Experience Sitecore ! | All posts tagged 'User-group'

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.


SUGCon 2017 insights and takeaways

I have attended SUGCon in Amsterdam this year, as usual - it was a blast! What I like Sitecore events for - they always have such an enthusiastic atmosphere of hundreds of best technology professionals united together "on the same boat".

This time I was proud to announce the winners of the community award - The Most Productive Sitecore Authors of 2016. Three luxury looking trophies found their owners, well-deserved guys!


Anyway, I have got few thoughts/takeaways from that wonderful event.

Sitecore Helix has become a proven and reliable development approach for Sitecore already. The more complex your solution is - the more likely you'd use Helix. I am now working on a multinational and multi-project implementation for an insurance service provider and we are using Helix. Given that we have also a distributed development teams, it became crucial that we are doping the development under the same guidelines and each new team member, already familiar with Helix and SOLID principles, becomes productive quite quickly. Also deployment, quality assurance as well as the rest of day-to-day activities - are going to the same standards. My own opinion on Helix is that "if it is cooked well - it serves you well"

My greatest impression after attending SUGCon was after I saw how Mark Stiles combined Microsoft Cognitive Services with Sitecore. The future is already here!

SXA and Sitecore Commerce are also two going trends. As you know, Sitecore has purchased Commerce Server and has now had intensively committed to the product. Sitecore Experience Accelerator is a different beast, that would best suit for large brands with multisite implementations, that simplifies governance and maintainability of them.

Sitecore PaaS becomes closer and closer to the real world. I'd personally not use it now, due to many (not yet sorted) incompatibilities, but the pace is impressing. Christof Claessens has presented about the way Sitecore works on Azure PaaS and relevant modules compatibilities.

Stephen Pope presented Sitecore Publishing Service 2.0 - an app written with .NET core that now increases publishing performance dramatically. The idea behind service is that it separates publishing process from the Sitecore UI by creating standalone service with a publishing queue, that allows aligning publishing load.

Nick Hills from True Clarity gave a great portion of insights on how Sitecore DevOps on AWS and personalisation are done for such a large implementation as for EasyJet.

JavaScript Service (or simply JSS) - another great impression was the last event at SUGCon, presented by Alex Shyba and Adam Weber. Smoothless javascript and front-end stuff working with node.js and Sitecore layouts will bring an excellent user experience. However, that was more a demo of the proof of concept and team needs to complete the development.

There was much more, but this is what comes to my mind (and from the notes) for the moment...

And finally, those 250+ of lucky to become Sitecore MVPs of 2017 were awarded a symbol of commitment to the Sitecore and its community:

Got a handy new tool for "finding ends" of presentation items - Rendering Chrome for Components

I have recently started working on a new project with a non-transparent structure. By saying non-transparent I mean non trivial locations for the code and non-matching layout and rendering items to their filesystem counterparts. So I was looking for the convenient way to identify matched pairs.

Luckily I remembered JammyKam presenting something similar at London UserGroup in January 2017 and refereed to his blog in order to find Rendering Chrome for Components package (module - ?). So I will briefly go through his solution show how it helped me and what it does:


  1. Install package as normal
  2. Add a namespace into web.config from /Views folder:
    <add namespace="ForwardSlash.SC.RenderingChrome.HtmlHelpers"></add>
    
  3. Append this to a containers element so that it generates an attribute:
    @Html.Sitecore().ContainerChrome()
  4. Now, if you go to Experience Editor and open View tab, you'll see a new checkbox Highlight Renderings clicking which turns all magic on


Here's the result:


    It works not only in Chrome, as you see I run it in firebug.

    Hope it will help you as much as it already has helped me.

    References:

    - original post by Kamruz Jaman

    - sources on GitHub

    - presentation slides from Sitecore User Group London (January 2017) - 3.5MB

    Sitecore Technical User Group UK - January 2016 - Download presentation

    Yesterday I have attended Sitecore Technical User Group in London and would like to share presentations from it. There were 3 presenters, talking about:

    1. "CDN with Sitecore" presented by Kamruz Jaman, a Sitecore MVP 2013-2015 and in general one of the most experiences Sitecore architect, who seems to have an answer to any question (StackOverflow). He reviewed know approaches of implementing CDN into a solution in order to reduce bandwidth and improve you servers performance, and demonstrated the most complex - integrating Azure into Sitecore with media items being directly uploaded to the cloud storage,
    Download presentation (521.5KB)

    2. "Continuous Integration & Delivery for Sitecore" by Jason Bert.
    Jason seems to know everything about CI with Sitecore. He stated, that is absolutely doable to achieve a working CI setup with Sitecore, GIT, TeamCity and Octopus Deploy and showed us how-to. Less theory in favor of a practical demo in real-time!
    Download presentation (4.4MB)

    3. "Sitecore 8.1: new Features and Improvements" presented by Steve McGill.
    Steve guided us through serious list of new features and improvements in Sitecore 8.1 - there are so many sweeties I am anticipationg to start working with! At the end of presentation he also discussed Sitecore Habitat - a project bringing modular approach into Sitecore.
    Download presentation (2.3MB)

    Steve McGill and Kamruz Jaman:


    Light of knowledge is coming out of Jason Bert


    Thanks to presenters and everyone who has attended!