Slides from our September 2016 casual gathering to discuss gleanings from this year's Sitecore Symposium and what 2017 means for Sitecore.

1. Sitecore User Group Meetup
September 2016

2. Agenda
• Introductions
• Symposium Hits & Misses
• Group Discussion

3. Personalization Hits & Misses
• Top of Mind for Users
• Lack of sessions that combined marketing and dev needs
• Notable session: Dive into Personalization Bliss
– David Walker covered utilizing free 3rd party APIs to create custom
rules against, allowing the personalization to become smarter

4. Path Analyzer
• Notable session: Path Analyzer X-Files: How we built the ultimate xDB
forensic tool
– This session by Alex Shyba and Adam Weber covered the
redesigned and much improved next generation Path Analyzer
• New direction - moved to 100% JavaScript and retired Silverlight
• The new look seems to tie all the concepts together
• Goal: look at paths to achieve goal; also gives you recent profiles/contacts
that achieved the goal.

5. FXM
• Notable session: Not just a cool party trick: Sitecore FXM
• Built to capture analytics data and personalize content on non-Sitecore
site
• Avanade used it to put a Sitecore component (header) on a non-Sitecore
site
• Went over limitations of FXM
• Discussed what to take into account when developing components to use
with FXM

6. Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA)
• Import/Export Feature
– Purpose
– Functionality
– Limitations and Feasibility
• Experience Editor Drawers
– Adobe Experience Manager-esque
– Floating toolbar in Experience Editor
– Organizes renderings into drawers
– Click and drag rendering onto page

7. Missing: Content Strategy, UX, and FED
• Very few digital marketing strategists talked about mobile
• Symposium uses a four-track model (dev, marketing, business, and
beginner) - where is the UX track?
• All dev talks hyper focused on back-end application - what can FED get
out of this conference?
• Talks about personalized content only focused on testing copy not testing
component placement
• Very few talks focused on architecting for efficient content editing, only
focused on front-end marketing strategy

8. Lapses in Accounting for Mobile
• Not much on mobile besides getting started with mobile
– From years past, it seemed to be much less discussed then at
SUGCON NA and 2014 symposium
• Is responsive design taking the focus away from developing mobile apps?
– If the user can navigate the site on a mobile browser, then why
build an app to repeat website functionality?

9. Language Fallback, Its Limitations and How to
Circumvent Them with the Rules Engine
• Theorem: The answer to all of your Sitecore woes is... The Rules Engine
• Challenges
– Fallback cannot have any cycles
e.g. English > French > Spanish > English
– No support for site-specific site-level fallback rules (multi-site)
e.g. English > French
Spanish > English
French > English

10. Incorporating Google Analytics into Sitecore
Personalization
• Dimension:
– A characteristic of a visitor
– e.g. language of a visitor
• How it works
– Mapped dimensions from GA to Sitecore Personas
– Updated via a nightly service
• Supports
– Simple 1:1 mapping from GA dimensions to Sitecore dimensions
– Complex 1:n or n:1 mapping from GA dimensions to Sitecore
dimensions

11. Sitecore Publishing Service
Sitecore is moving to Microservices
• Small, independent application
• Licensing?
Old Way of Publishing
• Publishing Sitecore.com took 3 days
• Publishing a single item = approx. 8753 operations
• Wizard that blocks use of Sitecore while Publishing occurs
• No Rollback
New Publishing Service
• Publishing Sitecore.com took 1 hour
• Publishing a single item = 11 operations
• No wizard that blocks use of Sitecore while Publishing occurs
• Rollback possible

12. xConnect
• Notable Sessions:
– Data Superheroes: Capture IoT Data with Sitecore xConnect
– Dreams Achieved: xConnect will drive your brand’s next digital
revolution
• xConnect is a unified API for collecting and querying experience data
• The idea behind this is that Sitecore needed to open up the exposure of
the data being collected in xDB and also make it easier to capture offline
interactions for storage in xDB
– This idea was put into practice at the Data Superheroes talk given
by Jason Wilkerson, who created a dummy device to capture various
exercise metrics and report them back into xDB

13. "Futurist" is Now a Job Title
• Who knew!?

14. Resources
• Romancing the Customer Experience Slide Deck
• Jane McGonigal TED Talks
• thisisJasonSilva.com

15. Thank You

16. Appendix