Unveiling the Layers: Delving into the Sitecore Tech Stack: SUGCON 2019 Takeaways

Welcome and Keynotes by Sitecore CTO Mark Frost

Sitecore CTO Mark Frost started SUGCON 2019 by focusing on the importance of community, developers in particular, Sitecore is investing in the community, community of highly skilled people, people will help customers to achieve their goals.

Sitecore CTO announced that this year Sitecore user group conference – Europe 2019 has more than 40 sessions, more than 650 people in addition to more than 40 Sitecore employees.

Mark also announced that this year Sitecore community will have a Sitecore user group conference – Australia in August 2019, as well as Sitecore user group conference in India on May 2019.

Keynote 2: DevOps by Senior DevOps Program Manager Donovan Brown

The second part of the keynote was by Donavan Brown, Senior DevOps Manager at Microsoft, Donovan talked about DevOps different features and the importance for organization and dev teams to use it.

Donovan defined DevOps as “The union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users”.

DevOps brings together people, process and products, convert the software delivery to more automatic way will make the delivery process faster and continuous, no matter the team size or the tools used.

You can use Dev.Azure.com for free for the first 5 people, and for the 6^th person it will cost 6$/month.

3 Main technologies DevOps provides:

Continues Integration (CI) which will improve the software development quality and speed. When using Azure pipeline, each time you commit a code it is atomically build a tested, also bugs are detected faster.
Continues Deployment (CD): By combining continues integration and infrastructure as a code (IAC), You’ll achieve identical deployments and the confidence to deploy to production at any time, with DI you can automat the entire process from code commit to production if you’re CI/CD test is successful.
Continues leasing and monitoring: with Azure application insights you can identify how your applications are performing and test if the recent deployment made things better or worst.

Microsoft provides flexible, powerful and open Azure foundation for past, present and future apps, for easily build, manage and deploy any application using your favorite tools and frameworks.

Azure DevOps provides:

Azure Boards: Deliver value to users faster using proven agile tools.
Azure Pipeline: Build, test and deploy with CI/CD that work with any language and any platform, Connect to Github or any other Git provider and deploy continuously.
Azure Repos: unlimited cloud-hosted private Git-repos and collaborate to build better code with PRs and advanced file management.
Azure Test Plans: Test and ship with confident using manual and exploratorily testing tools.
Azure Artifacts: Create, host and share packages with the team, and add artifacts to your CI/CD pipelines with a single click.

Resources:

Channel 9:

Azure Friday
Visual Studio Toolbox
DevOps Interviews
The DevOps Labs

Twitter:

@DonnovanBrown
#LoECDA

Web:

DonovanBrown.com
Welcome to DevOps (aka.ms/whatisdevops)

Taming the marketing Automation Engine by Nick Hills

In this session Nick talked about and answered the following questions:

1. What is Sitecore Marketing Automation?

2. How to customize and debug marketing automation engine?

3. How to deploy Sitecore Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a newly provided feature in sitecore 9, it gives the ability to create automation online campaigns in Sitecore, with a user-friendly drag-drop interface, it gives the ability to enroll a contact in a campaign and then using the defined rules; the contact will be evaluated.

Nick showed how you can create a custom activity, as we know sitecore started with Sheer UI then SPEAK and now we can use Angular/TypeScript/WebPack, following is a screenshot how the frontend looks like for a custom activity:

Following how the backend code looks for a custom activity:

Sitecore Marketing Automation activity can be integrated with xConnect, GraghQL, EXM or weather APIs, when configuring an activity you can add any number of custom parameters but notice that the case sensitive of the first character will be removed, as example MessageKey variable will become messageKey.

The ability to debug the custom activity is an important piece to know about, you can debug the custom activity by double click the maengine.exe file, this file can be found in the following path:

\xCONNECT_APP_PATH\App_data\jobs\continuous\AutomationEngine\maengine.exe

In addition to the above, if you need to debug the automation campaign, there are the following approaches:

Start the windows service and attach to it.
Run the .exe file then attach to it.
Include the .exe file into VS, right click à Debug à Start new instance

The last piece of debugging is to debug the Automation UI, Follow the below simple four steps:

Turn on source maps in the angular UI, tsconfig.json
Build and deploy the UI activity including the sourcemap.
Add the source folder into Chrome’s devTools workspace.
Step through your custom activity UI.

Finally, the deployment piece, Nick mentioned the following 5 steps for deployment:

Generate the JSON schema.
Deploy the schema
Deploy the DLL’s
Deploy the marketing automation patch config
Deploy the app config / Connection strings.

To automate the above 5 steps, Nick created a simple tool to do these, and he added this tool to GitHub, following is the URL for the repo if you are interested:

https://github.com/boro2g/xConnectDeployer

More useful links about marketing automation can be found here,

For Developers:

https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/91/sitecore-experience-platform/en/marketing-automation.html

https://youtu.be/0HxUph2YLZc

For Marketers:

https://www.Sitecore.com/en-gb/solutions/automation

Helix Mutations and Changing Habitat by Nick Wesslman

In this session, Nick who is a senior technical product manager at Sitecore talked about Sitecore Helix why and what, community feedback, in addition to how things are evolving when it comes to Sitecore Helix.

Nicks explained why Sitecore is not only a CMS, it is a platform, with a very robust model, that allow integrations with other systems. Sitecore Helix is needed to distinguish parts, organize dependency in addition to minimize the time and effort for finding and applying the change.

Nick mentioned the Sitecore Helix is NOT standard practices it is the Sitecore recommended practices, it doesn’t mean that we need to be very very restricted to it, but to make sure we get benefit from it as much as possible in our implementations.

The need for Sitecore Helix is very obvious, following are two charts for the dependencies between Helix and Non-Helix implementations:

Also, the following graph shows the cost of change over time, for a helix and non-Helix solutions:

Nick also showed the results of “Sitecore Developer Experience Survey 2018”, that ran from 7/10/2018 to 8/15/2018, there were 1404 responses from 56 counties, and following some of the helix related questions results:

Question 1: In the past year, have you applied Sitecore Helix Principles in a new development project?
Ø 33.21% yes, all projects
Ø 33.43% yes, some projects
Ø 16.61% No, not at all.
Ø 11.43% No, only maintained
Ø 5.32% What is Sitecore Helix?

Question 2: Satisfaction by using Helix?

Nick also announced a couple of things related to Sitecore Helix, as, later this year:

Helix Guidance for JSS will be available.
Multi-site and project layer HTML
Recipes, How To’s, Anti Patterns Smells.

A couple of extra news Nick mentioned:

Habitat will be retired and Helix examples will be provided.
Helix Digitize Training will be available on June of this year.

Helix examples will be multiple examples, developer focused, simple functionality, basic design, multi-site, minimal platform customization, in addition to leverage the community tooling.

Following are the types of examples that will provided:

Example # 1: basic Company

a. Very simple.,

b. Multiple Pattern

c. Project-Level Frontend

d. Unicorn

e. TDS and FxCop

Example #2: Franchise Mutli-site

a. Shared Features

b. Varying Content

c. CSS Based Skinning

d. Varying Workflow

Example #3: Corporate Multi-site

a. Shared Functionality

b. Differing Markup

c. More extensions and recipes

d. Integrated front end code

e. Multiple deployments targets

Email: Nick.Wesselman@Sitecore.com

Sitecore Hackathon 2019 – Sitecorps/Ahmed, James and Mohammed from Americaneagle.com

The 2019 Sitecore Hackathon is a free online community driven event organized by Akshay Sura and supported by Sitecore. Shout out to:

· Pieter Brinkman, Senior Director of Technical Marketing at Sitecore; http://www.pieterbrinkman.com

· Mark van Aalst, Senior Technical Evangelist at Sitecore;

http://www.markvanaalst.com/

This year our team choose the Sitecore JSS category to compete in, we submitted a JSS Link Tracker Module in a 24-hours, there were 97 teams in the competition from over more than 25 countries, we won this category!

Sitecore MVP program by Tamas Varga

Every year Sitecore recognize individuals who have passion to share knowledge and experience through participation in online and offline activities of Sitecore community, currently Sitecore MVP program has four categories:

Technology

Individual with seasoned technical experience who actively participate in online and offline activities and communications.

Commerce

Individual who actively share their commerce knowledge and experience.

Strategy

Individual who loves to share data driven experience marketing knowledge with customers, users and implementation teams.

Ambassadors

Individual who provides value by influencing customers and decision makers and by providing product feedback and references.

A couple of important things about the Sitecore MVP award, it is important to remember that the award is around individual community involvement on a specific topic, in addition this involvement should be beyond day job, this could be 5 – 10 hours/Week of personal time as well as a time for learning new stuff on top pf that.

Following chart shows the number of MVPs since 2011 until 2019, you will notice that Sitecore MVP program is looking for quality not just increasing numbers, MVP count has dropped in 2019!!