Sitecore Symposium 2016 – Day 1

Sitecore Symposium is an 2 day Conference for Sitecore Users, Developers, Partners, MVPs and just about anyone else who works with Sitecore.

This year it was in New Orleans and I was lucky enough to be able to come out for a few extra days to Explore NOLA and I can highly recommend it, a great city with some insanely good food, interesting history and friendly people.

Day 1

On day One I was to learn a lot about the improvements and new features in Sitecore 8.2 including SXA, Sitecore Azure, Path Analyser and much more.

Opening Sessions

The opening session was kicked off in New Orleans style with an big Jazz band which certainly woke me up after the early start.

Interesting it was comedian Jake Johannsen who opened up and got us all in the mood before handing over to Micheal to kick off the first keynote.

Micheal talked about empowering Physical and Digital experiences for customers and bought various users of Sitecore onstage to discuss how they are using Sitecore. Danone discussed the personalisation that they have done on their Baby early life platform for mothers and how they have used Sitecore to power this. It was really cool to see someone leveraging all the personalisation, profiling and automation features. Danone have seen an 800% uplift in sales from this. Their tips were: Build data first, start now and don’t wait for the tech to all be there to do it.

One of the most interesting things shown was Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) which allows you to create a new site in Sitecore, Wireframe it, Add Content, Export the wire frame and import a theme for it. It is Responsive out of the box and could be a really quick way to stand-up a Sitecore site quickly. I would learn more on this later.

Micheal announced that Sitecore has now built commerce in out of the box and it is fully integrated and supports personalisation. This is great news for those with Commerce aspects to their Sitecore sites.

Next up was Jason Silva who is a Technologist & Futurist. He was very engaging and had some interesting ideas about the future of Nueroscience and Nano Technology, ‘Hacking Life Itself’ and how Tech evolves exponentially. He made me re-think the barriers between tech and science and ‘Playing God’ stating that ‘There is no duality between nature and technology, they are 1 of the same’.

Developer Keynote

Lars Nielsen took to the stage to share some information on Sitecores product strategy. He talked about xConnect and oData which are coming soon and will provide much better APIs for working with data in Sitecore. He then discussed Express Migration Tool which allows you to go from Sitecore 7.2 to Sitecore 8.2 in an automated manner.

He touched on the NuGet feed that is now available for Sitecore, I think this is the thing most developers have been waiting a long time for (I saw a whole lot of Tweets about it when it was released a few weeks ago). The Official Sitecore Nuget can be found here: https://sitecore.myget.org/gallery/sc-packages.

Lars introduced Antony Hook who talked about how Sitecore manages new feature requests using ProdPad and the ways in which these requests get to the Sitecore product team. Great to hear they are opening up user voice to non MVPs https://sitecore.uservoice.com/ and about the new Stack Exchange http://sitecore.stackexchange.com that is nearly out of Beta.

One things for sure Sitecore’s Community is huge and growing every day, just look at the stats above!

We also heard about Helix (the new name for the the design principles that underpin Habitat) http://helix.sitecore.net/. More on this later.

We also saw a quick overview of Sitecore Path Analyser which looks great, I watched a demo of this by the Sitecore Product team in the Partner Pavilion and was impressed by the UI and functionality it provides.

Azure Sessions

It was the time to attend the first of the developer sessions and I chose two on Azure since this is something I’ve been looking at recently.

The first was Sitecore in The Cloud: Architecting in AWS vs Azure where Peter Petley shared some info on his recommendations for deploying Sitecore to the Cloud. He talked about the performance of AWS vs Azure and I was surprised to learn that Azure performs better in general.

He also talked about some of the new features for Azure that will be supported in Sitecore 8.2.1, more on this later.

One of the key takeaways here was the Paas doesn’t really work properly (there are reliability issues with some modules etc) so Iaas is still the way to go. Redis Cache was also recommended due to it’s great performance.

The above slides are a nice little summary of which platform wins out.

Next up was Ciaran McAuliffe’s session: Better Together: Sitecore on Azure. He dove into the Sitecore 8.2.1 Azure dashboard and showed us the power of App insights with things like Sitecore Logs, APV Map, Server Responses and Rules.

Ciaran explained how Azure search is used instead of Lucene and that for cost and performance reasons you should only setup the indexes you need and use (not all Sitecore indexes in the configs).

Sitecore 8.2.1 comes with Data Packs out of the box that will pre-configure Azure for you, there is no need to use the Sitecore Azure Module anymore – it is being phased out. There will be Data Packs for CD and CA servers and everything will be setup for using the web deploy engine. The automation scripts are JSON based and ARM Templates will be provided xDB, XP etc to build out environments and the resources required as a base level for each.

There are parameters files that go along with the ARM Templates that define the various variables, essentially 2 JSON files and an Powershell script is all that is needed to deploy Sitecore to Azure.

We were shown the different plans that can be used for the various services required to run Sitecore on Azure he also discussed how Sitecore are also working on GeoLocation in Azure and using Slots to allow for environments to be replicated easily (e.g Staging and Production).

This all seems like a vast improvement to the current Sitecore Azure offering and should greatly simplify the process. It should be available from January 2017 so well worth waiting for if your looking to move to Azure soon by the looks of things.

SXA – Sitecore Experience Excellerator

After a spot of (excellent New Orleans style) Lunch I went to see Kerns talk on SXA – Sitecores new offering to get you a Sitecore site up and running very quickly. I’d heard a lot about this and it sounded very interesting so was keen to find out more. It is installed as a separate package in Sitecore . It is installed as a separate additional package in Sitecore with an associated costs a percentage of the Sitecore license.

SXA allows you to create a new Site from within the Sitecore Content Editor Interface (nice). Sites need to be created within a tenant – a business unit with different visitors but which exists within the Same Sitecore instance. Tenants are created first (again within the CE).

Once you’ve created a site you will see it has created a folder structure that follows the Helix principles (from Habitat) so you will see familiar folders here such as foundation and feature.

Kern then showed us how pages can be quickly put together using page designs and partial designs and 70+ pre-built components.Standard values are no relied on that much, instead XML is layered to create the pages and dynamic placeholders are available out of the box. The pages built will not have a design, they will look like wireframes, this is intentional.

Kern then showed us how the wireframe layout can be easily exported using a button in the SXA toobar, then the zip generated can be provided to an front-end team or 3rd party to style before it is imported back in. Kern demonstrated this by quickly importing a pre-made theme and it automatically styled all of the pages and components. Impressive stuff.

We were then shown a bit more detail on how these themes are created. Essentially it uses the 960 grid system so supports mobile out of the box, Bootstrap and Foundation are not currently supported. The themes are made up of individual CSS files, Images and JavaScript but optomised versions of these are served from the Site. Developers can add addtiional classes to the HTML when theming but can not change the structure of the HTML.

Kern mentioned a few restrictions around using SXA, all data sources must use Items to us the standard components provided with SXA. However it is possible to build a standard component and use it within a SXA site. It does need to inherit from special SXA specific rendering classes to work.

Deployment of a SXA site (assuming no customisations) is just a simple case of publishing the Site. All all this seems a great way to standup a Sitecore site quickly and with limited investment in development. It is perhaps though limited to Sites without the need for medium to high customisation. It will be interesting to see how SXA improves over time as it is something Sitecore are going to continue investing in.

It was now time for me to go and enjoy the beer in the Partner Pavilion and meet a few new people. I was already looking forward to Day 2.

My thoughts on SUGCON 2016 – Day 2

badge There was an early start for Day 2 (especially after a late-ish night involving a few strong Danish Beers), but I knew there were some intriguing talks today so didn’t want to miss anything.

You can read about Day 1 here if you missed it.

The first session that caught my interest was Nick Wesselmans talk on how Active Commerce use SIM, Powershell, Octopus Deploy and Azure to automate product builds.

Using SIM, Powershell, Octopus Deploy and Azure to automate product builds.

Nick gave an overview of how they created a PowerShell wrapper for SIM to automate Sitecore instances for product builds for their Active Commerce product.

He also talked about how they use Sitecore Power Shell Extensions (SPE) to do things like automate publishing, rebuild the links database and initialise Sitecore Zip package builds. I’ve experimented with SPE but I’ve not used it in anger and this has given me ideas for how I might use it more on current or future projects.

Finally, he talked about their use of Octopus for deployment of packages and invoking PowerShell scripts and Azure IaaS and Azure Blob Storage and AzCopy which is used for quickly spinning up VMs for hosting the product build and test environments. I liked the idea of these being scripted to only run during business hours.

The Active Commerce team also use Bamboo for their build server (but are thinking of moving to Team City). Nick showed us that their build pipeline looks like this:

It was nice to see some familiar approaches here, albeit with different tools in some instances and some new ideas too.

You Me and Sitecore MVC

After a short break Kern Herskind delivered and entertaining (and Circus themed) presentation on Sitecore MVC. He even rode a unicycle at the end!

Kern gave a general overview on MVC for those not familiar with the concepts and then how Sitecore MVC works and whats available out of the box. Not much of this was new to me but it was good get a refresher anyway.

Then Kern talked through some of the downfalls of Sitecore MVC and how he has gone about solving them. Things like renderings not being able to alter any HTML that is rendered prior to them being rendered and multiple form posting issues.

We then go a sneaky peak of what coming up for Sitecore MVC, such as abstract base classes and better ServiceLocator and DI support:

Kern finished by talking about the future of Sitecore MVC and expectations for the future.

Good to see better documentation and closing feature gaps on the list of improvements.

The key message here being that Sitecore MVC is going to continue to be the preferred UI Framework.

Hedgehog then did a quick talk on their TDS product and helped to answer the question a lot of developers might have, “why should I pay for TDS instead of using Unicorn”. The answer is probably in these two slides, maybe go and show them to your Boss :-).

Essentially it does a lot more besides just syncing items between sitecore instances:

I haven’t used it but I’ve head good things about it from other Sitecore Developers.

After lunch (which was excellent by the way) I opted to attend two talks on Sitecore Habitat. One by Ruud Van Falier called Introducing Sitecore Habitat and the 2^nd by Anders Laub on Practical Habitat: Embrace the Architecture.

Introducing Sitecore Habitat

For those who don’t know what Habit is, it is an Architecture approach for Sitecore development and is designed to give best practice guidance on how to structure your Sitecore projects. I have taken a look at it a few times but not really used it and the feedback from other Sitecore developers I’d spoken to was that it was quite complicated, so I was interested in finding out more about it.

Ruud was presenting to a packed room with quite a few developers stood up at the back, obviously as keen as me to know more. He started with the basic concepts of Habitat, explaining how all modules are self-contained and that there should be no communication that goes upwards between modules.

He also explained the the 3 layers of Habitat: Foundation, Features, Projects.

Ruud then discussed examples of elements that might live in these layers and how the dependencies flows downwards.

He then showed the technology stack, which are probably familiar tools to most of you. Sitecore 8.2, MVC, Dynamic Placeholders, Unicorn, Bootstrap, JQuery, Sass and Gulp.

A run-through of the Habitat solution structure then followed and an explanation of the different build tasks used.

There was then a more in-depth explanation regarding Modules:

And then more detail on layers:

Finally, a pros and cons slide and questions:

Ruud was honest about the fact that Habitat is in the early stages and is changing every day, he also said it’s not meant to be taken as a ‘Boiler Plate’ for Sitecore solutions – more a guideline. However, I left the session will a lot of things to investigate further and will definitely be taking a closer look at Habitat and how some of It’s concepts can be applied to the projects I am working on.

Practical Habitat: Embrace the Architecture

With my appetite now whetted for Habitat I went straight to the next session on embracing the architecture.

Anders talk started with a general discussion around Architecture and then moved to Habitat and why Pentia use it as an architecture for their solution:

He then dived into a demo of their solution and explained how it differs to the default Habitat setup. I have a video of this somewhere which I’ll try and add here when I get a minute.

He then discussed a few foundation modules they have created and how it really works well for them as an approach.

Anders took some tough questions from the crowd well (such as the number of projects in Habitat – which is many) and I think by the end of the session most of the room will be taking another look at Habitat.

Ladies and gentlemen start your testing.

Testing in Sitecore can be notoriously difficult and for some Sitecore developers this means that unit and integration tests that involve the Sitecore context or items are sometimes skipped. I was interested to see if Alastair had some other ways to implement testing and I wasn’t disappointed :-).

Alastair Deneys ran us through 4 ways in which to Unit test with Sitecore. The first was an interesting one and was to essentially install Sitecore in your application and then run the tests from an asp.net web page test runner.

The 2nd and 3rd were to add a minimal or full Sitecore config files and the Sitecore dlls you need to your nunit test project and run It. This worked pretty well but as Alastair said, isn’t proper unit testing as it’s using real data.

The 4th was to use FakeDb to mock the Sitecore items you need to run your tests. I’d heard about FakeDb before but not used it so it was nice to see an example of how this is done.

Alastair also showed us how Sitecore.LiveTesting can be used to spin up an instance of Sitecore in a container in the background to test against.

It was a bit slow but seemed really cool and definitely something I’m going to experiment with.

The key message here was, whatever you do make sure you create tests and don’t get hung up on if they are real unit tests or actually integration tests.

Sadly it was now time to head to get our flight home so I missed out on the last talk of the day by Martina Welander on refactoring doc.sitecore.net, hopefully I can find it on Google Hangout.

SUGCON was a great experience and It has given me a whole lot of ideas and things to look into for current and future Sitecore projects. Thanks to the Sitecore Community and the sponsors for putting on the event.

My only regret is not having chance to chat to any of the MVPs who have been so helpful on Slack and on their blogs, but I’ll definitely be back next year so I’ll buy you a beer or two then instead.

Till next time.