SUCON Europe 2018 – Day 2

 Day 2 of this amazing event started early, it started with a welcome talk by Tamas then an interesting session by Todd Mitchell & Lars Birkholm Petersen about the power of connected data, once more these guys did a great job. I will give you a brief about the great sessions that I had the chance to attend on this day.

Evolution of xDB and xConnect: the Underlying Mechanics of Sitecore's New Scalable Architecture

In this presentation Dmytro Shevchenko introduce that whole evaluation levels from the beginning of OMS until xConnect, he compared the software evolution with Darwen’s theories and that was a great comparison and matching. Also, Dmytro presented how analytics evolved in each Sitecore version from OMS to DMS, then xDB until we arrived to Sitecore 9 and xConnect.

One of the interesting points that Dmytro explained in the famous contact locking issue that most people ask about on stack exchange, he explained how the whole contact was being locked in Sitecore 8 and how this is being solved in Sitecore 9, the comparison was nice here too, Dmytro compared the contact locking in Sitecore 8 with the legacy Source Safe software in which when a developer checkout a file no one else can working on this file until he finish, comparing with Sitecore 9 where locking became similar to git, where developers can all check out the same file, edit it then check it and at the end merging will group it all.

Couple of screenshots for the slides from Dmytro’s sessions:

Sitecore Cognitive Services: A web of Intelligence

Again, Mark stiles put artificial intelligent (AI) on spot, from neural networks to machine learning focusing on how much we can do with AI under Sitecore, he presented a couple of interesting examples:

1. Mark quickly showed his interesting image search, colour based or even gender based, that was amazing
2. Mark showed how he used some other companies libraries and API to build a framework to build a service layer on top where you can use this layer to do great stuff without giving much effort to the internal implementation, he used this to tag thousands of articles by analysing the content of each article and selecting the suitable taxonomies, Imagine how much time you saved by doing this comparing with manually going through these articles in Sitecore and set the tag!!

Couple of screenshots for Mark’s presentation:

Enriching Sitecore Experience Analytics with Power BI

This is one of the interesting session that I couldn’t miss, Power BI and how much you can do with it, Benjamin Adamski & Boris Brodsky used power AI to pull data from xDB of course with Sitecore 0 using xConnect oData, pulling data like interactions and contacts then build as many reports as you want with BI, that was really fast and interesting, if you ever had to create a custom report based on analytics data in Sitecore you will know how much effort and time this will save you, in a couple of clicks you can build a huge number of possible reports.

Couple of screenshots from the presentation.

From Forms to Riches

This was really fun! Kamruz Jaman & Mike Reynolds are really an amazing presenter, they talked about the history of WFFM until we arrived to Sitecore forms in Sitecore 9, they gave a great demo of how you can use Sitecore forms, how you can build custom fields, custom actions or even the ever wanted wizard form.  This is on of the most presentation I enjoyed,

A couple of screenshots from the presentation:

At the end, we have to thanks the sponsors and organizers for the great effort they did to make this happen, it was really a great event!! So Thanks you all!