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.

Sitecore Symposium 2018 – Thoughts and Takeaways

I’ve just arrived back from Symposium 2018 in Orlando, Florida and thought I would share some of what I learnt with those who couldn’t make it this year.

I’ve been to a previous Symposium in New Orleans but as I missed it last year due to moving house I was keen to attend again this year. This time around it is also my first as an MVP and is a great opportunity to learn more about the latest release of Sitecore and what’s planned for the future.

I would be joining over 3000 attendees with 3 days of sessions on all things Sitecore. I arrived early evening for registration the day before and caught up with a couple of Sitecorians. The conference would start proper the following day.

Day 1

Opening Keynote

This year Symposium kicked off with an opening keynote by Paige O’Neill & Mark Frost. The theme this year is ‘elevate the experience’ and there were some welcome announcements from Sitecore:

JSS finally in general release – I’ve experimented with JSS and seen it go through quite a few changes and improvements over the 4 technical previews but it wasn’t officially supported. With the 9.1 release it will be generally available and officially supported. This is great to see and there were many talks on JSS throughout Symposium that made my want to try and get using it on future projects where possible.
Stylelabs acquired by Sitecore – Stylelabs has been acquired by Sitecore to provide true DAM capabilities for assets in Sitecore. The integration isn’t there yet but it’s certainly an interesting announcement and from demonstrations of the products abilities it looks like it could add some real benefits and powerful asset management features to Sitecore.
Sitecore Cortex TM – Cortex is part of the new Micro services architecture that is present in 9.1. It is Sitecore’s Machine Learning brain which provides Content tagging, automated personalization recommendations (with preview). It also supports flexible integration with 3rd party systems and other Machine Learning engines and platforms. Again there were quite a few sessions on this at Sym, more on this later.
Deeper Salesforce Integration – with 9.1 it is now possible to see behavioural data integrated into Sitecore.

Following this keynote there were Talks by:

Volvo – who showed off their Car as a service offering (CaaS) where customers can swap their car every 12 months or in future even for a weekend trip with the family. An interesting concept that could be the future of Car usage.

Cannondale – who used IoT devices to pass data to the Website about customers bike usage which then used Machine learning to recommend bikes for them based on how they ride and check stock based on their location. They had also built augmented reality into their app to assist customers with setup and maintenance of their Bike. Pretty cool stuff.

Sickkids – this is a charity that raises money for Kids who are not well. They used to have fairly average charity branding but re-branded from a needy charity to create strong engagement with potential donors. The videos that were shown were very hard-hitting and I think there were are few people in the room that got a bit emotional :-). They have so far raised $628 million in 6 months and are halfway to raising over 1 billion dollars which will be the most ever raised by a charity in a year. During the event Sitecore donated $25 for every 3 minutes ridden on a bike for Sickkids (which I and about half of the attendees did) which raised $50,000 for Sickkids.

NotImpossible – Last and not least Mick Ebeling from NotImpossible talked about how his company have created tech for the greater good to help: create special glasses to allow an artist he was introduced to not only speak again but to draw art with his eyes. Create a wristband that uses vibrations to allow deaf people to feel music and which also was ‘potentially’ a cure for Parkinson’s. And lastly how he setup a 3D printing lab in Africa to print a boy who lost his arms two new arms and then taught the locals how to use the machines to print arms for $100 which would usually cost $15,000!. This guy was truly inspirational and a brilliant story teller. He also came up with the best phrase of the conference:

‘Commit. Then figure it out’

Hopefully more companies will take inspiration from this and look to do more to help others, as Mick said it’s good for shareholder value and good for the world.

After this is what time to have lunch and head to our first break-out sessions, I decided to start with a Session on Headless.

Headless CMS and the Great Uncoupling – Deane Barker

This talk was interesting and made a number of points about the current state of the headless CMS vendor market and where the likes of Contentful sit compared to Sitecore. The key takeaways from this were:

Contentful and others Headless CMS’s are currently not the same as Sitecore, they only offer part of the picture – content repository, they don’t offer preview, drag and drop etc.
The market has turned from a blue market where they were disruptive and new to a red one where it has matured and it is now more crowded.
Headless vendors are selling to IT again now instead of Marketing. However Marketing will start to ask how they view, personalise or track things with a headless CMS and therefore vendors will start to add these features. Some have already tried to add things like preview and a basic page editor.
Sitecore already has all of this functionality built in so is strongly positioned to cater for this change

The Cortex Engine, process at scale – Alistair Deneys

I went to find out more about Cortex and got a deep-dive into the inner-workings of Cortex. The key takeaways here were:

Cortex provides intelligence and moves us into a contextual era of content management
Has a task based system which decides how to run a task depending on it’s type and allows tasks to be chained
It can pull from many different sources, including external systems
Uses an ML Model and uses the same Message Bus as xConnect
Can Sync content to other systems for analysis

Sitecore 9.1 Overview – Pieter Brinkman

This talk crossed over with the Cortex talk so I couldn’t attend it. However I did install 9.1 recently and have seen other info on it at Symposium. I’ll be writing a detailed blog post on this soon but here are a few Sitecore 9.1 pointers:

Helix Folder Structure is provided by default
Significant speed improvements have been made (as much as 20 secs for CE)
Personalisation & Platform enhancements
Sitecore Identity Server comes with 9.1 – Single Sign On / Federated Authentication
Cortex – Suggested Personalisation
JSS now in General Release
Universal Tracker – Mobile Analytics
Horizon – New UI

Horizon uncovering core UX and architectural concepts – Alec Orlov

This session was on the new Sitecore content and page editing User interface that is in development and will be released after 9.1, probably in an update.

It will co-exist with the existing Content Editor and Experience Editor interfaces.
It will be a new launchpad icon for now but will eventually replace Content Editor and Experience Editor
It is brand new and build using the new Microservices based architecture in Sitecore 9.1 to make it a lot faster
It supports existing MVC field renderer code for Experience Editor
Horizon does not yet support JSS

This was really good to see and a welcome improvement on the current Sitecore UX. It will be interesting to see how this affects existing Content Editor and Experience Editor customisations and what effort is required to re-implement these.

More info on this here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complete-new-sitecore-user-interface-horizon-preview-emmerzaal/

Working with JSS Gold Master and Marketing Automation – Rick Bauer & Corey Smith

Corey and Richard presented on their experiences of using the final release of JSS:

They talked about the different modes: connected, disconnected, headless etc
How quick it is compared to MVC development and that MVC developers need to start learning React/Vue/Angular to avoid the risk of becoming obsolete
Showed how analytics are still tracked and how you can still protect against things like cross site scripting attacks

Closing Keynote – Daymond John

Daymond John from the US TV show Shark Tank closed out the first day with his story of how he created FUBU clothing, got hip hop artists to wear it and turned it from a bedroom business into a multi-million pound selling product. It was an entertaining and amusing talk and served as a good end to an informative day.

Day 2

Helix and JavaScript Services (JSS) – Jean-Francois L’Heureux

It makes sense to keep the same structure for front-end code as back-end code by splitting front-end code into feature folders and components and using similar naming conventions.
Use custom linters (eslint) to validate that the front-end development approach follows Helix principles by enforcing certain rules within the linter.
Jeff has added JSS app templates to github which you can use to start projects off with a Helix architecture.

You can see more info on this here: https://www.jflh.ca/2018-10-13-helix-and-sitecore-javascript-services

Integrated DevOps with Azure, Git, PowerShell and Slack – Rob Habraken

Rob showed us the build pipeline he uses on some projects, integration with various tools and processes he follows:

Devs are worried about deployment, they shouldn’t be if they release little and often.
Unicorn used to push out database updates and and Razl to sync back locally
20% of time on a sprint is spent on DevOps tasks and 1hr per sprint is spent on fixing SonorCube issues
PRs should be mandatory and all releases created from the trunk. Labels in Github can be used to manage this.
Connect Slack to Github to see releases and PRs and also use custom Webhooks to allow for custom Slack commands to see which build was live currently etc.
Content should also be part of Continuous Delivery
CD should be warmed up after deployment but it is not possible with CMs

You can find out more info here: https://www.robhabraken.nl/index.php/3000/integrated-devops/

Leveraging Sitecore data on a static website with GatsbyJS and GraphQL – Bryan Mills and Adam Lamarre

This was an interesting talk about using the JSS GraphQL engine in Sitecore with Gatsby to build websites.

The final product is just static HTML in a flat file
Demo’d a site built with Gatsby
Results in: simple deployments, no boilder-plate or back-end code, direct field access
Good for: Microsites, Product Sites, Time-limited Sites, Sites for lead-generation, Dashboards, Knowledge Base
Is used by some big brands such as Nike, Airbnb, Facebook

You can see the demo here: https://github.com/millsb/symp-gatsby

Day 3

10x your Sitecore development – Mark Cassidy

Mark gave us some of the benefit of his 13+ years of Sitecore development with some tips and tricks on how to reduce complexity and development time for Sitecore sites:

Mark Demo’d building a Sitecore 9 Site from scratch with no frameworks, mappers, Code generators, ORMs
As Sitecore developers we should be looking to reduce complexity of Sitecore builds. End-clients of Sitecore often complain about the complexity of Sitecore solutions.
Divide the work horizontally, not vertically to allow less experienced developers to contribute and more experienced devs to focus on the more complex work.
Sitecore APIs can be used directly without abstractions – KISS.
1 to 1 – 1 Controller, View, Model, Datasource etc per component

you can find Marks presentation, Site used and video here: https://github.com/cassidydotdk/Sym2018

A Helix approach to devops in light of the Sitecore micro-service architecture – Thomas Eldblom

Thomas created the idea of Helix and in this talk explained how Helix principles can be applied to infrastructure too:

Sitecore is getting more complex and therefor the Infrastructure layer should now be considered below the foundation layer as part of the Helix architecture
The infrastructure layer should define: Resources, Platform, Storage/Networking Services, App Roles, Extensions & Packages
Sitecore as a service doesn’t exist right now but this is what customers want and it’s up to us to help customers achieve this

Closing Keynote: A look into the future – Ryan Donovan

In the closing keynote we were shown a demo of how Stylelabs will integrate with Sitecore to manage assets and a recap on the key takeaways from Symposium.

And with that it was the end of another great Symposium, I’ve learn’t a lot over the past week or so and I’ve got lots of ideas to think about. It was also great to catch-up with fellow Sitecore MVPs and make some new friends, I’m already looking forward to Symposium next year.

Ryan Bailey

Before I go I should mention that sadly a fellow MVP Ryan Bailey Passed away shortly before Symposium. Although I didn’t know Ryan I heard some amazing things about him at Symposium and have been helped by some of the posts he regularly wrote on his blog: https://blog.ryanbailey.co.nz/.

A site was created to help raise money to support his family and Incredibly due to community the site has raised over 13k so far: https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/support-for-ryans-family

You can donate at the above link and read more about this here:
https://sitecorestorm.blogspot.com/2018/10/an-amazing-thing-happened-at-sitecore.html.
Props to Corey and Kam who helped get more donations by shaving off their Stache and Beards at the MVP Summit!

My Sitecore MVP 2018 Journey So Far

Back in late January I was fortunate enough to be awarded Sitecore Technology MVP 2018. For anyone in the Sitecore Community this is a great privilege as there are only 208 Technology MVP’s worldwide and 20 in the UK.

Sitecore_MVP_logo_Technology_2018

I hadn’t got round to writing on my Blog about it at the time so I thought it would be good to talk about my experience so far this year as an MVP and also what my plans are for this year.

Every year, the Sitecore MVP Awards honour individuals with a passion for sharing their knowledge and expertise through active participation in online and offline Sitecore communities.

Sitecore has an fantastic community of developers who really try and help one another out both online and offline and share their knowledge and expertise whenever they can.

If you want to see the full list of Sitecore MVPs for 2018 you can see it here: https://mvp.sitecore.net/MVPs/2018

As an MVP there are a number of benefits; such as getting to give feedback to Sitecore on things they are working on, access to additional resources and Community Groups and gaining early knowledge of future releases & features coming out of Sitecore HQ.

How Do I Become an MVP?

I’ve seen this asked a few times on Twitter, Slack and Stack Exchange etc and I think the consensus is that you shouldn’t aim to become an Sitecore MVP but should instead try and get involved in the Sitecore Community as much as possible.

Share what you learn on a Blog, get involved in Sitecore Stack Exchange (SSE) by posting both questions and answers, join in on Sitecore Slack anad get involved in your local Sitecore User Group. Maybe do a presentation or two and share your learnings and expertise.

This is a great post on SSE from Mark Cassidy with more ideas of how you can get involved in the Sitecore Community: https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/1689/how-can-i-connect-with-the-sitecore-community.

By getting involved in the Community like this if you feel you’ve contributed enough you can nominate yourself (usually in November) and ask others to recommend you too.

You can read more about the MVP program here: https://mvp.sitecore.net/become-an-mvp

There is also an excellent SSE post here about becoming an MVP by Tamas Varga (who is an Technical Evangelist at Sitecore and works on the MVP Team): https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/5796/how-to-become-a-sitecore-mvp

My Plans For 2018 as an MVP

Since becoming an MVP I’ve tried to continue being active in the Community and have written some useful blog posts on Installing Sitecore 9 Update 1 and Getting Started with JSS.

Part 2 of working with Sitecore JSS is coming up soon and I’ll be giving a talk on this at the next Manchester meetup along with 2 talks from other Sitecore MVPs:

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I’m planning on giving an overview of installing JSS. I’ll then be going into more detail on and getting up and running and building components. Hopefully this will be one of a number of presentations I’ll get to do this year.

I’m also hoping to build my first Sitecore Module and share it on the Marketplace this year. I’ve got a few interesting ideas so watch this space.

I’m really looking forward to learning more about Sitecore 9 and catching up with the Sitecore Community & other Sitecore MVPs at SUGCON in Berlin next month and the MVP Summit at Symposium later this year.

Lastly I wanted to say thanks to Sitecore and the great Community for recognising my contributions and particularly the MVPs and Sitecore staff that recommended me (you know who you are :-)).

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.