Layer One Media, Senior Sitecore Architect — May 23, 2017

My first trip to SUGCON EU was full of honors and humbling moments. First, simply to be selected and make the list of only around 60 or so speakers out of a large pool of talented candidates. Second, to see all the other sessions and the pace of innovation taking place across the Sitecore ecosystem.

I was there to see Lars Floe Nielsen ask Pieter Brinkman and a small team of “Retired MVPs” (former MVPs now Sitecore employees) to do some “real work.” In just two weeks they built a SitecoreUG.com clone that included HoloLens integration! It was awesome — and even Lars jokingly “agreed it was slightly innovative.”

I then saw the excellent presentation by Mark Cassidy: Decoupling Your Sitecore Architecture Using Azure Service Bus and Azure Storage. It is amazing how the simple utilization of a message queue can enable such great scalability and reliability into systems, even when some segments of the architecture become unavailable. In the simplest of terms: your order would still go through, even if the order processing system was down.

Then came the awesome demonstration by Bas Lijten and Rob Habraken of Sitecore Robbie! They built a robot using Raspberry Pi running Windows and communicating back to a Sitecore instance for all of its interactivity and personalization capabilities, with Microsoft Cognitive Services powering photo/video processing, facial recognition, and LUIS language services. I want to build one myself!

After that — I am extremely grateful that I had recently co-presented at the Boston SUG with Mark Stiles and the Milwaukee SUG with Jason Wilkerson, because their sessions were at the exact same time as mine and I was glad I didn’t have to miss them! Mark Stiles did an amazing job with his open source project: Sitecore Integration with Microsoft Cognitive Services — a whole new Media Library capable of auto-tagging images, facial recognition, emotional recognition, and much more. Jason Wilkerson’s Leveraging SXA to Empower Large Organizations is always excellent and brings the excitement around SXA to whole new heights.

My room was packed. I always love presenting to new audiences — asking questions, then personalizing the delivery of content based on their backgrounds and interests. If my informal surveying has any accuracy, the Sitecore practitioners in my session were about 80–90% already using Sitecore Personalization! That was amazing, as every prior event had been approximately the opposite — 80–90% not yet doing personalization. This is the future. The tools are here. Our customers are demanding it and we all need to deliver it.

Then came Dmytro Shevchenko’s Sitecore xDb In-Depth: Harnessing Contacts, Sessions and Clusters. It helps me readily admit that even within just the Sitecore ecosystem there are so many innovations going on in so many directions that no one person could stay abreast of it all.

During the dinner and entertainment, I was excited to speak with several attendees from my session and find that the content was very relevant to their recent customer needs and deliverables.

At the end of the dinner: “Let the games begin.” Using Kahoot, we played Sitecore Trivia! The room was packed — I’d estimate 300–500 people, and over 110 played! I was “in the middle” of the rankings for most of the game until I went on a roll and finished in 5th place. It was very exciting and fun. As Adam Najmanowicz pointed out, in reality it meant I was the first-place loser, as everyone else took home prizes. 😁