Dreamcore 2011
This year’s Dreamcore took place at Mill Bank Tower in central London. I was fortunate to attend as a speaker – more on that below. Here are some thoughts on the topics that were presented at the event, including some exciting new features in Sitecore CMS and the Digital Marketing System (DMS).
DAY ONE
The event kicked off with a dramatic intro video:
This was followed by the keynote that introduced some of the major changes in Sitecore 6.4 and 6.5:
- Multi-browser support for the Sitecore Desktop, this means that your content team are no longer limited to Internet Explorer when using the Sitecore Desktop but IE6 support has been stopped (well, it is over 10 years old).
- JQuery to replace the Prototype in Sitecore. This is great news because JQuery is Eduserv’s framework of choice. This change means that there will be fewer problems when writing custom JavaScript that has to work with the Page Editor.
- The Digital Marketing System (DMS) replaces OMS - this takes many of the great ideas started in OMS and makes them better.
With DMS it is easier to track your site users, report on their activity and dynamically control what the user sees based on their browsing habits. Combine this with Sitecore’s other tools like the Email Campaign Manager and you can monitor a user’s progress through both the site and emails and see how many reach your site goals and in turn how effective your site is. One massive leap forward is the Engagement Automation, which allows you to create workflows for your engagement with the customer, for example you can automatically send follow-up emails to users who haven’t read the first email, or send a more targeted email based on the links the user has clicked on.
The Developer Goodies session did exactly what it said on the tin, Lars Neilson ran us through the Sitecore Rocks extension to Visual Studio, which I suspect will be every developer’s best friend. The extension allows the developer to do many of the common Sitecore tasks such as creating templates directly from within Visual Studio, speeding up development time.
On top of this Sitecore Rocks contain lots of excellent advanced features such as multi-item editing, query analyser (allows ad hoc querying of items) and drag and dropping items into the Sitecore media library. Not content with having the plugin available in Visual Studio Lars then demoed the standalone version! This was really exciting because the standalone version can be put on a server and used as an advanced admin tool. This will save hours of effort and time. During this talk Eduserv’s Kieran Marron tweeted that it would be great if we could use the query analyser to make a package and within a few hours Jakob (TheRocksGuy) had tweeted that he had added this functionality to Sitecore Rocks. The video below gives you a taster of what Rocks can do:
Just before the afternoon break Alexy Rusakov took us through some of the new features of the Sitecore Page Editor in 6.5 which looked awesome. The process of setting up multivariate page tests has been streamlined. You no longer have to hunt round the Content Editor to set up a test. From the Page Editor you can click on a piece of content in the page and create a multivariate test, with a click of a button you can flick between the different test content to see how the page will look and then publish the test live.
Seeing the results of the test and promoting the winning content to be the page standard is just as easy. The speed and ease with which this was done really opens up multivariate testing to less experienced content editors. For more on multivariate see the Sitecore Multivariate page, unfortunately the video hasn’t yet been updated to show the new page editor method.
The improvements to multivariate page testing have also been applied to personalising content based on a user’s persona. From within the Page Editor you can select some content and then the persona you want to customise. The process of switching between the different persona is straightforward and editing the content on the page allows the content editor to understand the context in which they are writing.
Below are some screenshots of multivariate and switching persona in action, thanks to Sitecore for supplying these:
Persona and multi-variant testing
DAY TWO
- Directing patients to the appropriate point of care suitable for their needs e.g. Self Care, call from a nurse, visit your GP
- Syndicate the services to as many 3rd parties as possible
- Ensure that managing and updating content would be easy and quick for non-technical staff
- Usable by non-technical staff
- The ability to easily syndicate content
- Enable better user engagement
The last session I attended was the Shared Source Workshop for Developers. This was an interesting session with three different speakers. The first was the Shared Source community manager Jimmie Overby. He highlighted that Sitecore is now actively engaging with the Shared Source community and putting their backing behind some modules.
To do this Sitecore have introduced two different levels of support for Sitecore modules: Test by Sitecore and Supported By Sitecore, these badges allows us to better assess the quality of the modules on offer and confidence in the modules. More can be found on the Shared Source blog.
Mark Aalst spoke about the Weblog Sitecore Module which is a nice lightweight bloging module for Sitecore (it’s supported by Sitecore, it features Captcha, importing from WordPress (this is really useful) and RSS feeds. The final speaker Gabriel Boys took us through a demo of the Custom Item Generator that allows a developer to generate C# code that will manage the pulling of data from items in Sitecore. This is another way of solving the same problem we tackled with the Sitecore Object Mapper as part of the NHS Direct project and it was good to see how they had tackled the problem and pick up some different ideas.
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