https://symposium.sitecore.com/en/agenda?tab.day=20241018#/

My notes from day three:

A Fireside Chat with Brendan Hunt

The fascinating part of the conversation with Brendan Hunt, for me, was the slow process of turning Ted Lasso from a few, small commercials into a wildly successful show. One of his quotes was from Walt Whitman: “Be curious not judgmental”. Teamwork and acknowledging all ideas were also notions expressed while developing the show.

Product Previews

The Product Previews session allowed Sitecore product owners to talk about the products and provide a small demo.

Content Hub

The product owner of Content Hub discussed how expensive it is to store an asset and an elegant search for assets is crucial. Content expiration can help mange the storage of assets as well.

Content Hub will have the ability to utilize Sitecore Stream to help create marketing briefs and campaigns for you.

Stream / XM Cloud

Some bullet points on Sitecore Stream:

• It can look at interactions and predict trends within its dashboard
• It can add attributes to an asset using AI for you
• Personalized multi-level campaigns are in the near future

The demo shows altering banner images and styles based on personalization attributes. It made me think of Racing Victoria’s presentation, where they strived for consistent branding across all channels. Once your branding is consistent, making tweaks to banner images or even text can improve audience engagement when those tweaks are specific to that audience.

Order Cloud

I really liked this presentation about Order Cloud. The product owner spoke about recent trends in the industry that were very interesting, such as:

• Companies offering to buy back used goods
• Companies offering to repair and upgrade your products
• Companies recycling products in an effort to increase sustainability
• Donations, gift cards, and charity gift cards

The product owner sounded like he is on top of the market and responding accordingly with product changes. He said it is a very competitive industry and he doesn’t want customers to lose sales to competitors by missing out on the latest trends.

Building Resilient Integrations with XM Cloud

This session was a great discussion on a few topics: why to go headless, what ideologies to leave behind when moving to XM Cloud and how to integrate other content into your headless solution. Some of my take-ways were:

• A composable architecture gives you a natural separation of concerns
• You can push data from other APIs into Sitecore but you probably shouldn’t. Merging content from disparate sources into the front end should be your default mode. A hybrid approach may be necessary (say if you need to create a page in Sitecore but all of the content comes from another system).
• Don’t use the Sitecore Item API which may be tempting and familiar at first
• Remember the Authoring API is there to make and change items in Sitecore (but it has a different schema than the Sitecore GraphQL API)
• Webhooks only fire when cache is invalidated so it may take time for them to run
• Using Sitecore Connect is better than webhooks for critical business events
• Add monitoring to all stages of your code flow; traceability is tough because of asynchronous nature of the code
• Plan for some microservice to be down

Accelerated Success: Lessons Learned from 100+ Live XM Cloud Deployments

It’s never a good idea to go into a session looking for a magic bullet like I did with this session. Here are my takeaways for this one:

• Find a partner from the Find a Sitecore Solution Partner web page
• Only staff with certified developers 
• They have created over 50 best practices documents
• Developers can improve their skills with frontendmasters.com 
• Utilize SXA
• Your Project Manager should also be using best practices 
• Do not do customizations to the CM
• Look into Sitecore 360
• Sitecore Connect can be an orchestration layer for no code / low code solution 
• You can do basic personalization in XM cloud

That’s a wrap on this year.