xConnect

Sitecore and Geo-Distribution

Neil KillenLeave a comment

So I’ve been involved in several projects where I’ve had to setup geo-distributed Sitecore environments and/or scale the Sitecore Content Management and Content Delivery roles along with the plethora of roles XP Scaled provides. I’ll share some of those experiences here and some hurdles and how to overcome them.

Geo-Distributed Content Delivery

You can configure one or more content delivery servers for improved scalability and better performance. If you expect to have high numbers of visitors or want to configure servers in different geographic locations, ideally nearest to your customers.

In order to reduce latency you will want your web database in the same region as your CD. If you have multiple clusters in different regions you will need to consider how you plan to keep these web dbs up-to-date. Normally you would implement multiple publish targets, however Sitecore also supports geo-replication of the web database. See my post on Publish Targets vs Azure Geo replication for more details.

What other services and or roles do you need to support Content Delivery and where should these be located? More on this later… Continue reading →

GDPR! Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in Sitecore xConnect.

Neil KillenLeave a comment

With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) about to go into effect on May 25th, you should be aware of what Personally Identifiable Information (PII) could be stored in Sitecore 9 xConnect.

These fields are easily identifiable if you have installed Sitecore Data Exchange Framework 2.0+ and the xConnect Provider (provides the ability to read and write data to the collection and reference data services of Sitecore xConnect).

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How to Migrate your Sitecore 8.x MongoDB Contacts to xConnect

Neil Killen2 Comments

With Sitecore 9.0 and the introduction xConnect you might be wondering what you are going to do with all that analytics data sitting in MongoDB, when you upgrade your Sitecore 8.x instance to Sitecore 9. Well, Sitecore have created a tool called the xDB migration tool. The tool uses the Sitecore Data Exchange Framework 2.0 and it provides the ability to read from MongoDB (source system) and write to the xConnect server (target system). If you are not familiar with the Data Exchange Framework I have covered it in an earlier post.

The xDB migration Tool provides a pre-configured mapping of data from the MongoDB database to the xConnect server in the form of a DEF Tenant. The Tool includes two data migration processes.

  1. MongoDB Contacts to xConnect Contacts – Reads contact data and related device and interaction data for each contact – from a MongoDB database and writes it to xConnect.
  2. MongoDB Reference Data to xDB – Reads geo IP and location data from a MongoDB database and writes it to xConnect.

Continue reading →