A final post, and a transition

As I transition from my post at Sitecore, I wanted to take a quick moment to thank everyone at this great company.  It has really been an honor to represent a great product in a great market with an amazing partner channel of such talented and committed professionals.  I have learned so very much from you in these last 7 1/2 years, and I am truly grateful for the opportunities that have been available to me because of my time at Sitecore.

In particular, I wanted to thank Bjarne Hansen, who has been such a steady and significant influence.  His teachings have been admittedly simple--treat people fairly and honestly, a deal is only good if it's good for everyone--but they will continue to guide me in this and any future chapter.

I look forward to continuing the great conversations we've had and look forward to our ongoing study of the tools, techniques and technologies that drive the quest for the best digital experiences on the planet.  Look for (much more consistent) posts as I dive into my new adventure @ThunderheadONE.

Mike Casey

10 Days of Sitecore 8 Analytics. Day 3: A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

Main point for today

OK, I admit it.  On my recent posts I faked my picture of Abraham Lincoln in my Experience Profile.  I didn't even use PhotoShop; it was just a cheap SnagIt copy-and-paste.  But now, here's the real deal:

A true Abraham Lincoln Sitecore Experience Profile Contact

Why is this such a big deal Mike?  Two reasons:

1. Looking into how to add a contact's picture to the Sitecore Experience Profile reminded me of how incredible the Sitecore community is.  There are great blogs going back months (from people much more talented than I am) that discuss this subject in great detail.
2. The main purpose of this blog series was to investigate the power of xDB.  I've been around reporting requirements long enough to know that power comes from modeling whatever it is you want to model, viewing it in whatever way you want to view it.  While my adding a picture here is a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of moment, it will hopefully get the creative juices flowing (it did for me).

About that community

First and foremost, two top examples of how great the Sitecore community is, and representative of much more thorough discussions of this subject than I will have here today:

1. Anything by Adam Conn is great.  This is a series he did back in September (which shows how far ahead of the curve he is) that does a great job explaining developing against xDB.
2. Sitecore's great partner, Horizontal Integration, does a fantastic job of showing code samples.

My summarized steps to get Mr. Lincoln's picture in my Experience Profile:

There are much better posts around all things Mongo, development in Sitecore and xDB, etc.  This is my quick list of things that I went through as I investigated this task, using just the information from the above two blogs.

Step 1.  Learn enough Mongo to become dangerous.

As you get into xDB within Mongo, you'll gravitate to the Contacts and Interactions collections.  As you're using RoboMongo or MongoVue or your tool of choice, you'll find yourselves wanting to query the collections for your documents.  Again Adam Conn comes to the rescue with an explanation of how to use ID based queries.  Here are a few find() statements that also helped me:

db.Identifiers.find({"_id" : /extranet\\abr?/i})

In this example, my Identifiers collection has a link between my Contact ID and Abraham Lincoln's Sitecore user record.  The above uses a Regular Expression since in this case the _id field seems to be a string (as opposed to Adam's description of how to deal with identifier types in the Contacts collection).  The RegEX looks for user in the extranet Sitecore security domain, staring with "abr" and case insensitive ("/i").

db.Contacts.find({"Personal.FirstName" : "Abraham"})

Switching to a find in the Contacts collection, above is a way to find a value in an embedded document.  Contacts have a "Personal" document, with an embedded document that can include FirstName and LastName.  The Personal.FirstName syntax allows me to find a value of "Abraham" within.  This could be another use of a RegEX as used in the first example.

db.Contacts.find({_id:new BinData(3, 'zgZHZ6RszESnllHXYIuUrA==')})

Adam's blog will really explain why we need to set up a find query in this way for the Contacts collection.  The example above is just an easy copy and paste (changing out the resultant ID for your system).

Step 2.  Look at an example of a Contacts document.

{

    "_id" : LUUID("4332583d-d8df-3a5c-6382-4cb8037a15f3"),

    "System" : {

        "IntegrationLabel" : ""

    },

    "Identifiers" : {

        "IdentificationLevel" : 2,

        "Identifier" : "extranet\\mike@test.com"

    },

    "ConversionInfo" : {

        "WasConverted" : true

    },

    "Lease" : null,

    "Personal" : {

        "FirstName" : "Mike",

        "Surname" : "Casey"

    },

    "Emails" : {

        "Preferred" : "work",

        "Entries" : {

            "work" : {

                "SmtpAddress" : "mike@test.com"

            }

        }

    }

}

The above document has some entries based on some typical activity on our Launch Sitecore site.  For instance, by registering we've gathered some "Personal" values and "Emails" values.  Notice there is no Pictures section of this document.  As expected with this NoSQL strategy, the document continues to build as information is collected.

Step 3.  Understand a bit about facets

As Adam explains, the Experience Profile makes use of Contact "facets".  As of Sitecore 8, the Sitecore.Analytics.Model.Config file contains the default facets, as shown below:

Default Facets in the Sitecore 8 Sitecore.Analytics.Model.Config

Since "Picture" is already an available facet, nothing to do here.  Adam explains the process of adding new facets and leveraging those new facets in a new SPEAK-based tab on the Experience Profile.

Step 4.  Get some code to write to the Picture facet

Still getting my terminology straight here, but basically we want to add a Picture section to that original Contact document shown in step 2 for Abraham Lincoln.  Thankfully, our friends at Horizontal Integration have already done the heavy lifting here:

Horizontal Integration Code to write to the Contact's Picture

As an aside, you'll be likely looking for some assembly references to use the above, so just in case:

Now, by having a Media Library item with Abraham's picture and replacing the GetItem statement above with its GUID, we're good to go.

Since this isn't a real-world example and just an investigation, I went ahead and created a control that just runs the above code when I visit my page on my local Launch Sitecore instance.  I'm really interested in the real-world sources for this picture--social, CRM, etc.  And now I'm more interested in taking the next steps in understanding the power this type of access to xDB unleashes in Sitecore 8 projects.  I'll leave you with the new section of the Abraham Lincoln Contact document:

Abraham Lincoln Contact Document with Picture

And now we can see good 'ol Abe's smiling face when we access all the great detail of his Experience Profile (and no copy-and-paste this time around!):

Searching for Abe and seeing our new picture facet

10 Days of Sitecore 8 Analytics. Day 2: Insights from the Experience Profile

Introduction to today's discussion

The Experience Profile is a new Sitecore view into analytics that provides incredible insight at a visitor (Contact) level.  From pages viewed, to patterns / personas matched to campaigns triggered to goals achieved, the Experience Profile paints a full picture of your visitors' interactions with your brand.

Today we'll take a bit of a deeper dive into this Experience Profile.  For those of you on the tech side, this view shows the power of what SPEAK interfaces can become in Sitecore, and as we get to the end of this series we'll see the ability to customize these views, add tabs to the reporting interface and more.  For this post I wanted make sure that some of the simple goals, campaigns and page events in our Launch Sitecore site are ready for the Experience Profile, and ready for those deeper conversations.

A reminder of what the Experience Profile looks like and what we'll be drilling into

Experience Profile with the Contact Timeline showing

Marketing Control Panel Considerations for the timeline

Campaign

For this exercise, I set up a new Campaign in Sitecore's Marketing Control Panel (as everything now is, one click away in the Sitecore 8 Launch Pad).  To those familiar with DMS, this is the same idea as the Marketing Center, the area of the content tree dedicated to setting up marketing initiatives.  I set up a new Campaign to track called "Video Blog Campaign" (our team is working on demo and other instructional videos that we plan to have a home for soon).

Some things to note that have been added to Sitecore 8.  The Campaign Group is a drop-down selector to allow us to start considering a richer taxonomies for our campaign organization.  This will become important later as we start looking at Campaign reports.  I added a new Campaign Group (Mike Campaigns) in this Taxonomies section, and it became available in the Campaign Group drop-list as I set up the Video Blog Campaign itself:

New Taxonomies Section for Campaign Management

  

Goals and Page Events

We can keep the goals we already have in place for Launch Sitecore.  These represent simple "transactions" that we are trying to encourage our visitors to take part in, like downloading the Launch Sitecore package, visiting certain targeted pages, adding articles to a logged in user's persistent profile:

List of Goals for LaunchSitecore.net

One interesting addition to Goals is shown below:

A Goal item shown in the Content Editor

Note that a new "Experience Profile Options" section with two checkbox field are now available for Goals (they are also available for Page Events).  This gives us the option to make sure these goals / conversions are prominently displayed on our Contacts' Experience Profile Reports.

With these simple Campaigns and Goals in place (and making sure all of these items are Deployed and Published), we can now start to see Abraham Lincoln's visit history start to take shape.

Below is a section of the Timeline where we can start to chart various interaction points with our Contact:

The Timeline gives us visual cues representing Goals achieved and Campaigns triggered.  It gives us a bar graph indication of value for the various visits from our Contact.  Below the Timeline we are able to see specific Goals achieved, the nature of the Campaign that was triggered, Page Views, Value and more.

Since we had many of the Digital Marketing considerations in place with Launch Sitecore (which started on Sitecore 6.6), we were able to ready the site for new Sitecore 8 features very easily.  The public site at launchsitecore.net is now on Sitecore 8 and tracking all this great Contact data so that we can enjoy the new insights that the Experience Profile and other analytics views provide.

10 Days of Sitecore 8 Analytics. Day 1: Where are we now?

An intro to this series

As I prepare for a discussion around Sitecore 8 Analytics coming up in a couple weeks, I figured a concentrated blog series on the topic would help in my investigation and preparation.  Those of you that attended Symposium and now have had a chance to see the generally available release of Sitecore 8 are undoubtedly excited to dive into all the details that make this release so great and so fundamental to the future of the platform.  This post will set the stage for a detailed look into the specific analytics features of Sitecore 8.  Since analytics is pervasive now in Sitecore (think Engagement Plans, the new Path Analyzer, Multivariate Test results reports and more), I will be touching on some features that aren't directly based on analytics reports.

How did we get here?

For those of you that have followed Sitecore's analytics evolution, Sitecore 8 is an incredibly exciting stage for this platform.  It is, at the same time, a culmination of lessons learned from the Online Marketing Suite through the Digital Marketing System days, combined with the beginning of a truly new frontier in analytics capabilities and possibilities for Sitecore.  OMS and DMS introduced amazing capabilities into Sitecore.  Sitecore 8 takes the best of these features, expands on them, introduces a wide array of new features, and makes the entire system scale to previously unreachable heights and scope.

An introduction to xDB

The single feature (really the single architectural decision) that makes this all possible is xDB.  xDB is an incredibly scalable collection and reporting system.  If you are just starting out in your investigation of xDB and Sitecore 8, please take a few minutes and read the xDB Overview and Architecture document on sdn.sitecore.net.  I'll take a couple of minutes to describes some key points, but the document does a really nice job in explaining the basics.

Taking apart one of the Overview document's diagrams, let's briefly look at the main components of the system.  The tier below includes:

1. Content Delivery, our tried and true friend.
2. Session State, always available to our .NET application, but this is a new version for xDB.  Session State is separated between Shared and Private, basically allowing data for a "Contact" (a Visitor that can have many Visits across any number of Devices) to be efficiently collected at a Visit level and also at the Contact level.
3. Collection, a new system leveraging MongoDB to scale the collection of analytics data to unbelievable new heights.

Visitor Data Collection and State Management

Tackling the next grouping:

Processing for xDB Reporting Database storage

1. Processing Server (also referred to as Aggregation).  This is a new Sitecore server tasked with dealing with all that great, expansive analytics collection.  It is able to make sense of widescale collection, mapping it to the tables and structure of the SQL Server reporting database described next.  This is also where some really interesting things can happen with ties to additional datasources like CRMs, demographic data web services and much more.
2. Reporting Database.  We can think of this as very similar to the existing Analytics / Reporting database found in DMS.  In 7.5 and 8 and beyond, this table structure is very different, modeled for the scalability of the new collection system, and tuned for the various applications that will request data and reports from it.

Lastly:

Reporting Components of xDB

1. xDB contains a Reporting Service that accepts requests from reporting applications / API calls.  This service can sit on another Sitecore server or can be a dedicated Sitecore server.
2. Reporting applications (like the Experience Profile which shows insights around a single Contact, or the new Sitecore 8 Dashboard of out-of-the-box analytics reports) leverage the Reporting Service and format the data it responds with.

What if I don't want to understand anything about what you just talked about?

You're in luck.  Sitecore is working with MongoDB and Microsoft Azure to make this entire stack available to you via an xDB Cloud offering.  Sitecore offers a subscription model based on the volume of data collect (specifically the number of Contacts and their interactions with your sites).  The beauty of this subscription model is that all of the components described above (with the exception of Reporting Applications that you'll want locally) is architected, maintained and scaled for you.

What do some of these new Reporting Applications look like?

For now we'll just take a high-level look at some of the reporting applications and interfaces.  Further into this series we'll do more detailed investigation into some of these, as well as discuss the possibilities that xDB unleashes in terms of connected external data, customized reporting and more.

First, the overall Sitecore 8 Launch Pad, with a couple of default reports on my dashboard:

The new Sitecore 8 Experience Platform Launch Pad

By selecting Experience Analytics, we get to the new Analytics Dashboard, with an impressive list of out-of-the-box reports and a default dashboard:

Sitecore 8 Experience Analytics Dashboard

The Experience Profile, which we'll investigate more closely in this series, shows the insight you can gain around a particular Contact important to your organization:

The Experience Profile

Lastly, the Path Analyzer shows valuable paths through our site based on goals and outcomes we've set up in Sitecore.

Sitecore 8 Path Analyzer

Setting the stage for our investigation

Hopefully this high-level introduction sets the stage for this series to take a detailed look at some of these reports, the data that drives them, and the possibilities that xDB brings us.  In the next post, we'll start setting up a campaign that follows this series.  As always, go to www.launchsitecore.net and register to get your own copy of this evaluation site in Sitecore 8.