Sitecore XP :: Federated Experience Manager

In this blog I will talk about another great feature of sitecore experience platform which is federated experience manager "FXM", 

Sitecore 8 will give you the power to track visitors of an external non sitecore sites by just adding a single JavaScript line!, so let's dive deep and know more about this feature.

What is FXM?

FXM is a SPEAK application that allow you to track visitors interaction with external non sitecore websites by gathering the related analytics information and saving these information into sitecore; particularly to sitecore experience database "xDB".

As xDB is mentioned here we should know that xDB collect all visitors interaction information and store it in a big repository, The following diagram which I took from sitecore documentation may give a good overview for the architecture  of xDB and their use of MongDB as a collection database.

In previous, sitecore was using SQL server for these analytics information but when we get to a billion of records it become more and more time consuming when extracting these data for generating a report as example; so the solution was to depend on a database which capable of collecting and storing vast amounts of customer experience data while maintaining scalability, performance and availability.

How to Configure FMX?

You can access FMX using the Launch pad or using the Marketing Control Panel as you can see on the following screen shots:

Then you can define a domain matcher rule for the external website that you are attending to track it visits, during this you will have a JavaScript code that should be added to the pages in the external website that you want to track.

The following are a screen shot of the adding new external website in which you can notice the JavaScript code:

What I can do with FMX?

with FXM you can do the following:

• Assign Marketing Attributes like goals and event to items.
• Add page filter in page level which allow you to personalize content according to visitors.
• Add Placeholder which allows you  to replace existing external components with a Sitecore placeholder
• Capture Click Action