Sitecore 10 benefits for Content Strategists and Digital Marketers

Jason St-Cyr 1 Comment

Everything brands need to deliver and evolve experiences in a fully integrated solution. Adapt quickly based on contextual insights through Horizon and deploy data-informed updates or new experience elements faster than ever before.

If you want a quick overview of the whole release, check out Sitecore 10 Highlights article. In the following article, we’re going to drill down into the changes and benefits for the technical teams of content strategists, authors, and marketers.

While a lot of the big changes in the release address technology delivery, there are several new enhancements that allow marketing teams to quickly evolve experiences and have a better flow with their existing tools.

See the promo!

The Sitecore corporate YouTube channel dropped a 2-minute promo video all about delivering the ultimate customer experience with Sitecore 10:

You can also see the official sitecore.com What’s New? page https://www.sitecore.com/whats-new

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Sitecore 10 benefits for Developers, DevOps and IT

Jason St-Cyr 1 Comment

Deliver more rapidly to accelerate digital experience success with new features — from container infrastructure orchestration to integrated data and marketing functionality.

If you want a quick overview of the whole release, check out Sitecore 10 highlights article. In the following article, we’re going to drill down into the changes and benefits for the technical teams of developers, DevOps professionals, and IT staff.

Take a tour!

In this video, Nick Wesselman provides a quick tour for developers of the new stuff in Sitecore 10:

Nick also has a great overview in his LinkedIn article Sitecore 10.0 Released: A Great Day for Sitecore Developers.

Continuous Delivery with Sitecore Containers

First announced as supported in Sitecore 9.3, Sitecore 10 brings about new tools from Sitecore on how to adopt a container approach in your delivery flow. Why are containers important? In general, if you’ve been doing your development with virtual machines or local installations, moving to a Docker-driven development and infrastructure flow will be a huge benefits for you. In general, you can address four major areas:

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Sitecore 10 highlights

Jason St-Cyr 2 Comments

With the release of Sitecore 10 there are enhancements and innovations that help create efficiencies for both Marketing and IT teams – providing tools that help teams launch and evolve unique experiences that drive successful engagements.

“With Sitecore 10.0, the focus has been on new innovations for usability, accelerated time to market, and improved performance with features for both Marketing and IT.

Everything brands need to deliver experiences is in a fully-integrated solution–allowing brands to work more efficiently.

IT and Marketing can align timelines to accelerate customer experience success by using everything from container infrastructure orchestration to integrated data and marketing functionality. Brands can also evolve experiences quickly based on contextual insights through Horizon and deploy data-informed updates or new experience elements faster than ever before.”

Jason St-Cyr. Everybody loves a little product marketing speak!

Now let’s take a look at what’s in the box!

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Should I #DockerAllTheThings?

Jason St-Cyr 3 Comments

A while back I was in a discussion about whether there was a benefit for all organizations to adopt Docker. I was of the opinion that there are scenarios where it just wasn’t a fit. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the benefits are always there, but some organizations have some issues they have to work out first before they can start reaping those benefits.

When you start looking into containers and their benefits you may come to the conclusion that “this would not work here“. Maybe that’s right. Are you sure?

You need to ask yourself why that is. Why is it that your organization cannot benefit from container tech? Perhaps there’s an underlying issue that needs to be addressed first, like a lack of priority on infrastructure automation. Or a lack of a DevOps culture. Or any number of things. Ultimately, there is one thing I believe is true:

YOU. CAN. NOT. FIX. ORGANIZATION. ISSUES. WITH. TECHNOLOGY.

If you are struggling with your digital transformation, suddenly deciding to Kuberneti-All-The-Dockers is not going to solve that.

(I have decided that Kuberneti is the verb form)

I put together some key benefits of containers for organizations up on sitecore.com, as well as the challenges you might face and how to tackle them. Following this article (linked below) is a good series by my colleague Rob Earlam that can help you get started with Docker:

Are Docker and Kubernetes the right fit for my team?

How to decide if your organization should adopt a container strategy.

Read on sitecore.com

I’d love to hear back your thoughts on this and how I could make this better!

DevRel metrics – Counting things is terrible. Do it!

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Upon seeing some activity numbers from a recent quarter, a leader I respect told me “I know everybody is busy.” They wanted to know what the impact of our activity was, not how much we did.

Of course! Anybody talking to you about metrics tells you that counting things is a terrible metric. We’ve all heard the horror stories of developer productivity being measured by lines of code. It doesn’t measure the right thing! But here’s the tricky part…

How do you get there? Where do you start? The ultimate metrics dashboard you saw in that webinar one time doesn’t just appear magically out of thin air.

You need to start somewhere.

My suggestion: Count. Things. Measure something. ANYTHING!

We’re going to go through 4 lessons you can use with the content marketing that your team is already doing.

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So you work from home now…

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With the current pandemic a lot of people are now working from home full-time and we all need to adjust to a new way of balancing work and life. Not only that, we are not having a normal “work-from-home” situation. This is a “work-from-home-while-living-through-a-pandemic-that-can-potentially-wipe-out-the-family” situation.

So there are a few challenges to face, but those of us who have been doing DevRel as remote workers for a while can at least help with some tips for working from home over a prolonged period of time, and some for dealing with all of this mess right now with COVID-19. Here are some things I’ve found work for me, hopefully they work for you!

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DevRel metrics – Which video in a series is the best performer?

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When working with a technical audience, we create a lot of content in a variety of ways: documentation, blogs, presentations, and videos. Some people learn best by watching somebody else do something, or explain a concept with visuals. As we create this type of content, we need to be able to measure what is working well so we can learn from our experiences. This is where video analytics comes into play (specifically on YouTube for this post).

Our team likes to create playlists with short videos that break up a topic. Playlists are helpful to guide the audience through the series of videos so they get all the content in the right order. Eventually, you want to know how each video in the series is doing, but when you go to look at the playlist analytics, the view counts don’t seem to add up. What’s going on? How do you figure out the actual views on this series of videos?

Why don’t the playlist views add up?

YouTube playlist analytics are helpful to see the effectiveness of a playlist specifically. The video views shown are specific to the views of that video from within the playlist, not overall views of the video.

This is not usually what you need to know, though.

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Should we host Sitecore on IaaS or PaaS? (Jan 2020)

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This started as a question on the community forums, and my answer got so long I decided to capture it here as well.

In general, when you are choosing an infrastructure model the first question you need to ask is what your team is comfortable having responsibility over, and what your organization is willing to pay to have somebody else worry about. You could do it in-house, pay a managed services group or Sitecore partner, or have Sitecore do things for you. Figure out what your team wants to have responsibility for and then that will guide you towards the best hosting model for your production environment.

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