an under-the-hood tour of sitecore experience accelerator

An Under-the-Hood Tour of Sitecore Experience Accelerator

Presented by:John Field & Ryan Donovan@john_field // @ryan_donovan

Implement Sitecore faster than everHow Sitecore XA frees you up to do all the really compelling things that always seem to get deferred to Phase 2

Introducing SxASxA is a new module that is downloaded and installed

similar Commerce and PXM

Fully integrated into the Sitecore editing function,

Experience Accelerator (XA) reduces your time to market

by allowing content teams to design, assemble, and

deploy web content across channels.

IT and implementation partners are unburdened of many

page build responsibilities and can focus on the high-

impact requirements that usually get relegated to phase

two

How do we get up and running faster?

© 2001-2016 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners.

#Sitecore SYM

5

Why is my implementation so long?!

• Content teams can contribute in parallel with the design process, significantly shortening projects.

• Streamlines projects by allowing business users to design, assemble, and deploy across multiple channels without development resources.

Issues and solution

© 2001-2016 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners. 6

Separate Information Architecture from Design

• SXA’s wireframing tools let the site map and page architecture be completed and handed over to design. This enables content entry to happen in parallel with design process.

• Raises the out of the box quality, everything is responsive

• Greater freedom for marketers

Details


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• Wireframes are created directly in Sitecore, reducing the need to manually build sites from static traditional wireframes.

• UX Designers can start building pages while design is happening in parallel.

• Content entry can start directly after UX.

Build Sites with Wireframes


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Export and Import Site Design

• Export the wireframe site to static HTML/JS/CSS allowing parallel work by visual designers.

• Applying to the export requires no Sitecore development experience.

• Completed design is imported as a theme.

• Multiple designs can be imported and themes easily switched at any time.


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• Take existing site and change branding with a very limited effort.

• Multiple sets of CSS files can be attached to any given site – easy rebranding.

• Themes can be composited from other providing:

• Additional functionality

• Styling augmentation

• Grid replacement

Theming


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• Behave just like standard Sitecore Layouts developer would create

• Designed by business users

• Independent from content they display

• Workflow governance

• Partial Design changes propagate across all pages that use the Partial

Page Designs and Partial Designs


Enables agencies, designers, developers and content teams to work seamlessly in parallel

Value Proposition: Agility and Scale for increasing ROI

Linear Site

Production

TIME TO MARKET

User Experience

Capture and define the user experience

Visual Design

Create the visual design to satisfy the user experience

Front End Development

Develop themes/styles/layouts to implement visual design

Back End Development

Reuse, configure and/or build site components

Content Entry

Assemble site pages from components and add content.

Parallel Site

Co-Production

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Demo

Wireframing UX

Exporting to Agency

Theming

Page and Partial Designs

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So many great things Sitecore can do, why do I wait?


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Why are we only delivering static content in Phase 1?

• Bring Phase 2 into Phase 1

• Frees up IT to focus on high-impact requirements.

• Implementations can focus on higher value CX, not just WCM

• By streamlining the time-intensive site build process, agencies focus on high-value tasks that usually get differed to phase 2.

Issue and solution


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• Features such as personalization, content optimization, and engagement automation can be leveraged on launch, not a year later.

• By streamlining the time-intensive site build process, agencies can focus on high-value tasks that usually get differed to phase 2.

Bring Phase 2 into Phase 1

Our requirements have changed.. Now what?

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It feels like I have to go back to IT to change the smallest of things!

• Simple and Fast Content Maintenance

• New pages, sections, and sites can be created and edited without IT intervention.

• Low cost experimentation for marketing without the need for IT

• Total Cost of Ownership is significantly reduced by allowing business users to create new experiences and still comply with governance rules.

Issue and solution


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Simple and Fast Content Maintenance

• New pages, sections, and sites can be created and edited without development intervention.

• Total Cost of Ownership is significantly reduced by allowing business users to create new experiences and still comply with governance rules.


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• ~100 Pre-built Components to Build your Website from

• Easy Drag and Drop Toolkit

• Mobile First with Responsive and Adaptive Options

• Component Variants to Build and Test the Optimal User Experience

• Elastic and Flexible Page Layouts and Extend your Page Templates

Details


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Drag-n-drop Page Assembly

• While maintaining predefined design and architecture governance, SxA’stoolbox has all components needs to build any page from wireframe to production-ready.

Best Practice by Default

• All code generated by SxA follows Sitecore’s best practices around page structure as well as enables the use of personalization and experience optimization

Details


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Rendering Variants

For a large number of renderings on a page users are able to select between different ways that the rendering may appear or what content it shows.

This might vary quite a lot from project to project, so we have created a facility for a super user to create their own Rendering Variants.

This avoids the need for building specific renderings which are only slight variations of existing renderings.

Details


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Details

One rendering – multiple variants

Demo

Simple and Fast Content Editing

Using Pre Built Components

Using Rendering Variants

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We want a new website.. now


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I know Sitecore can handle multiple websites, but it seems difficult to just create a new site from what we already have

• The way SxA is architected means that themes and functionality become more easy to re-use for new websites

Issue and solution


#Sitecore SYMSite creation is as simple as running a wizard

Demo

Standing up a new website

Reusing existing functionality

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IT seem to consider any cool new stuff risky?


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IT

• Spending too much time on basic WCM (plumbing), never get to the high value work

• Customizations take long to develop, have a high risk, and can impact upgrades

• Discovering and establishing best development practices can be tedious

Issue


#Sitecore SYMWhat is my platform meant to deliver?

PRODUCTION

CORE

Content & assets

Site creation & maintenance

Creative & User experience

Authoring experience

Flexibility

Service integrations


#Sitecore SYMWhy doesn’t my platform deliver effectively?

PRODUCTION

Tight coupling

Expertise required

Increasing resources has diminishing returns.

spee

d

resources / cost

CORE


#Sitecore SYMCan we fix this?

PRODUCTION

CORE

Business driven

Low entry barrier

Highly scalable

spee

d

cost

sweet spot

spee

d

cost

Optimal max speed

Highly skilled team

High risk and critical


#Sitecore SYM

Moving to Business as Usual

Value Proposition: Agility and Scale for increasing ROI

Traditional model

Business As Usual

Code Release

Code Release

Code Release

Content

Template

User Experience

Platform

Accelerated model

Business As Usual

Business As Usual

Business As Usual

Code Release

Type of Change

Next steps/Resources

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What to do• Monday – introduce your partner/dev team to SxA

• Three months – evaluation of SxA with new site/section

• One year – upgrade complete, standardized around SxA

Resources available• 8.2 webinar next week!

• https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_accelerator

https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_accelerator

FOR DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY. SitecoreConfidential and Proprietary. © 2016 SitecoreCorporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore®

and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All

other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners.

an under-the-hood tour of sitecore experience accelerator

Technology