Author: Neil Killen

Upgrading Content Hub

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During a recent Content Hub upgrade I was surprised to find how little information there was available on the actual process involved. In this post I will share my findings and lessons learned during this process. This information is relevant to upgrade of versions prior to Content Hub 4.2. As from 4.2 onwards Sitecore introduced Automatic Upgrades meaning that upgrades are performed automatically and on a regular cadence.

Why Upgrade Content Hub?

New features & Enhancements – everyone loves shiny new features and Content Hub development are continually adding new features and improving existing features. Being on the latest version allows you to take advantage or those features and provide a better Authoring experience and User Experience for both your users and customers.

Bug Fixes – each release includes several bug fixes that have been identified in earlier version based on priority and impact when you upgrade you should notice these improvements or some pain points you may have had are no longer an issue.

Seamless upgrades and versionless SaaS model – as mentioned previously when you upgrade to the latest version you will be on the Sitecore Content Hub’s versionless Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. No more version specific upgrades, you can benefit from latest features and improvements without the need for complex and time-consuming upgrades. Updates will be deployed automatically and identified by dates to your Content Hub instances on a regular cadence. However, if an upcoming release contains breaking changes you will be notified at least one month in advance. That particular update will be deployed to your non-production first, then 14 days later it will be deployed to your production instance. Giving you time to test and mitigate any breaking changes before they hit Production. If you would like to read more on this topic checkout this post by Tim Marsh.

Sitecore Support – upgrading to the latest version ensures you have the necessary Sitecore Content Hub support and SLAs:

  • Sitecore cannot guarantee service availability for versions 4.0 and 4.1 after June 30, 2024, and for versions 3.x after December 31, 2023.
  • Assistance with errors or unexpected behavior during code or configuration promotion, or development activities. Versionless Only.
  • Addressing product defects. Versionless Only.

Things to consider

Before scheduling your upgrade here are some things you should take into consideration:

Breaking Changes – depending on your current version you are upgrading from you will need to review the list of breaking changes in each of the release notes from your current version to the latest version and check if any of these are applicable or are a risk.

Sitecore has changed the structure of the automatic release notes as it no longer has a release number and they are organized by date following the release cadence with a new format. I did notice there are fare fewer breaking changes in these releases.

Customizations – review any integrations, custom pages, external components and custom css that you have within your solution and assess the risk. You should upgrade your lower environments first before production as that will allow to assess impact and resolve any issues before applying the upgrade to Production and mitigating any risk.

Downtime – there will be downtime incurred during the upgrade and the length of that depends on your current version and the size of your solution. Downtime could be anywhere between 4 and 8 hours but it should not be more. The Service Request team will perform some analysis when you make a request to upgrade and provide with an estimate of the actual downtime they anticipate to help you plan and schedule the actual upgrade. What to expect during downtime:

  • Content Authors will not be able to access Content Hub.
  • Content Hub Rest APIs will not be accessible. This is important if you have built custom web services or have other applications consuming these Rest APIs as you will need to consider how to best handle this service unavailability during the Production upgrade.
  • Content sync’d to Sitecore using SCCH will be fine you just won’t be able to sync any new or updated content during the upgrade.

Rollback – if whatever reason the Sitecore service team handling the upgrade run into any unexpected issues and are unable to resolve within a timely manner they will perform a rollback using a backup they take prior to the upgrade. This actually happened during our the upgrade of our production environment even though both non-production environment upgrades went off without a hitch. The service team were able to diagnose the root cause and we rescheduled the upgrade with confidence they could complete the upgrade without having to rollback. An unexpected inconvenience but we got there in the end.

High-level Task Overview

During any upgrade I like to define a list of the steps involved and define the roles/responsibilities, estimated LOE, expected start and end dates and then document actual start and end dates. This information is super useful in helping to plan each of the environments to be upgraded. Capturing any lessons learned for each task between upgrades will help to improve the process and mitigate risk. This helps with planning and tries to ensures there are no unexpected surprises when you get to production. You should plan to upgrade the lower environments first i.e your Dev environment, following by QA and finally Production.

  1. Review Breaking Changes – list out all the breaking changes listed in the release notes between current version and latest version. Review the list and determine if any of these are significant or are a cause for concern determine any risk and how that could be mitigated.
  2. Create Service Request for the Environment – raise a service request with Sitecore. They have provided a guide on how to request an upgrade from earlier versions of Content Hub with some instructions about the process. Once the service request is created the Service team will be able to perform an analysis of the Content Hub instance and provide a LOE and expected downtime to perform the upgrade.
  3. Determine Impact of downtime – knowing the expected downtime you can plan for it and/or take any necessary steps to mitigate the impact of this downtime (if any). With this information you can plan with appropriate stake-holders when best to perform the actual upgrade of the instance. This is not such a concern for the lower environments, however it could coincide with other project release cycles. So its important all stakeholders are made aware.
  4. Plan for the actual Upgrade – You will need to plan with all the stake-holder including the Service Sitecore Service request team to ensure they have availability to perform the upgrade on your preferred date/time.
  5. Perform Upgrade – this is handled by the Sitecore Service Delivery team and will notify when is complete and relay any information on the Service request ticket. Once Service delivery have completed the upgrade you can verify by logging into the instance and going to Settings and locating the version in the lower right corner. Once you are on the automatic release this will co-relate to the version date following the new Release Notes format.
  6. Test Content Authoring – your QA team should perform some tests following the upgrade, ensuring they can create the various assets and workflows.
  7. Test Integrations – verify SCCH is working as expected and new/updated assets are being applied as expect to Sitecore. Ensure any custom web service or applications consuming the Rest APIs are working as expected.
  8. Review and test for possible breaking changes – using the list of changes discovered in step one, review each item and test.
  9. Issue resolution iteration – work through any issues identified in steps 6, 7, 8.
  10. Sign off Instance Upgrade – once all stake-holders are happy the instance has been upgraded successfully with all issues being resolved and/or mitigated the upgrade can be signed off. You can then start planning the next instance util all your Content Hub instances have been upgraded.

Once you are done upgrading all your instances you can scrunch this up and throw it away… with the automatic updates you’ll never need it again. One less thing for you think about or invest time and resources. Leaving you to focus on other business critical tasks.

Useful Info

I hope this is helpful!

Sitecore XM Cloud Tips & Tricks

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In this post, I’ll share some useful info, handy tips, and tricks to help you get started with Sitecore XM Cloud.

XM Cloud Portal

The Sitecore Cloud Portal is your hub for everything in XM Cloud. You can manage and switch between the various apps seamlessly: XM Cloud, XM Cloud Deploy App, etc. There are handy links to documentation and the Sitecore Support Portal. You can even create new support cases without leaving the portal.

Check out the XM Cloud Introduction it has some helpful information, links, and videos to get you started.

Navigating XM Cloud

Switcher – the multi-dot menu icon opens the switcher and allows you to switch between organizations, projects, and apps.

Home – each App has a home page providing access to the main features.

Admin – if you are the administrator of one or more organizations you can manage members of those organizations, you can:

Quick actions – let you easily access important features.

Apps section – clicking on one of these instances, opens a side panel to the right with direct links to quick actions available for that instance.

XM Cloud Dashboard – where you create and manage your websites and access all your XM Cloud Tools. The Site tab is where you can add websites to your instance in just a few clicks. The Tools tab is where you can access all the features included in XM Cloud. It looks very similar to Sitecore XP and provides access to some familiar tools.

XM Cloud Deploy – allows you to manage projects and environments.

XM Cloud Pages – combines editing and design capabilities for building web pages.

XM Cloud Content manager – this is where you can manage and edit all the content on your website.

XM Cloud Explorer – is an editing tool that lets you work with content independent of presentation.

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Sitecore Symposium 2022 Highlights

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The biggest event in the Sitecore community calendar, Sitecore Symposium happened last month in Chicago. It was the first time to have this event in person in 3 years. I had the pleasure of sharing some highlights and key takeaways with our Valtech Sitecore craft circle this month. Sitecore have been very busy over the past 12 months and there were a lots of exciting announcements and innovation to share. Whether you are an implementation partner, an existing Sitecore customer or just exploring Sitecore current product offerings – there has never been a better time to build with Sitecore to transform user experiences and businesses.

Symposium Kickoff

In the opening keynote Steve Tzikakis (Sitecore CEO) kicked off the event, outlining Sitecore’s vision for the future. To be the leader in content and a disruptor in engagement and commerce. He made several announcements including 3 new products:

  • Content Hub One
  • Search
  • Connect

More on these shortly.

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Sitecore Personalize – Livin’ on the Edge

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With the explosion of data being collected and consumed by IoT applications and devices along with our insatiable desire for near real-time feedback, has led to a shift in how we handle computing. Performing all the computation at data centers and/or cloud servers is not the most efficient approach as this increase in data consumption requires significantly more bandwidth which only increases latency. Edge computing, allows computation of data to remain much closer to the user rather than going through several network hops, for a cloud server to process the data and return a response. With this computation of data happening closer to the source not only is Edge more performant it is also considered more secure.

Users who have a personalized online experience and feel a connection with your brand are more likely to make a purchase and become loyal customers. However, a poor implementation that adversely impacts performance will have the opposite effect and drive potential customers away.

The probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/page-load-time-statistics/

In this post, I will demonstrate how you can improve performance and user experience by moving personalization to the Edge with Nextjs Middleware and Sitecore Personalize using the Sitecore Commerce template created by Vercel. First I’ll show you how to personalize using visitors’ Geolocation to show summer or winter clothing collections.

Then we’ll personalize using guest information collected by Sitecore Personalize to display products from our men’s or women’s store.

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Sitecore Demo Portal

Neil Killen1 Comment

If you’ve been involved recently with Sitecore on any client pitches for OrderCloud or CDP & Personalize then you would have seen Sitecore Sales engineers demonstrate the power of these applications running on the demo portal using the PLAY Summit. It has been made available to all Sitecore MVPs this week and allows you to quickly and easily spin up an environment and instance to easily demonstrate Sitecore products. For Partners you need to be onboarded via the partner team, you can contact your partner manager to get access.

If you’ve ever been involved in pre-sales then you know how much effort can go into standing up a demo Sitecore Solution to provide your Sales and Marketing teams with something that can be shown to potential new or existing clients.

The goal of the Portal and what the Sitecore Demo team have continually been striving towards – to simplify the process of spinning up a working Sitecore solution, allowing you to quickly demonstrate the main features with each new Sitecore release. It has to be said they’ve had their work cut out recently with all the recent acquisitions and new Products being added to Sitecore. But it has to be said this most recent incarnation of their demo solution and portal is their best work yet! It demonstrates how to spin up a ComposableDXP with Sitecore with a few clicks and some simple configuration. The portal will do its thing and you can review the progress or go make yourself a cuppa coffee and wait until you receive an email indicating your demo instance is ready in around 10-15mins. Awesome!

Taking it for a spin

I was fortunate to get early access to take it for a spin. If you’ve not already accessed the demo portal you’ll want to head over and sign in with your Sitecore Partner account. Once signed in you’ll be presented with the portal home screen which will list any current demo instances you’ve created:

As you can see here I have several demo instances available one for each of the demo templates that are currently available.

To spin up and new demo instance Select the Get a Demo menu option or click Quick Demo for a faster wizard-like experience.

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Using Postman with OrderCloud

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The OrderCloud API Console is a pretty awesome tool and an excellent feature to have within the OrderCloud platform. However, I like to utilize Postman when developing against APIs. As I’ve previously demonstrated by utilizing Postman with Sitecore CDP & Personalize and Sitecore Send, in this post I’ll look at using Postman with the OrderCloud API.

Importing the OrderCloud API into Postman

OrderCloud provides an OpenAPI spec and is available at OrderCloud Developer Tools. You can use this definition to import into Postman and create a collection. To import follow these steps:

1. In Postman create a new Workspace -> New Workspace let’s call it OrderCloud API

2. Now copy the OrderCloud OpenApi URL documentation endpoint and click on the Link tab and enter the copied URL and click Continue.

3. Use the default setting and click Import.

4. The OrderCloud API definition is imported and a collection of APIs are created and divided into the various functional areas as described by OrderCloud API definition as described in the API Reference guide.

Using the Collection

Once the collection has been created there are a few things you’ll need to set up:

  • Register for an account on the OrderCloud Portal.
  • Create or have an existing Marketplace.
  • Create or have existing API clients: Seller Client, Buyer Client.
  • Create or have an existing Admin User account and security profile with full access.

All of these details are covered in the OrderCloud Establishing API Access guide.

Note: If you have used the Vercel Commerce template and added the OrderCloud Integration or the headstart-nextjs application then these would have been created during the setup of the integration.

Authentication and Access Tokens

OrderCloud uses OAuth 2.0 for token-based authentication. This means that each API request to OrderCloud requires a valid access token which can be acquired through a variety of OAuth workflows.

Encrypted in the token are the identity of the user as well as the roles that the user has access to. Once validated, the OrderCloud API has enough information from this token to determine which endpoints and data a user can read and/or write.

Tokens are valid for 8hrs and you can renew or create a new token. Generated tokens can then be stored in a variable and reused.

OrderCloud API Exercises

While the APIs are well documented in the Reference guide there is a great OrderCloud Postman Tutorial. These postman exercises will guide you through the steps, data and api requests involved in setting up a fictitious Coffee Shop. This is a really good starting place to learn the various APIs and data structures and how they interact with your OrderCloud data.

To import the exercises into your own local or web postman instance simply click on the simply click on the Run In Postman button located at the top of the exercises to import into with your web or desktop postman instance.

You will also want to import the variables used in the exercises and update them accordingly to your OrderCloud environment instance as you progress through the exercises.

Have Fun!

A React Sitecore Personalize NPM module

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The React Sitecore Personalize npm module is a wrapper for Sitecore CDP/Personalize Direct Client Script allowing you to easily add the script to react-based apps. The goal of this project is to make it even easier for those developers who might be new to React or Next.js and are learning how to integrate Sitecore Personalize by providing a simple wrapper for the direct client script. Allowing you to easily add the script to your projects and send events to Sitecore Personalize to track user behavior with just a few lines of code. The project is available on GitHub so please use it to help you get up-to-speed quickly, and contribute to the project if you have any suggestions for improvement.

Installation

npm install react-sitecore-personalize

Or

yarn add react-sitecore-personalize

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Utilizing the Sitecore CDP Blueprints Library

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The Sitecore CDP Blueprints library created by the Sitecore team contains useful configurations and snippets. You can either use as a reference to help understand key concepts or adapt and use in your own implementations. Which can help you get up and running quicker with Sitecore CDP.

Web Experience Snippets

These snippets can be used to create web templates for your marketing team in their Web Experiences. Simply copy and paste the provided HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into the corresponding tabs when creating a new template.

The library contains the following examples:

Advanced Page Targeting Snippets

The following scripts can be used with your web experiences by copying the snippet into the Advanced Page Targeting block to ensure the web experience is only executed when the specific event occurs:

  • OnClick – Triggers the experience when user clicks the specified HTML element.
  • OnDelay – Triggers the experience after a delay.
  • OnExit – Triggers the experience when user moves their mouse out of the browser window.
  • OnHover – Triggers the experience when user moves their mouse over the specified HTML element.
  • OnScroll – Triggers the experience when the user has scrolled a certain percentage of the page.
  • SpaTargeting – This function can be used in Advanced Page Targeting to allow an experience to trigger on every virtual page load, rather than only on full page loads. It can be used along with other page targeting functions to trigger experiences after a delay or on hover over an element etc.

Decision Model Snippets

Most Viewed Page Decision Model – This decision model will get the most viewed page from your customer’s sessions and return relevant content for you to display.

Sitecore Personalize decision models enable users to model and run decisions using business rules. You can create reusable programmable decision templates using JavaScript for use within your models. The following are examples of programmable functions you might use as a decision template:

  • getNumberOfEvents – This function will return the number of events of the specified type in the provided session.
  • getTriggerEvent – This function will return the order that triggered the execution of the experience. This is for use in triggered experiences where the trigger is Custom Trigger.
  • getTriggerOrder – This function will return the order that triggered the execution of the experience. This is for use in triggered experiences where the trigger is Order Created or Order Updated.
  • getTriggerSession – This function will return the session that triggered the execution of the experience. This is for use in triggered experiences where the trigger is Session Closed or Abandoned Cart.

Audience Filter Snippets

Sitecore CDP allows you to target an audience in a triggered experiment and there are a few different ways you can achieve this. If you want to target a real-time audience you can apply JavaScript either via a reusable Audience template or direct JavaScript that can be added to the Experiment. The following JavaScript snippets are included in the library:

Credit

Thanks to the team at Sitecore for pulling this awesome collection of snippets together. They provide lots of insight and certainly help stir some creativity.

Have Fun!

Generating Leads with Sitecore Personalize and Sitecore Send (Moosend)

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Lead generation is such an important marketing practice for every business or brand and it comes in many different forms. Take the simple subscribe to receive discount offers email, almost every e-commerce site I’ve landed on recently has displayed one of these pop-ups. Sitecore Personalize makes it possible for your marketing team to easily add these lead generation experiences. While Sitecore Send (Moosend) allows marketing to stimulate and nurture visitor engagement through targeted and relevant communications. With the ultimate goal of converting visitors into lifelong consumers.

In a previous post, I showed how to easily integrate Sitecore CDP/Personalize with your existing site using GTM. In this post, I’ll show you how to capture the visitor’s name and email address using a Sitecore Personalize web experience, once a guest submits their information we’ll add them to a mailing list configured in Sitecore Send (Moosend).

To achieve this we will complete the following:

  1. Create a offers mailing list in Sitecore Send (Moosend) for customers so they can subscribe to receive offer emails.
  2. Take a look at the Sitecore Send REST API we will use to add a user to the mailing list.
  3. Create Data Connection in Sitecore Personalize for the API method.
  4. Create a Web Experience prompting user to enter name and email to subscriber to the email campaign that only displays when user has not previously subscribed.
  5. Create a Triggered Experience that will send user data to Sitecore Send using a data Connection to subscribe the user to the mailing list when the user submits the subscription pop up.
  6. Start the Experiences and Test.

At first glance, this might seem like a lot of steps to go through but it’s relatively straightforward to accomplish with Sitecore Personalize and Sitecore Send. Once you understand the various components involved, which I’ll guide you through, your marketing team will be able to re-use for similar scenarios.

Lots of good stuff!

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Creating a Postman Collection for Sitecore Send (Moosend)

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When working with various REST APIs it’s nice to be able to manage your sample and test requests in a single location. In a previous post, I introduced the Sitecore CDP REST APIs and shared my Postman collection. In this post, I will show you how to create a collection for Sitecore Send (Moosend). The good news Moosend provides an API Blueprint specification available here. However, you are not able to import this document directly into Postman. In this post, I will show you how you can convert this Blueprint spec so it can be imported into postman and automatically generate a collection of requests for testing and development with Moosend.

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