Goodbye Sitecore, Hello Community

Over 15 years ago I spoke at the very first Sitecore conference at Trekroner, Copenhagen (yes, when and where the desktop background photo were taken) and today I did my very last session as a Sitecore employee at the SUGCON conference in Berlin.

After precisely four years as a Sitecore employee it is time to say goodbye.

During the last four years I’ve had the pleasure of working with some great teams and people. 

From Sitecore ANZ to Product Marketing

Initially as part of the ANZ sales team in Sydney under Rob Holliday and Kyle McManus where I helped bring in customers such as Toyota and QBE. I met some great friends, Sitecore partners and a thriving community during my time in Australia.

Subsequently I joined the Sitecore Product Marketing team under Mark Floisand, Sjur-Olaf Hanseid Bendiksen, Darren Guarnaccia, Scott Anderson and Terry Fortescue. I was also very fortunate to be working with the talented Mike Carter, successfully building and delivering 5 open source example and demo sites, codename Habitat, to our sellers and partners covering our entire product suite across CMS, personalisation, analytics, email marketing and commerce.

Helix, Habitat, SIF and Documentation.

During this period I also fostered the highly successful Helix initiative which I am proud to say is now a community standard and a unique value-proposition for Sitecore in the MarTech industry. If this initiative has just marginally helped raise the overall quality or maintainability of implementations I will leave Sitecore as a happy man.

In the last year I’ve worked under Ryan Donavan, Mike McQuade and Jeff Beaulieu in the Sitecore Product Management team leading technical documentation initiatives around GDPR, system architecture and data flows with the awesome Martina Welander. I also helped make Sitecore 9 installations easier by promoting and managing the Sitecore Installation Framework together with John Hand and Kieran Marron.

Is has been a fun and exciting ride and I look forward to following the Sitecore products from the sideline. I also look forward to returning to the best technical community in the world.

Exciting times ahead…

 

Growing your Technical Marketing Organisation and Roles

The last week I have again been reading through the Connect book by Lars Birkholm Petersen et al. which covers the marketing maturity model exercised by the Sitecore SBOS team. Although it is a very good read it does have one very big gap: The lack of focus and attention on the technology powering the modern marketing organisation.

The back cover reads: “Marketing must be faster and more agile than in the past, ready to move rapidly to leverage new technology and stay connected and available to customers”.

In other words: As the marketing operations become more mature the need for quick optimisations and deployment of initiatives, new features, channel support etc. becomes imperative. Marketing technology – if implemented correctly – is sophisticated enough to allow marketers and marketing technologists to adapt and optimise somewhat without the intervention of development or IT. But as the organisation matures and marketing initiatives cover more business critical parts of the customer journeys, the technology touchpoints and requirements will inevitably become more advanced and start spanning more business critical systems and more of integrations. This will require a greater focus on traditional development and IT disciplines – and if these disciplines are not a part of the marketing organisation agility will suffer,

The IT/Marketing Gap is a Maturity Blocker

I have been building marketing solutions for the last 10 to 15 years and have encountered organisations in every end of the maturity scale and ranging from the smallest to the largest organisations in the world.

Over the years, I have experienced that one of the biggest blockers for marketing to realise the full potential of their marketing technology investment – and therefore ultimately a blocker for maturing more rapidly – is the lack of coherence between marketing and technology. The realisation that the IT/Marketing relationship has to be strong and respectful is more and more essential when moving up the maturity scale.

In essence: in a modern and mature marketing organisation, technology is not covered by external roles or organisations but needs to be a part of the marketing team and built into the daily marketing operations.

Growing your Marketing Organisation and Roles

Chapter 12 of the Connect book is titled “Growing Your Organization and Roles” and covers the marketing roles which needs focus in a maturing marketing organisation. The roles covered in the book are:

• Marketers
• Digital Analysts
• Acquisition Marketer
• Channel Expert
• Data Analyst or Data Scientist
• Chief Marketing Technologist
• Experience Architect

As mentioned, none of these roles are actual technical roles, developing or extending the marketing solution. The following lists the technology roles needed for a modern mature marketing organisation, written in the same format as in the book:

Solution Architect

The Solution Architect is your key to getting off on the right foot and leveraging whatever technology or technologies you choose the right way for the business. This role also makes sure that your governance process and solution is architected in a way which assures the flexibility and agility you need to mature and optimise.

A good solution architect is not only a technologist, understanding the chosen technologies and surrounding systems, but also a person who understands the business and marketing. This is the person which translates your business goals into technology and makes sure that the technology adapts continually.

You need this guy on your team if you want to be successful in the long run.

Skills and Competencies

• Understands the technology and how to apply it in the business
• Understands digital marketing and the goals
• Works in an agile manner and understands the need for flexibility in the technology
• Strong in communication
• Practical
• Quality driven

User Experience Architect

The most flexible part of any marketing solution is customer facing user interface and even if you are dealing with campaign landing pages, email, personalisation, or testing and optimisation, the user experience of your marketing solution will have to be continually changed and adapted.

A User Experience Architect knows the underlying marketing technology and how you will get the most value without rebuilding again and again and again.

Skills and Competencies

• Strong on digital marketing and information architecture
• Focus on solving real-world business problems with technology as an enabler
• Understands the entire technology stack and how it all applies to the user experience
• Works in an agile manner
• Quality driven

Content Architect

With the increase of maturity in the marketing organisation and rise of the importance the digital channels it is vital that your valuable content – whether information, merchandising or other – is reusable across digital channels and that the task of creating and maintaining the content is as optimised as possible.

The Content Architect will assure that your organisation has a strong focus on content architecture and organisational processes, including content before presentation.

Skills and Competencies

• Strong organisational understanding
• Focus on workflows and business processes
• Prioritises content over presentation
• Quality driven

Developer

In a technology stack as deep as in marketing technology ranging all the way from user interface (HTML, Javascript and CSS) and server technology (Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby) down to the service layer and database technologies the developer role can be quite broad and it can be quite a task for a marketing organisation to team up with developers in the entire stack – and in truth, in many scenarios this is not even a viable solution.

This said, all marketing organisations need to comprehend that developers are essential for the long running success of the marketing effort. No marketing solution will run itself after installation so respect the developers and make sure you comprehend what they are doing and understand what they are saying. Your success relies on them doing their best.

Embrace the Technology

Independent of the technology you choose to power your digital business, you will inevitably need to take more and more ownership as your maturity grows. Just like you need more and more focus on growing your marketing team and filling the marketing roles, you will need to embrace the technical roles as part of your team – and unless you embrace this early in the process, technology and the processes around it will only slow you down.On the other hand: if you embrace the technical roles as your own, technology can be the driver to speed your maturity.

Why does my Sitecore website perform so badly?

After many years of doing a lot of reviews on Sitecore I would conclude that it more or less always comes down to one single thing when pages perform badly: bad code. And when I mean bad code, I mean code iterating an excessive amount of items.

Iterating A LOT of items

Previously we used to see a lot of calls to descendants when solutions were using axis, xpath or Sitecore Query, but luckily this is a disappearing trend with the introduction of Sitecore Search in Sitecore 7. This does not mean that there are less bad code – maybe even on the contrary. The use of ORM and abstractions in many solutions means that layers of code can easily hide item iterations. Neither of the two patterns or technologies are inherently bad, but they do provide means to hide “bad code”.

The ARGH! Example

The example in the diagram below is from a customer here in Australia which had a problem with a very slow running product search. The diagram breaks down the different parts of the search page and describes the functionality and number of items hit by each part. It was part of the presentation to the client to highlight where the performance bottleneck was (and that Sitecore itself was not cause of the problem).

After looking through layers and layers of code (3000+ lines to be more specific), we discovered that the code in the different layers were searching Lucene and iterating search results, loading the items individually and recursively running business logic.

A simple search resulting in a page of 50 links would easily take up to 5 minutes, simply because the code was iterating in excess of 1.7 mio items from the Sitecore database –  which would take time in any solution 🙂

To cut the very long story short: always keep an eye on number of items being iterated – and never rely on caching to do the trick.

Extending the Reach of your Sitecore Platform using the Federated Experience Manager.

The Customer Experience Management system landscape is incredible fragmented, covering amongst others content management, online customer service, e-commerce, campaign management, analytics and tracking, personalization, automation, social media, ad management, retargeting and many more, and most organisation have multiple systems in place – not only to handle different parts of the process, but often identical systems – like multiple CMS’s – to cover the same processes.

This scenario is not likely to change in the near future.

One of the newest features of the Sitecore Platform is the Federated Experience Manager, which can help connect a fragmented digital platform and make it possible to track and reach out to all visitors across all the owned channels in an organization.

Disconnected Platforms

Before joining Sitecore in 2014, I worked the last 14 years in a company called Pentia, based in Copenhagen, Denmark and since Pentia was the company from which Sitecore originally sprung in 2001, we were almost exclusively building Sitecore solutions for Danish and international customers.

Through the years, most of the clients I worked on aquired Sitecore as a major technological investment and as a new platform for driving their marketing efforts. So building or rebuilding their brand website, customer service website or e-commerce solution – and configuring the marketing tools – was almost always a major project for them.

When this is said, almost without exception, all would be stuck with one or more legacy websites or CMS systems following the migration or implementation project. This was not because the marketing division necessarily wanted it, but typically because the technical migration of their entire web platform would be too costly – or simply because Sitecore did not feel like the a good fit for a remaining systems.

So even though a lot of hours and smart people worked on implementing Sitecore and making the marketing platform better and giving the customers a better experience, it would often feel like we were working on a part that mattered very little.

Disconnected Experiences

We often saw that the legacy websites which were not converted to Sitecore was the e-commerce platforms, the direct customer service websites or the transaction websites. In other words, the websites actually giving the most value to the visitors – and often the organisation – and where the customer experience and visitor journey tracking was most vital to the success of the whole online platform, was being kept on legacy systems and technologies that were not allowing Sitecore to help marketing and customer service.

So the result was often a bad and very disconnected customer experience.

Seemingly simple things, like the visual design changing slightly from website to website, the overall flow or information architecture being bad or simply the content being wrong, not updated or just not assisting the customer towards the goal and the conversion. Furthermore the tracking and profiling capabilities of Sitecore was severely crippled, making the investment in personalization and optimization at best poor but often simply not worthwhile.

One platform, One Experience

Personally this was why I was rather excited when I first heard about the Federated Experience Manager a while ago.

By allowing Sitecore to reach out to non-Sitecore websites and applications and track visitor behaviour across these, we can start to see the entire visitor journey on the owned platforms and profile the users accordingly. But more importantly, we can start incorporating the legacy websites into the optimization effort, assisting the visitors on making those vital transactions, or start marketing our products or services on the websites where the visitor actually is, and not just where we would like them to be.

This will allow the marketing people to get even more control over all the digital channels – and ultimately make the investment in Sitecore and their new marketing platform much more valuable.

The Sitecore Federated Experience Manager

Sitecore Federated Experience Manager, FXM, will in short allow you to track the individual visitors across Sitecore and non-Sitecore websites using javascript tags – just like you know it from other analytics tools. This will allow you to use the standard Sitecore tools for goal tracking and visitor profiling. This mechanism is pretty much independent of technology, and FXM can even be used to track non-websites such as mobile apps.

But FXM will also allow you to push content from Sitecore to non-Sitecore websites and applications. This of course means that content can be maintained in one location within Sitecore and pushed across to other platforms. But potentially this can also be used to push theming and visual elements, to assure a unified user experience across all systems.

And since all content is managed and shared though the standard Sitecore mechanisms, we can leverage all Sitecores tools including personalization and A/B testing.

Finally FXM can be used to push data back to Sitecore too. This means that events and data from the external system can be sent across to Sitecore, and by leveraging Sitecores rules engine, we can trigger marketing events in Sitecore, for example engagement automation.

FXM is available for Sitecore 7.1 and forward on SDN.

Merging Visitor cookies in Sitecore CMS 7.5 and the Experience Database

Sitecore 7.5 hasn’t hit the streets yet, but as rumour has it, it will soon.

One of the highly anticipates features of Sitecore 7.5 is the ability to merge visitors across devices or cookies. This was something which had to be implemented specifically in the past, but will now be part of the platform.

How do I merge two visitors?

First of all, visitors in Sitecore 7.5 are no longer called visitors, but contacts. This is a part of a larger renaming scheme where e.g. visits (sessions) now are interactions and visitors are contacts. The renaming has consequences in the API, in that the DMS (which is now the Experience Database, xDB) API has had a major rework. Therefore expect a slightly harder upgrade path for those heavy DMS customized websites.

The key to merging contacts lies in identification. Two interactions on two different devices cannot be associated unless something common identifies them. This could be a login, an entered email address or something similar. It’s basically up to you to determine what and how to uniquely identify two contacts on two different interactions as being the same.

Sitecore.Analytics.Tracker.Current.Session.Identify(string key)

After you have determined the appropriate key to uniquely
identify a user, it’s as simple as calling the Identify method on the current interaction, ehh session? (Oops, apparently the rename hasn’t been done all consistently)

How does it work?

Using the new session handling mechanisms in Sitecore 7.5, Sitecore loads the contact associated with the current interactions cookie into session. The contact is then locked in shared session, making sure that two separate interactions will change the contact simultaneously.

1. When calling Identify on the contact in the current interaction, any other contact identified with the same key is loaded using the LoadContactReadOnly in the ContactRepository class.
2. The newly loaded contact is locked, making sure other interactions are not changing it.
3. The current interaction is transferred onto the new contact, running the TransferSession pipeline
4. MergeContacts is called, passing the current contact as “dying” and and the loaded as the “surviving”
5. The MergeContacts pipeline is triggered, which in turn merges tags, counters, automation states, attributes and facets on the contacts.
6. The new merged contact is now the active contact in the interaction and tracking will continue on this across multiple devices.

Things to keep in mind:

• Sitecore 7.5 introduces new terms for the Analytics API
• Expect a development effort when upgrading – dependant on the level of analytics use
• In Sitecore 7.5, the platform will be able to merge visitors automatically
• Nothing comes for free – you will have to determine how to uniquely identify contacts, and call the appropriate method
• All steps of the actual merge is configurable using pipelines

See Nicks posts on 7.5 for a more in-depth walk through:
http://www.techphoria414.com/Blog/2014/June/Copy_of_One_Month_with_Sitecore_7-5_Part_3

Getting your Sitecore project right

Still a very relevant blogpost – from 2011

Eldblom

This post is for you clients who have already selected Sitecore as your new website platform and is starting up a new Sitecore project.
Here are a couple of my thoughts on how you can get your Sitecore project on the right track from the beginning, by setting the stage for a good collaboration with your implementation partner.

The website you a building today should also be the website for tomorrow and hence the website you are building should be extendable, flexible and scalable. It is absolutely possible to build a Sitecore web platform which will last many iterations – considering that you take this into account early in the process.

Select your implementation partner carefully

Your implementation partner is the single most important collaboration partner in your project. They bind everything together; requirement specifications, user experience design, hardware, software, domain knowledge and more, and is therefore crucial for the…

View original post 778 more words

How do I get the Publishing date for a page in Sitecore CMS?

During the last week I’ve stumbled upon this question multiple times (strangely enough when dealing with many Sitecore solutions I find myself stumble upon the same issues – and oddly enough, the same issue often arises on different solutions at the same time) and the answer is: “You need to determine what you mean by Publishing Date”.

Getting the date the item was published.

So you mean the date and time the page was transferred from the master database to the web database? Would this be the very first time the page item is transferred to the web database? Or maybe the first time the latest version of the page is transferred? Or maybe the last time the version was transferred?

The answer to all the above would be: There is no such date available in the Sitecore CMS API!

If you still want to pursue this path, John West has a brilliant post apparently solving this: http://www.sitecore.net/Learn/Blogs/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2011/08/Intercept-Item-Publishing-with-the-Sitecore-ASPNET-CMS.aspx

But you have to keep a couple of things in mind:

1. Perhaps most important – does this date really make sense? Remember that this is not the date the page item was last changed, but merely the time of the transfer to the web database.
2. This date would be the publish of the latest version to the web database.
3. A full publish of an item would update this date – even if the item already exists in the web database. A full publish removes the items from the web database before a new publish commences.
4. I am always most reluctant to make changes directly in the web database (as suggested by John West). There are generally many components of Sitecore (indexing, publishing etc.) which are based on items being transferred as-is from master to web. You might get it to work – but will every feature of Sitecore keep working? Correctly?

Getting the date the page was last changed.

Well this one is easy: Item.Statistics.Updated will give you just this, the date/time for the last change – any change – on the version of the item. By setting up workflows and a scheduled publishing strategy (which I would recommend on any solution) will transfer the page changes automatically to the web database, thereby getting an updated item published as soon as possible.

But! If you determine to use this field, keep in mind:

1. The Updated date/time field will be updated by any change, e.g. both major revisions and just smaller changes. Even fields which are not shown on the page or not edited manually by users will trigger a change. For example: If an editor makes a revision to the text on a page on July 1., but an approver waits two months before approving the change (without content changes), the Updated date will be September 1. (because the item workflow state was changed on this date).
2. There is no way for the editor to control this field (unless you start meddling with the inner working of Sitecore, which is never recommended). The field is controlled by Sitecore.

Using your own date/time field

Most likely, when thinking this issue through, you will arrive at the conclusion that the editors – or at least the administrators – needs to have total control over the Published Date shown on the page. This of course means that the field will have to be a custom field added to all page items – and the most straight forward solution is to just make the editors set the value when they make a change.

But if you need to automate the date/time value, there are a number of options which springs to mind:

1. First option is to set the field value when the item is created. This can be done by setting the standard values on the template: http://briancaos.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/initial-field-values-for-sitecore-setting-a-default-future-date/
2. You could change the date/time if some predetermined fields changes (e.g. the content fields shown on the page). This would be done in an event handler for the item saved event: http://www.sitecore.net/Learn/Blogs/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2010/11/Intercepting-Item-Updates-with-Sitecore.aspx
3. You could update the field in a workflow action, e.g. approval. This would be require a custom workflow action. See more here: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/workflowreference-usletter.pdf

Things to keep in mind

• Think carefully what you mean by “Published Date”
• There are no “Publishing Date” concept in Sitecore.
• Use the Updated date with care – it will get changed by Sitecore at every change to the item
• Consider using a custom field for this. There are ways of automating the value in the field without meddling with the inner workings of Sitecore.

Avoiding downtime while rebuilding your Lucene search indexes in Sitecore ASP.NET CMS

This is the first blog post I’ve written since my arrival in Sydney and my new job within Sitecore. It will be about a simple yet strong feature often overlooked in the Lucene indexing capabilities of Sitecore 7: how to avoid downtime on your Lucene indexes.
One of the problems I run into occasionally is that a rebuild of an index, e.g. the web database index, will cause features of the site to not work properly. This is due to the fact that the index is taken offline while rebuilding.

But what causes a rebuild?

A rebuild may be triggered manually through the control panel in Sitecore, or by an indexing strategy such as RemoteRebuild (see more here). But full rebuilds might also be triggered by simply publishing too many items from master to web. This is due to the Threshold setting in e.g. the PublishEndStrategy, which will transform many single item indexes to simply one full rebuild if the given threshold is reached (See more here).

How do I avoid downtime then?

Well the solution to the above problem is relatively simple, yet often overlooked: Changing the standard Lucene index handler (the class which actually handles reading and writing to the Lucene index files) from LuceneIndex to SwitchOnRebuildLuceneIndex will remove this problem.

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <contentSearch>
        <configuration type="Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider.LuceneSearchConfiguration, Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider">
          <indexes hint="list:AddIndex">
            <index id="sitecore_web_index" type="Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider.SwitchOnRebuildLuceneIndex, Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider">
              <param desc="name">$(id)</param>
              <param desc="folder">$(id)</param>
<!-- ... -->

The SwitchOnRebuildLuceneIndex maintains two separate indexes on disk, one active and one passive. As a rebuild occurs, it is executed on the passive index and when the rebuild completes, the passive becomes active and the active becomes passive. Thereby, there will be no downtime of the index.

Things to keep in mind

Therefore, a couple of things to keep in mind:

• Switch to SwitchOnRebuildLuceneIndex if you want to make sure that you have no downtime on your Sitecore search indexes.
• Make room on disk for maintaining duplicate disks.
• Always choose your Index update strategies carefully.
• Different server roles might require different index update strategies.

“Estimate” – redefine or new term?

About once a year I have a big discussion with one of my colleagues about the concept of estimation. From a professional point of view, we come from different backgrounds. I am a developer and technical architect, and he comes from a background in project management and communication. This year we came to a conclusion that our disagreement is not in what the craft of estimation is or what an actual estimate is – but rather how to approach the common perception (or misperception) of an estimate.

Most people think of an estimate as the number of hours required to solve a given task. If we assume that this is the actual definition, we would have to assume that the task is well defined and completely fixed and this is always – yes, always – not the case. The Cone of Uncertainty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Uncertainty) states that an estimate is never precise (the uncertainty zero) until the task is complete – in other words: both the task at hand (scope, requirements, possibilities etc.) and the number of hours (or sum of money) required to solve it is nothing more than qualified guesswork. We all know this, right?

A fact of the matter is that quite a lot of our clients are not agile. In essence, they do not accept risk in an IT project, and trust us to carry that risk. This means that clients need to know the price of a given requirement before commencing on the work, which means that we have to estimate the “number of hours” required to solve “a given task” – and that the number of hours will not be flexible. Which bring me down to the greatest misconception of the above definition – that the “given task” is also not flexible.

For a great many years I have been one of the lucky developers attached to technical presales – and thereby responsible for estimation in the sales process. Now, if I had a penny for every receiving developer who has moaned about the “number of hours” on my estimate I would be a very rich man. In other words, it seems that many developers think that the “given task” is as fixed as the number of hours – why else would they moan about the hours instead of spending time on resolving how the solve the task within the timeframe? In these developers heads, there is only one solution to the task – and the problem is therefore the number of hours given to this solution. In my experience, there is never just one solution to a given task.

Coming back to my discussions with my colleague: What we agree, is that we need to emphasize – both to our developers and to our clients – is that in a fixed price project, the flexibility lies in the tasks, not in the number of hours. The disagreement is how we emphasize this to our clients and developers.

Call me an idealist or a dreamer, but I still think that key lies in communicating a broader definition of an “estimate”; something that makes it obvious that there is so much more to an estimate than a one-liner task description and a number.

I suggest the following definition of an estimate:

The assumed volume of a task with the knowledge of scope and value at a given time at with a given experience.

This definition emphasizes knowledge of scope and value, as well as context such as the time of estimation and the experience of the estimator. I know it’s not an easy definition, but I think the emphasis is important.

I know that I should probably back down and realize that the common misperception of an estimate is going to be dominating – but that would mean that I would have to let my colleague win the discussion. And I am just not ready for that…

Sitecore Symposium 2012 – Hopes and Expectations

Tomorrow is the Sitecore Symposium 2012 in Amsterdam. I am going and here are some of my hopes and expectations as a Sitecore technician and architect:

Wednesday 9:15, Keynote

First of all, Sitecore has been waving version 7 in our faces for a while. The last year’s conferences were full of promising new features – will this be the time when we hear something concrete?  I therefore hope (although not exactly expect) to hear a keynote with a working demo of Sitecore 7. Michael Seifert is growing into a fantastic speaker, so if he has the product, he will be able to deliver the wow factor.

Wednesday, 15:30: Developer Track, Multiple Ways to Multisite Solutions

One of the eye-catching sessions for me has got to be the multi-site session by Tim Ward. Over the years, we have pretty much delivered multi-site solutions to ALL our clients. I’ll be interesting to get the official Sitecore take on the problem. Furthermore I am very comforted by the fact that Sitecore actually has a take on it – given the problems we have faced historically with lack of multi-site support in some of the official modules.

Wednesday, 14:15: Sponsor Track, Preventing the Language Chaos
Thursday, 11:15: Sponsor Track, Sitecore Translation Strategies and Techniques: Which One Is Right for You?

During the conference, there are talks by two translation/localization vendors: Clay Tablet and Lionbridge. In the last years translation support is one of the key features our enterprise clients request, and it’ll be interesting to see if the vendors gives us some nice technical integration tips. Although I must say, I do expect sales pitches from both sessions.

Wednesday, 15:30: Sponsor Track, Best Practice for Performance Tests Within CMS Installations

The Sitecore Partner Apica has a session about performance testing and best practises. Seeing that this is a techie talk on the sponsor track (which in itself is a contradiction in terms) I’m hoping for a surprise wow experience.

Wednesday, 16:30, Product Track: Building, Connecting and Measuring Communities with Sitecore

Social media and social web features are seemingly always very important to our clients – and why?  “Well because everybody else has it”. In this light, I’m expecting John Field to give me some Sitecore recommendations on how to prove the value – or lack of same – to the clients. Secondly, Sitecore recently purchased a large share of the Danish Facebook integration company KOMFO – I’m hoping for the conference to shed some light on what this collaboration could mean.

Wednesday, 16:30, Sponsor Track: Sitecore and Salesforce – A Compelling Case for Unified Customer Engagement

During the last year, a number of our clients have shown a very keen interest in the CRM integration part of DMS – turning their website into a direct sales tool, integrated with their sales department’s weapon of choice. A nicely done Salesforce/Sitecore integration could give us an additional tool in our integration toolbox.

Thursday, 9:00, Developer Track: Breaking a Million with a Bucket of Items

Buckets are in my world, the next HUGE thing in Sitecore – and something which have been waved around our nose in years. I hope to see massive amounts of data, easily indexed and faceted AND extracted with a nice and neat API. And how does the bucket data tie in with the hierarchy that we know today? Furthermore I hope – well I might even venture an “expect” – to see the concrete implementation and a glimpse of Sitecore 7.

Thursday, 12:15, Product Track: Sitecore Roadmap – Where Are We Going with the Product

This I guess is always a conference must-see. This is where I expect more Azure integration, more social media stuff, more enterprise features, closer integration to ERP and CRM, more app center services from Sitecore etc. etc. Although I hope to see a glimpse of what’s beyond Sitecore 7 and, pretty please, some focus on integration and the development community – and not just new features.

Thursday, 14:00, Developer Track: Become the Marketer’s Best Friend ̶ Using the DMS API to Extremes

The DMS API has never really had any success with the developers within Pentia – and in my view for a good reason: It’s simply not good enough. It just doesn’t have the sleek interface and neatness that the core Sitecore API has. Therefore I’m hoping for an introduction to a clean DMS API in Sitecore 7, although I must admit that I’m expecting an attempt to woo us developers with some features in the current API.

What are your expectations? Hope to see you there!