Tag: presentation

XM Cloud Demystified

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I had heard a lot about XM Cloud over the past year or so at SUGCON and from Symposium as well as from the Sitecore Community, however I realised I didn’t really know that much about it still and wasn’t clear on what was included.

Given that XM Cloud was officially released for general availability at Symposium it was about time I learned about if properly and answered some of the questions I had.

So I dived into the XM Cloud documentation and watched a lot of Videos and setup the local XM Cloud instance to learn more about it. I then decided I’d try and speak at the next Sitecore user group in Manchester on XM Cloud to share what I learned. Nothing like a deadline to force you to learn about something properly huh? :-).

You can see the Slides and Video of my presentation ‘XM Cloud Demystified’ below.

Update: You can see an more recent talk I did on XM Cloud at the Columbus Sitecore User Group back in March which is clearer, newer and more in-depth too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yw0kNrh-f4

In my presentation I talk about:

  • What XM Cloud is
  • The benefits of XM Cloud
  • What is included and what is not
  • How it compares to Sitecore XP
  • Where it fits in with the new SaaS products Sitecore has acquired and developed
  • The different development and deployment approaches
  • Show how XM Cloud looks and Demo my local Instance

What’s Included?

In my research one thing I couldn’t find was a list (or diagram) of everything that is included in XM Cloud. So I put together a list on one of my slides (see my Slides below), however I really wanted to create a diagram of this. I didn’t get chance to before my talk but I’ve now created one which you can see below.
I’m sure it’s not as fancy as Sitecore would have done but it’s pretty clear I think.

Update: after some feedback from Pieter Brinkman on Linked In I’ve updated the diagram a little. Sitecore search is not included, it is instead available as an add-on. XM Cloud Forms Builder is also a Roadmap feature. I’ve also added SPE and Automatic updates to the diagram.

xm-cloud-whats-included-v2

Slides of Presentation

Here are my slides from the SUG (see the Video of my presentation below).

Video of Presentation

Here is the Video of my Talk. Click the video below to jump to my presentation.

Update: You can see an more recent talk I did on XM Cloud at the Columbus Sitecore User Group back in March which is clearer, newer and more in-depth too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yw0kNrh-f4

I leaned a lot from my research and hopefully this is useful for people looking to get an clear over-view of XM Cloud. If you want to know more the developer docs have lots of information.

If there is anything I’ve missed or got wrong then please let me know on Twitter or in the comments so I can correct it as I’m still learning about XM Cloud and things are changing all the time.

While your here check out the rest of the SUG as well as we had some other great talks too.

Sitecore Horizon Features & Functionality – SUG Presentation

Back in March before everything changed in the World and the UK ground to a halt with the Coronavirus pandemic, we managed to squeeze in the first Manchester Sitecore user group of the year.

Horizon

I presented an overview of Sitecore Horizon Features & Functionality in Sitecore 9.3. I talked about what Horizon can do as well as some of it’s current limitations, how to install it and demoed editing an custom page I’d built in Sitecore MVC in Horizon.

My talk seemed generally well received and there was quite a lot of discussion about various aspects of Horizon, some of which I’ve edited out to keep the presentation a reasonable length. One of the hot topics was around how existing MVC pages would work with it and surprisingly they mostly do (for field types that are supported at this point anyway).

I think it was useful for others who haven’t yet installed Horizon to have a chance to see it in action and to think about how it might be used in the future for Sitecore Page Editing.

On The Horizon

It’s taken a while to adjust to the ‘New Normal’ with Covid-19, so this post is much delayed. However this week I finally got round to editing the video of my presentation and publishing it on my YouTube Channel, so here it is:

I hope it’s useful for others too and thanks to Jeremy Davis and Dominic Hurst for their help organising the SUG and to Valtech for hosting.

It may be some time until we can have another one in person but i’m starting to think about planning the next Manchester SUG (online only – in June/July) so if your interested in speaking at that one then let me know.

Stay safe eveyone.