You missed the 2018 Sitecore Symposium or you made heartbreaking session choices? Then, this post is for you. Here is a list of public sessions recordings and slide decks the presenters have published online.

Development and IT

By Jean-François L’Heureux

JavaScript Services (JSS) is a completely new way of developing your digital experience on Sitecore. In this session, Sitecore Technology MVP Jeff L’Heureux will demonstrate how to apply the Sitecore Helix principles to the development of new sites using JSS to keep them and their project architectures clean, maintainable, and flexible.

By Alex Shyba

In this session, you will learn how to go from a “hello world” app to a full-featured, blazing fast progressive web application in under 40 minutes; how to leverage the best tooling of the open source JavaScript ecosystem for your next Sitecore project; and finally, how to leverage content delivery networks to deliver an outstanding user experience for customers worldwide.

By Corey Smith, Rick Bauer

Sitecore MVPs Corey Smith and Rick Bauer provide a wide-angle view of JSS and Sitecore Marketing Automation. Focusing on developers, this session provides a high-level understanding of what the end product of Sitecore Marketing Automation should look like from a marketer’s perspective based on real-world use cases. Then we’ll pop open the hood and show how it was achieved using JSS, including tips, tricks, and lessons learned.

By Anastasiya Flynn

Many Sitecore developers still see JavaScript as just a client-side language that’s used to enhance the UI. This session will prove that JS belongs server-side as well, showing how to use Node.js to automate server-side processes. We will cover how to break up client-side JavaScript into component-level Helix-friendly modules that are testable and reusable, and then use gulp to compile them into a single CDN-ready aggregate file. This approach makes code easier to maintain, makes environments more stable, and reinforces Helix principles of simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility.

By Bas Lijten

Achmea is the largest insurance company in the Netherlands and their businesses have the need to deploy good quality code fast and often to Azure with zero downtime. With multiple Sitecore instances for numerous sites which are built and managed by various teams using shared code and shared infrastructure, this can get complicated. That’s why we have defined an approach on how components, modules, and sites should be built, deployed, and tested, while following Sitecore best practices and Helix guidelines.

By Bill Cacy, Patrick Perone

From synchronizing content to redirecting incoming Internet traffic, we will perform a live demo of a blue-green deployment. As part of the demo, we will discuss the high-level strategy behind the deployment and dissect the steps performed in Octopus. We will discuss some of the assumptions and limitations of blue-green deployments and the business value for clients.

By Adam Simmonds

Your CMO is demanding exciting new digital customer experiences, so your CIO needs you to fly faster with Sitecore. How can you deliver new features in hours instead of weeks? In this session, we’ll cover the best ways to accelerate your development efforts. We’ll explore tried-and-tested tools and methodologies designed for speed, automation, and continuous delivery (think VSTS and Azure). We’ll discuss the best ways to structure your dev squads to maximize collaboration and productivity (and when to go maverick). We’ll also share insights from a recent supersonic mission, which involved delivering a major Sitecore project for an Australian platform business, with only seven months to beat the complex integration and data migration bogeys on our tail and land successfully.

By Jeremy Davis

Internet-scale load can be a scary thing. When your shiny new site goes from load testing to real-world assault from the Internet, are you confident that your code will perform well? Fear not! Join MVP and battle-hardened developer Jeremy Davis and learn from his experiences building sites that can survive the load spikes caused by peak-time TV advertising. You’ll learn about common developer tools that will help you easily spot and correct problems in your code as well as best practices you can use to make sure your launch is a party and not a crisis.

By Pieter Brinkman

In this session, we’ll highlight all the new features being shipped in 9.1.

By Ishraq Al Fataftah

Technology trends have significantly disrupted the way commerce works. Customers expect a seamless and consistent experience across all channels of the retail process. Omnichannel retailing is providing a more powerful experience that is combining online services such as product pricing comparisons/reviews and in-store kiosks and NFC technology. In this session, we’ll explore Sitecore Experience Commerce as an enterprise solution that delivers an integrated, omnichannel personalized experience throughout the customer lifecycle. By leveraging online and offline channels across a single commerce platform, Sitecore is providing the right tools to achieve a personalized customer experience that is relevant to the individual customer and consistent across all points of interaction.

By Jason St-Cyr

We are all guardians of the digital spaces our audiences live in. We control what data is collected, how it is used, how it is stored, and potentially how it can be abused. With advancements in machine learning, personalization, and individualization, we are looking at a new world of improved customer experiences. How do we ensure this is done in an ethical way? How do we protect individual privacy? How do we avoid bias in our algorithms? We will explore these questions and others and empower the audience to take ownership of these issues.

By Una Verhoeven

Learn how a social network (Twitter) can be combined with machine learning (ML) and leveraged to enhance the user experience. During the presentation, we’ll focus on building an online book store using Sitecore Experience Commerce, SXA, xConnect, Twitter API, IBM Personal Insights, IBM Watson, and PowerBI. Most impactfully, we’ll see how companies can produce true business impact through user experience WITHOUT storing a user’s personal data (gender, twitter name, location, tweets). Using ML techniques, the trained model will recommend products (in this case, books) for the user. We will explore how users based in the Netherlands may have similar interests and needs as users in the U.S.

E-commerce Experience

By Kamruz Jaman, Akshay Sura

Using Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) and Sitecore Experience Manager (EXM), we’ve created a modern loyalty program for our restaurant brands that has helped to reduce churn, increase retention rates, and drive category sales online through marketing campaigns and marketing automation. In this session, we will show you how we implemented the solution and how our clients and their customers have reaped the benefits of loyalty programs.

Marketing Strategy, Innovation, and Best Practices

By Mark Stiles, Daniel Murphy

Content authors face an ever-growing list of new tools and responsibilities that come with a modern digital experience platform. There is mounting pressure for these unsung digital heroes to spend less time fumbling with menu options, assigning taxonomies, or struggling to find the right creative assets and more time identifying segments, setting goals, and personalizating content in an effort to engage consumers. In this session, Sitecore MVPs Mark Stiles and Dan Murphy will introduce practical ways to use machine learning to overcome tedious tasks, use your time more effectively, and focus on high-value work.

By Deepak Mathews, Borja Prado

Zurich Insurance is one of the world’s biggest financial services companies in an industry undergoing massive disruption. Sitecore has become the platform of choice for its various functional units, product divisions, and countries looking to digitize their businesses. Join us as we take an in-depth look at innovation and best practices from across the organization including cloud deployments on Azure PaaS, reusable feature store using SXA, headless CMS, e-commerce and omni-channel experiences. We’ll also discuss how our innovative architecture enables us to use multiple technology vendors and design agencies to deliver cutting-edge digital customer experiences.

By Kristine Stebbins

Personalization is the holy grail for many companies, but it can be elusive to achieve. This session will focus on how to accelerate the power of personalization by integrating Sitecore and Salesforce. In this session, we will provide step-by-step guidance on how to plan and execute an integration between Sitecore and Salesforce that does not only focus on the technical integration but more importantly walks you through the decisions regarding what customer data is captured and shared between the two platforms. Real-world examples will highlight how to share data between the systems and leverage the power of the Salesforce CRM and SFMC to deepen engagement and conversions.

Sitecore Optimization

By Kristine Stebbins

Sitecore Analytics are one of the most powerful tools in the Sitecore platform, but as discussed at last year’s symposium there are many customers who are not taking advantage of the power of analytics. This session will focus on how customers are taking full advantage of Sitecore analytics and the creative ways they are combining the power of Sitecore analytics with Google analytics. We will share customer stories from the healthcare, manufacturing, and retail sectors providing example dashboards, recommended B.I. layer technology such as Power BI, Tableau, and others to create custom dashboards. This session will also include proprietary research and insights on how customers are using Sitecore analytics to create custom dashboards.

By Tony Rems

Sitecore sits at the core of your customer experience. However, becoming a mature digital marketing organization requires the integration of customer data and CRM and email and CRM. Sitecore and Salesforce can support driving your customer experiences to the next level. This session will show you how it all fits together and discuss successful strategies for use these technologies to deliver on your business objectives.

By Mike Shaw, Jacqueline Baxter

Sitecore xDB captures a wealth of data; however, sifting through the data and making heads or tails of it can be overwhelming. Join this presentation to learn how to use all the tools of Sitecore XP to identify, hunt down, and formulate a plan of attack for opportunities within your customers. Mike will show you how he uses a combination of Experience Analytics, Path/Page Analyzer, xProfile as well as some lesser known nuggets to truly gain a 360° view of your site and your customers.

By Jaina Baumgartner, Sai Yerramsetty

Forms are one of the most critical aspects of a website. They are the point of converting anonymous users to qualified leads, and eventually loyal customers. They are the beginning of a lifetime engagement. Yet, the average conversion rate on websites is 2.35%, with contact forms garnering less than 3% conversions. In this session, we will give you a conversion boost by reviewing what the top 10% of websites are doing differently. With the help of Hexagon, we will share real-world implementations of similar experiences using Sitecore 9 forms and review their benefits with supportive analytics. Expect to leave this session with a renewed vision for increasing leads and building lifelong customers on your website.

Getting Started

By Mark Cassidy

What if I told you, you could build a Sitecore site in a couple of days? What if I told you, 80% of your Sitecore site could be built by .NET developers with limited Sitecore experience? What if I told you that implementing Sitecore is easier than you think? Attend this session and see for yourself. Witness a simple implementation pattern that any developer can learn in days. We’ll focus building components and how to eliminate complexity in the development cycle.

By Jeffrey Rondeau

Learn how to maximize the content management experience for your users, ranging from basic features like tooltips and thumbnails to more advanced concepts, such as separating editing interfaces for your site frame and creating entire sections of content in one click by customizing branch templates.

Keynotes