Experience Sitecore ! | October 2017

Experience Sitecore !

More than 200 articles about the best DXP by Martin Miles

Symposium 2017 and takeaways

I've been anticipating that event for so long, and finally, I was there! So let's take a look at what's new have been presented.

Sitecore 9 and xConnect brought a new era of Sitecore development. Starting from principally different installation approach, Sitecore brings multiple changes, the most significant of which are changes developers used to work with xDB (which now moved to SQL Server) and content search (which is now Solr by default). Now instead of calling xDB directly, we will be using xConnect API, which is very well documented, thanks to Martina Welander and her team.

CRM connectors have been announced - for both Dynamics and Salesforce. 

Zenith and Horizon - two Sitecore projects currently in development, but both are very promising. It will change the way we work with the platform, but as for now, there is no way too much information about.

Marketing Automation has been re-worked to the best. Brimit, a Sitecore partner, has arranged a perfect demonstration stand of xConnect and marketing Automation working together on Sitecore 9, identifying contact's (visitor's) parameters from both online and offline channels and assigning them to certain profile pattern card, with sending them personalised email afterwards.

Sitecore Cortex will be a new machine-learning technology to be used along with Sitecore xDB in order to increase personalisation and data analysis. 

I spent decent time talking to guys from the team that builds the core of the platform and Express Upgrade Tool. The last one became a mature intelligent tool allowing do controlled upgrades from almost any recent version of Sitecore to version 9, with identifying all the potential issues and configuration breaking changes. I proud that have suggested few valuable ideas for the product about identifying any customises pipeline changes for the instance.

Technical Preview of JavaScript Services.

Thursday morning Symposium finished, but not for the 250+ lucky to be announced Sitecore MVPs of 2017. We have had 2 more thrilling days of MVP Summit.

Almost everything we have been told or presented there has a "non-disclosure" label, so there's not too much to share. Summit was held at much faster pace, comparing to Symposium itself - longer up to 1 hour long deep presentations, with short 5-10 minutes breaks. We were given a great opportunity to challenge new Sitecore 9 training exam, so that whoever passes that test - becomes Sitecore 9 certified already (as I did!). We also took part in Round Table, where various Sitecore teams were presented at round tables, so MVPs were travelling from one interested table to another, raising questions, suggesting ideas and providing feedback.


Sitecore 9 is out there


So, finally, what we all have been waiting for, has happened - Sitecore 9 has been announced and released. To be honest, as an MVP, I already have had an access to a beta of the version 9 of Sitecore since late July. but after an official release, we now can publically talk about that.

So, what has been new:

Runtime for Sitecore 9 is .NET Framework 4.6.2 and most of Sitecore 9 NuGet libraries are built against that version of the framework.

The installation process is the first you meet when trying to play with the platform. And it's worth saying that installation process has been totally reworked. So, welcome Sitecore Install Framework - Powershell modules for install and uninstall and a set of JSON config files that store steps for installing Sitecore. Each of these JSON files relies on a part of installation: xConnect, Solr and Sitecore itself. No SIM support (yet) available, unfortunately.

I mentioned xConnect - that is a new component and probably the largest architectural change for the platform - a framework that allows you to read and write analytics data to xDB and search providers, keeping collections, processing, search (Solr) and reporting behind itself. Previously we have had 4 different APIs used to deal with xDB contact, depending on its state, so that entire method full of if /else clauses looked monstrous. Since now we do not do direct xDB calls and operate using XConnectClient. That allows updating contacts from any channel at any time and automatic indexing of data. Sitecore XP introduces client certificate authentication in order to communicate with xConnect server, that is a Windows service. Also, a good thing is that this framework is well documented.

SQL Server 2016 becomes the only storage for all Sitecore databases - content data, xDB, marketing, processing, reporting etc. If you are desperate to keep Mongo - nothing to worry about it is still possible to do, or you may store in the cloud with Microsoft Azure SQL or Azure DocumentDB.

Solr is now search provider by default, and it is also required for installation by Sitecore Installation Framework. Sitecore 9.0 supports version 6.6.2 and sorry not for having version 7.+ of Solr. It is commonly used to install Solr as a windows service, using nssm as the easiest.

Sitecore Services Client (SSC) has got the ability to create oData REST service and API key management for securing access to APIs, that would be good for interacting with VUE or React JS.

Those who struggled with Web Forms for Marketers module previously will enjoy new Sitecore Forms, featuring completely redesigned UX with drag and drop, easy styling, built analytics. Also, there is a multipage wizard for creating complex "split" forms. One can even create a form template and instantiate forms from it! Also, there is form and field metrics showing the corresponding performance.

One more long waited feature is Dynamic Placeholders, now built into the platform, so that it may be called as @Html.Sitecore().DynamicPlaceholder("name"/*, some optional parameters*/). In general purpose, dynamic placeholders allow the use of the same placeholder key multiple times in the same rendering and across multiple renderings in the same placeholder. We have evidenced multiple implementations, so now good to have a universal standard.

Marketing Automation tool is much better reworked. It provides a new way to create automated online campaigns in Sitecore. With a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, Marketing Automation provides an extensible set of tools to processes contact enrollment in campaigns and activities. The Marketing Automation Engine is a stand-alone service that is responsible for enrolling contacts in plans and activities

Express Migration Tool is already familiar to us. Since version 9 that it supports upgrades to 9 from almost any legacy version of Sitecore.

Welcome, SPEAK 3, built on Angular 4, now using proper architecture. It is now reworked according to best industry standards, pulls data from Sitecore Services Client and unlike previous versions, it is item unaware. That means no more struggle with Rocks and lack of documentation. There is already a demo project you may download and rework.

What previously caused pain for both developers, administrators, DevOps was way too much complicated configuration. Sitecore is a truly flexible platform, but the flexibility has hidden cost of every flexible component being registered via configuration, boosting compiled config up to hundreds of thousands of lines. That was taken into consideration and we were given configuration Roles and Layers. Now it becomes possible to configure whether a particular setting or config node should be patched for a specific server role using role:require attribute. An instance can be in one of the following roles: ContentDelivery, ContentManagement, Processing, Reporting, Standalone. Apart from roles, there is also a different level of configuration - the also layers: Sitecore, modules, custom - simple, flexible, allows less patching. With layers one can switch off an entire layer, it can be handy for Sitecore support providing a diagnostics, to disable anything apart from Sitecore to make ensure platform itself is working well.

What is else new regarding Sitecore 9?
JSS Framework is staging. Also coming soon Sitecore Commerce 9 with a proper inventory and support for federated authentication, SXA and Azure PaaS, CRM connectors for SalesForce and Dynamics for xConnect.