Category Sitecore

Sitecore is a Web Content and Digital Marketing Management System.

Sitecore Symposium 2019 – So you think you can DevOps?

Jason St-Cyr 1 Comment

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This year at Sitecore Symposium we launched a new DevOps track, with two rooms of sessions delivering what you need for day-to-day tactical solutions, but also bigger-picture, strategic guidance. Do you want to know how to deploy your code with Azure DevOps? We got you covered. Or maybe you are wondering how to fit an agile process into a waterfall organization? We got you there too! This track can appeal to both the technical and the business, it’s not all about Solr (though we got that too, thanks Jeremy!)

I am really proud of the sessions that Rob Earlam and I selected for the track this year, I think we have a little bit of something for everybody. Below, find your guide to all things DevOps at this year’s event!

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xConnect Upgrade to 9.2 – Where did the web request handlers go?

Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

Recently, I needed to update my xConnect Tutorial from 9.0 to 9.2 so I could start looking at the new data purge API (more on that another day). I figured it should be an easy enough upgrade, my tutorial wasn’t doing anything complicated. Just some basic Create Contact or Register Interaction stuff.

So, I did the usual:

  1. Update Target Framework from 4.6.2 to 4.7.2
  2. Change all the NuGet references to the 9.2 packages
  3. Recompile
  4. Squint at all the red compile errors from doing an upgrade…

Continue reading “xConnect Upgrade to 9.2 – Where did the web request handlers go?” →

Are you ready for the MongoDB 3.4 EOL?

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If you are running Sitecore version 8.2.x, you are running MongoDB 3.4. Unfortunately, that also means you are impacted by the announcement by MongoDB that version 3.4 will reach end-of-life in January 2020.

You have some options on how you want to fix this and it sort of depends on how much tolerance your organization has for running production systems that don’t have commercial support from the vendor.

Over on the Sitecore Technical Marketing blog, I outlined a variety of options and provided a few FAQ answers:

 

Preparing for AI-driven customer experiences

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Digital marketers today are caught in the middle of a huge digital transition.

Behind them lie the old, slow, and manual methods of creating content, connecting with customers, tracking engagement, and measuring the results.

Ahead of them is the promise of the brave new intelligence-enabled world, teeming with possibilities—task automation, massive-scale analytics, and real-time, data-driven decision making powered by Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning solutions.

For the most part, these promises have been made in good faith. Connecting clean, structured, and tagged data with powerful machine learning algorithms is an exciting prospect brimming with interesting use cases like:

  • Automated content tagging
  • Self-assembling web pages
  • Dynamic audience discovery
  • Predictive scenarios and best next steps

However, for many, this bold new future of seemingly magical efficiencies might be further away than it seems. The industry is currently packed with pundits and vendors getting excited about what might be possible with AI without thinking about the steps needed to get there. While the benefits of becoming an AI-enabled marketer are clear, the journey a marketer and their team needs to take is still hazy.

Read more on sitecore.com

Preparing your CMS infrastructure for traffic spikes

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We’re living in the days of “going viral.” Consumers move faster than ever, and businesses need to be ready to respond to sudden demand the moment it arrives—or risk losing out to competitors.

The right endorsement from the right person can generate global exposure and cause unprecedented numbers of people to flock to your site, with little or no prior warning.

Take Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show in 2017—millions of people saw her backup dancers in Steve Madden boots and rushed online to order them. That can amount to more traffic than most people dream of in a year, all arriving in seconds.

Major televised events are only one piece of the puzzle. In the modern digital world, digital marketing is aimed purposefully at trying to create demand–and businesses need to be ready to scale up to meet sudden successes from the drop of a tweet.

Crucially, it’s not just about bearing the weight of enormous traffic spikes. It’s about being able to innovate, and capitalize on sudden demand at a moment’s notice. One great way to do that is to leverage cloud hosting for your CMS.

Read more on sitecore.com…

Mitigating CMS implementation risk

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Prior to joining Sitecore as a Technical Evangelist, I worked as a consultant on many projects implementing Sitecore in various types of scenarios. The implementation is where things can really start to heat up!

The stakes are high. More than that, implementation projects can also be long, costly, and susceptible to error, even with the best partner. No implementation project is exactly like another, so there is always an element of the unknown as you undertake this new project. Also, just like the selection process, these projects are highly visible to the rest of the business. That means risks need to be identified early and addressed as soon as possible.

Read more on sitecore.com…