The SUGCON ANZ 2023 Experience

That's a wrap for SUGCON ANZ 2023 in sunny Brisbane!  I was fortunate enough to be able to make it, and as my first experience of Brisbane it was lovely to have been to spend some time before the event running along the banks of the Brisbane River on the Thursday morning after I landed, as well as experience some of the evening atmosphere on the Thursday evening going out to dinner with some of the crew.  What a great city!  It was also fantastic to see so many familiar faces, and meet a bunch of new ones as well. Everyone was super friendly and up for a chat - plus it helps that we all have (at least) one thing in common!

I thought it would be worth sharing a summary of events for those who couldn't make it - hope to meet some more of you next year!

Day 1 (Thursday)

Richard Hauer - as one of the organisers - kicked things off with a brief welcome, and was quickly followed by Gus Quiroga (Sitecore AVP) who invited us all to be "open to inspiration", providing a few examples of a few historical figures who proved that we “don’t have to re-invent, only to re-imagine”.

Vignesh Vishwanath ran the first session "Migrating from Platform DXP to Composable DXP". He started by asking for a show of hands for which version(s) of Sitecore you're currently working on. For the 10.x series there was a fairly even split of the room, by the time we got to 9.2 there were only a couple of hands, but the big surprise was the few hands for 8.x, 7.x, and 6.x!! Obviously some happy (or scared) customers to still be running those ancient versions.  He assured everyone that XP wasn't going away, and that 10.4 would be released Q4 of 2024, and that obviously all the new composable stack was still very much compatible with the platform (XM/XP) products.
He then ran us through a couple of products which the Sitecore team are working on to assist the migration from platform XP ("the monolith") to composable: 

1. xDB -> CDP (+ eventually Send) migration for Sitecore 9.0+
   If you have XP + CDP even though this uses Connect it would come at no additional cost.
   1million users (with a couple of custom facets) migrated in ~9hrs
   They're currently looking for pilot projects, if you'd like to be involved!
   
   
2. XM on-prem content + users (10.1+) -> XM Cloud migration
   GUI based
   Select your content items and/or users and the tool handles the rest
   No size limits

Very exciting stuff! No doubt will be incredibly useful for many clients.

Next Greg Baxter ran a session on "Which Sitecore Personalisation Tool is Right for You?" where he took us all (in great detail, as he describe it: "a rabbit hole") through different ways to personalise depending on "where you are at, and where you want to go".  XP is still very robust and reliable, but if you haven't yet started on the journey then it's best to go with XM Cloud (to start with) and/or Personalize (for those who need more); the future is clearly the latter options.

The Dataweavers team, in their quick sponsored session, took us through how - now that there are so many Sitecore products to deal with at the same time - it's important to have good DevOps, PerfOps, and SecOps.  Naturally they wrapped with their plug: that they have the experience and tools to do this efficiently and effectively for any clients.

After lunch we needed to select from a couple of different tracks: developer or marketer. This first day I went full developer.

Vincent Lui from CPA was up first with a session on "Abstracting Personalisation" where he described a bit about what CPA does and how it benefits its members. He went through a bunch of the tech that CPA uses to ensure that they collect as much data as they need to personalise for their users using a couple of different tools - CDP and EDP - and how these differ but complement each other.  Naturally given the PII being collected there are a great number of tools and processes that are in use to protect the data, as well as restrict how it's used.

Yevgen Spektor then followed with a session on "Estimating the upgrade from monolith DXP to XM Cloud" which covered how XM Cloud / headless allows for better separation of concerns, faster builds and deploys, and takes load off Sitecore (ie no CD servers). Key considerations for the move include: serialization (eg. Sitecore content serialization) that most Sitecore modules no longer work, personalisation needs to be refactored, there are no longer custom Solr indexes, there will be little-to-no custom (.NET) code, you need to use Docker, and you'll probably use webhooks. The team structure will also be largely focused on the frontend devs, with little to no backend. Definitely some things to keep in mind there!

Next Navneet Pisharodi's session "Exploring a Modern Vercel Frontend for XM Cloud? An Architectural Viewpoint." took us through hosting a headless app in Vercel.  Not only are they the creators of Next.JS (which you're very likely to be using to build your Sitecore head) they are easy to use with many efficiency gains like gitops (also allowing for immutable deployments and instant rollbacks) and many easy integrations (logging to SumoLogic being the example provided). Not to forget, Vercel is a partner of Sitecore meaning that (fingers crossed) any new developments on both sides will quickly be integrated into the other party's product(s). Licensing and costs were the final key consideration called out - pretty much always the case, but in this particular scenario if you're not familiar with headless hosting it can be something which may catch you out, or be difficult to estimate.

To end the day, Gus once again took the stage to award the Ultimate Experience award to Destination Gold Coast and their partner PING for their excellent use of Sitecore.

Day 2 (Friday)

Sanchia Stafford-Gaffney and Troy Outtram from Deloitte kicked off day 2 by reminding us that we in the room are the fortunate few, and there are many people globally struggling in many different ways.  Deloitte has started a Digital Career Compass to help those struggling to find jobs in digital, mentored and trained by people like us and potentially going on to be employed by companies such as Sitecore (as well as a bunch more they also listed).  Not only do these candidates come from a vast array of backgrounds bringing with them a wide variety of experience but they are generally super driven and excellent employees.

Following this we then split back into Devloper and Marketer streams once more, where I attended:

"From Frustration to Success: Marketers' Guide to Sitecore XM Cloud Do's and Don'ts" by Raman Gupta and Vikas Kumar was an excellent walk through their learnings from experiences implementing XM Cloud. Not only a great list of "dos" and "don'ts" (especially for those of us who haven't yet had the chance to work on a full XM Cloud implementation) but they also treated us to an excellent demo of XM Cloud and the component builder.  If you'd like to download a copy of their list you can fill out the form on their website to get a free copy.

Rajesh Sure then took us through a bit of a deep dive into webhooks in his session "Unlocking Seamless Connections: Leveraging Sitecore Webhooks for Enhanced Integrations".  Not only did he cover the various types of webhooks and how they are used (a couple of key considerations are: timeouts, and the fact that there is no retry logic), but he also had a great demo of a webhook triggering a message to Slack and email, for which he walked us through the code. Super useful stuff!

Andy Cohen from the Sitecore product team followed up with a peek under the hood of some Sitecore tech (XM Cloud in particular) in his session "Building for Resiliency" where he explained how Sitecore uses event-driven architectures, liveness checks (with tools such as Apache Kafka and Azure App Configuration) to ensure that Sitecore can handle all sorts of "outage" scenarios. Not only that but he suggested a few books around event-driven architecture and domain-driven design that I'll need to take a look at some time!

vNext up I went to the session "Exploring Atomic Design with Storybook in Next.js for Sitecore Headless" presented in part by an old teammate of mine Arif Uzzaman, as well as his client Nikunj Sanghadia. In this breakout they took us through how frontend developers barely (if at all) need to know Sitecore, and can utilise atomic design to ensure consistent design between components, as well as Storybook to preview and showcase their output.  Not only that but it's easy to produce components which look great and play well in Sitecore.  As someone who uses Storybook extensively (but not atomic design at this time) this was quite familiar, and there were some great (and funny) questions from others in the room going through a similar journey.

Alistair Deneys from the Sitecore product team, in his session "Exploring the Experience Edge GraphQL Schema", walked us through the different GraphQL schemas for XM/XM Cloud and ContentHub / ContentHub One and various ways these could be used for different technical requirements. Not only that but he presented it all on his custom-built .NET MAUI interface consuming content from ContentHub One. Super cool!

The final sessions included Arul Pushpam Murugan who gave an inspiring talk "Empowering Women in Tech: A Journey of Growth with Sitecore" where she took us through some of the hurdles she herself had to overcome, as well as tips for other women in the industry.

Sandy Drew then took us through the technical side of Toyota's XM Cloud build in his session "Driving hybrid success with Toyota Used Vehicles" which sounded like a great implementation, utilising Next.JS SSG and Discover.

Final Thoughts

Whether Sitecore's indeed at an "inflection point" (as Gus put it at the start) it has clearly matured even over the last year or so. It's clear that even though there are still a vast number of clients and partners nursing old Sitecore instances (many of which are no doubt out of support), there are also a really healthy number of companies who have not only made the leap to composible (or hybrid) but have completed implementations and come out unscathed, and ready to share their story.  Sitecore is listening and learning from those first implementations, and the "new" SaaS products are continually improving. At this point, if you're considering Sitecore's new products, you're not an "early adopter" or "trailblazer" you're just in good company.

It's great to come to community events like this where it's not all vendor-painted roses and sunshine - "our product is the greatest and can do everything".  Here you'll find real stories and talk to real people who can reassure you of the reality - that even though not 100% of what you want/need to do will be a walk in the park, it's all achievable when we share our knowledge, experience, and love of developing with Sitecore.