tied to Azure App Services.

As I understand it App Service Support will be marked as obsolete in Sitecore 10.1 and removed in Sitecore 10.2. This isn’t that Sitecore won’t work in App Services anymore but more that ARM templates will not be provided anymore and Support for Sitecore in App Services may be limited.

The session by Bart Plasmeijer and Rob Earlam on how to create an AKS Cluster, Windows Node Pool & deploy an Sitecore instance into it was really insightful. They managed to do all this within 20 minutes.

It was also really interesting to see some of the tooling in action like
@k8slens and K9s showing how they work and the features they provide.

Screenshot 2020-10-28 115726

There is another on-demand session on this too which was really informative around what the benefits are for Kubernetes for various roles in an organisation.

6. New Sitecore DevEx

A significant part of the Sitecore 10 release was the new Sitecore Development Experience (DevEx).
As well as containers for development one of the other new features is the availability of an new serialization option, which comes as standard with Sitecore. There are two flavours of this: the Sitecore CLI (using JSON) Or the GUI (Sitecore for VS). The CLI is free where as Sitecore for VS requires an (TDS) licence.

I saw an demo of this and it looked really interesting. I’ve tried it out myself too and it works really well. I’m interested to see if there are any features missing that unicorn or TDS have. It does look like Sitecore have most things covered though with the rules support.

Another part of the new DexEx is the new ASP.Net Core Rendering SDK which I saw an session on. This is a new way of building Sitecore sites in Sitecore 10.x, allowing you to use Layout Service to return content from Sitecore to display using .Net Core Components using Tag Helpers.

This approach has full support for Sitecore features such as editing in Experience Editor and also Analytics and Testing.

Nick also explained the .Net Core Request Pipeline works with the SDK, this is shown in the diagram below. It looks a little complicated but makes sense once you break it down.

There is a lot of new stuff to learn here but it’s great to see .Net Core support and another option available for Sitecore development. I’m learning more about this currently and plan to share what I learn in the near future.

It’s a wrap

The closing keynote with Leslie Odom Jr was entertaining and there were a lot of other on-demand sessions I watched too. It was really cool to hear that the next Symposium is going to be in Vegas next year :-), Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

Thanks to Sitecore and the speakers for putting on another great event and for making it so accessible. Lets hope the Sitecore Community can meet up in Person in 2021!.

My Sitecore Symposium 2020 Agenda

It’s Sitecore Symposium this week and It’s going to be a bit different this year. I attend Symposium in the USA most years and I’d usually be boarding a plane about now, this year (if it wasn’t for COVID-19) I’d be heading to Chicago. Instead the entire conference is Digital.

This means unfortunately I won’t get to catch-up with others in the Sitecore Community in person or get to do a bit of travelling which is a shame.
However there are some benefits though (other than it being a whole lot cheaper) which is that there a a lot of on-demand and breakout sessions which (if you purchase an all-access pass like I have) I believe you can access after the event. So unlike in the real-world you can catch up on sessions you’ve missed, in-light of this I’ve sometimes selected more than one clashing session.
An additional benefit I guess you’ll probably not have a hangover for those early Morning sessions either :-).

Anyway I’m looking forward to Sym and thought I’d share the sessions I’m playing on attending and why. You can find the full agenda here.

Day 1 – Tue 27th

» 10:20 – 10:50am (CDT) – Sitecore business update with CEO Steve Tzikakis
Steve Tzikakis – Chief Executive Officer – Sitecore

– This is the first opportunity to listen to Sitecore’s now CEO. I’m looking forward to hearing what Steve has to say and his plans for the future.

» 11:45am – 12:45pm (CDT) – Influencer Roundtable with Microsoft: Integrating AI into your existing digital marketing strategy
Colin Wright – Director Strategy – Microsoft
Jonathan Weindel – Advanced Analytics Manager – Microsoft
Wina Wichienwidhtaya – MarTech Strategist – Microsoft Corporation

– I’m interested in seeing how other Sitecore customers are using AI and gaining further insights from Microsoft.

» 12:50 – 1:15pm (CDT) – Premium general session: The Road to Product Innovation
Desta Price – EVP Product Management – Sitecore
Tom De Ridder – Chief Technology Officer – Sitecore

– This is an all-access pass session and looks like it will give some insight into Sitecore’s plans for the future as well as the latest innovation’s in Sitecore 10.

» 1:45 – 2:15pm (CDT) – Serialize your way to success
Charlie Turano – Product Manager – Sitecore

– I’ve installed Sitecore 10 and experimented with the new Seralization features but I’m looking forward to learning more about it.

» 1:45 – 2:15pm (CDT) – 2020 and beyond: Integrating Sitecore with emerging technologies to wow your customers
Brian Henderson – Sitecore Architect – XCentium
Julia Gavrilova – Technical Director – XCentium

– Using Sitecore to power and Personalise 3D and AR technology sounds pretty cool to me so I’m intrigued to find out more.

» 2:20—2:50pm (CDT) – Real-time personalization in a true omnichannel world using JSS and Azure
Bas Lijten – Principal Architect – Achmea

– This sounds like an interesting approach and use of some of Sitecore’s newer features to fulfil some complex requirements.

» 3:10 – 3:40pm (CDT) – Containers & AKS: Taking Sitecore 10 to the next level
Bart Plasmeijer – Senior Software Architect – Sitecore
Rob Earlam – Technical Evangelist – Sitecore

– I’ve played around with the Docker examples for Sitecore 10 and have been impressed how quick and easy it is to spin up a development instance with Docker. I’m looking forward to hearing more and seeing how AKS can be used with Sitecore.

» 3:10 – 3:40pm (CDT) – Content as a Service: A preview
Alistair Deneys – System Architect – Sitecore
Andy Cohen – System Architect – Sitecore

– I’m always keen to learn more about new Sitecore features so this session regarding Content as a Service (CaaS) should be interesting.

» 3:10 – 3:40pm (CDT) – Insufficient facts always invite danger, Captain!
Neil Killen – Technical Director – Valtech

– Monitoring and performance of Containerized environments is all new to me so I’m looking forward to learning more about this.

DAY 2 – Wed 28th

» 12:05 – 12:35pm (CDT) – Data privacy and Sitecore
Rob Habraken – CTO – We are you

– GDPR is tricky subject so I’m going to drop in on this session to make sure I understand all the touch-points to consider in Sitecore for the right to be forgotten.

» 12:40 – 1:10pm (CDT) – Sitecore AI: Auto Personalization Standard for Sitecore 10
Marcos Guimaraes – VP, Chief Data Scientist – Sitecore
Nancy Lee – Principal Product Manager – Sitecore

– I’ve not really seen the Auto Personalisation in Sitecore 10 in action so I’m interested in learning more about this.

» 12:40—1:10pm (CDT) – How to develop with the new ASP.NET Core rendering SDK
Nick Wesselman – PM, Developer Experience – Sitecore
Oleg Jytnik – Technical Lead – Sitecore

– I’ve been experimenting with the new ASP.NET Core rending SDK using the examples on https://doc.sitecore.com, but I’ve got a lot to learn still so I’m really looking forward to this session.

~ At this juncture I might do some yoga…no your right I probably won’t. I’ll likely just go and see if we’ve got any more biscuits in the cupboard instead. I’m just checking you’re still awake :-). ~

» 1.30 – 2.00PM (CDT) – Content Orchestration: A symphony between Content HUB and Sitecore XP using Content Hub Connector
Akshay Sura – Lead Platform Architect – Konabos Consulting
Sumith Damodaran – Sr. Product Manager – Sitecore

– Fellow MVP Akshay has been doing a lot with Content Hub over the past few months so it will be great to learn more about Content Hub and Content Hub Connector.

» 1:30—2:00pm (CDT) – Choosing the right option for building your Helix solutions
Shelley Benhoff – Lead Developer and Author – The Berndt Group

– Shelly has written some great Pluralsight courses so this session is bound to be informative.

» 2:45—3:45pm (CDT) – Failing Up: How to Take Risks, Aim Higher, and Never Stop Learning / Closing remarks with Paige
Leslie Odom Jr – Tony and Grammy Award-Winning Performer
Paige O’Neill – CMO – Sitecore

– The closing session of Symposium should be interesting and entertaining too.

On Demand

On top of all the live content there is a heap of On-Demand content too, I’m planning on watching some additional sessions on SOLR, SXA, Kubernetes, Content Hub, JSS, Upgrades and there are loads more for you to watch besides these.

It’s just as well I’ve taken 3 days off work to learn all of this. If you haven’t got a ticket yet then I think you can still grab one here. You’ll be missing out on a lot of interesting stuff if you don’t.