Category Sitecore

Sitecore is a Web Content and Digital Marketing Management System.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Getting started with Sitecore Marketing Automation

Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

With the latest Sitecore 9 release, a completely new Marketing Automation tool is available for users to quickly plan and extend their automation activities with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

Also, a new fully-scalable engine architecture is now available so that you can make sure to process new activities as quickly as you need to.

I have put together a video series as well as a blog post on the new capabilities in Sitecore 9 and published it to the Sitecore Technical Marketing blog!

Read more…

Glasses on top of laptop keyboard

Evangelist Year One – a Retrospective

Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

Just over one year ago, I wrote about a big change in my career as I joined the Sitecore Technical Marketing team to work as the North American Technical Evangelist. Over the last 12 months, a lot has happened, and in typical agile fashion I’m looking back at what has been happening, what worked well, and what didn’t!

FAIR WARNING: This is a long read, there is no TL;DR, this is mostly for me. Read at your own risk!

TL;DR: I lied. The short version is I had a blast all year and am way too excited about more big things this year!

Continue reading “Evangelist Year One – a Retrospective” →

Sitecore 9 xDB Sharding

Jason St-Cyr 7 Comments

Have you ever wondered what is going on with those new Shard databases in Sitecore 9? This is the new xDB! The new Shard Manager stores data based on the contact ID. A contact ID is a GUID identifier that is unique for each contact. It looks something like this:

B9814105-1F45-E611-82E6-34E6D7117DCB

The xDB scales out by splitting these contacts across the various shards based on their contact identifier. A 16-byte hash of the GUID is used and assigned to each shard to ensure distribution.

Continue reading “Sitecore 9 xDB Sharding” →

Scaling Sitecore 9.0 XP Services

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The blog here has been a little quiet lately as I have started moving to creating content on the corporate site. I wanted to share something I worked on and has been posted on the Community blogs.

Here you go: Scaling Sitecore xConnect and XP Services architecture

In the linked blog you’ll get a brief overview but primarily you’ll get access to the video content I’ve created to help you understand the new Sitecore 9.0 services and how to scale them!