Sitecore Fetch Squad

As most of you have probably already realized, Sitecore has now officially released CMS 6.5 and DMS 2.0 (Digital Marketing System, formerly known as OMS). Together, these products make up the new Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform.

The release is a major milestone for Sitecore and our customers, bringing tons of new and exiting functionality to the market in some key areas, such as:

• Inline personalization and multivariate testing right on the page using the Page Editor
• Engagement automation that allow business users to build and manage integrated campaigns that flow across channels
• Executive Insight Dashboard that allows business users to measure the qualitative value of their campaigns
• Completely re-written analytics reports, optimized for better usability and also incorporating value metrics
• Optimized and redesigned Analytics API and database schema
• And much more

I can wholeheartedly recommend that you brew a nice cup of coffee, lean back and read through the extensive release notes – not only for the official release, but also for the Technical Preview from April, since all the good stuff from that release are also present in the official release.

And when you’re ready, download, install, explore!

And as for modules? We have released new versions of Web Forms for Marketers, Seach Engine Optimization and Calendar, and the AD and CRM Integration modules have been tested and verified with CMS 6.5. A new version of Email Campaign Manager will follow in the next weeks.

Happy coding!

PS: Does this mean that we’re no longer going to focus on 6.4 maintenance updates? Not at all. We have some good stuff coming up…

For those of you who haven’t noticed, Chris Bushnell, a Technical Writer at Sitecore, has written a tutorial describing how to create a Sitecore OMS report based on a profile key.



Check it out here:



Creating an OMS Profile Score Report



Great work, Chris!

Sitecore is moving a lot these days and releasing almost on a monthly base new and cool functionalities. Not everybody has the ability to work with Sitecore on a daily base an keep up with this new exciting functionality. So time for me to step in and guide you back to the highway by creating small and very focused blog posts. This is the first one about Webforms for Marketers and the Dynamics CRM Campaign Integration.

The following diagram shows how the CMS, OMS, Webforms for Marketers and Dynamics CRM Campaign Integration glue together:

On top of the Sitecore Web CMS you can find the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite(OMS) which is used for gaining more details out of the visitor experience.

The Webforms for Marketers module is added on top of the OMS. It relies heavily on the OMS, so I’ve decided to add it there.
Eventually you can run this module without the OMS, but you’ll definitely not gain all the potential out of it.

For integration with MS Dynamics CRM, we have our new Dynamics CRM Campaign Integration module. This module consists of 2 parts:

1. Save Actions: An extension to the Webforms for Marketers module. It allows any business user to import data into any CRM entity. All WYSIWYG. So no coding required.
2. Security Provider: Share Contacts in Dynamics CRM as Users in Sitecore. This means that a contact in CRM can login into your Sitecore website for extranet purposes.

Let’s assume you want to start developing on a similar solution. Then it’s highly advisable for you to setup a sandbox environment. You need the following components:

• Windows Server 2003/2008 Web with IIS installed (you can virtualize this)
• SQL Server 2008 (2005 is possible but 2008 is a speedy animal)
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Installer (on your MSDN subscription) or CRM online
• Sitecore 6.3
• Sitecore OMS 1.1.1
• Webforms for Marketers 2.1
• Dynamics CRM Save Actions & Dynamics CRM Security Provider

Then you’re ready to rock!

So far so good for today. We’ve got plenty more to talk about. But that can wait for later.

To all of you Sitecore Developers, Architects and Webmasters out there. I just want to point you on our latest update: CMS 6.1.0 Update rev. 090722 , also known as 6.1.0 Update-1 ) and OMS 1.0.0 (full version number: Sitecore Online Marketing Suite 1.0.0 rev. 090722).

Although it isn’t a recommended release at the moment, I’d suggest everybody who’s working with the Sitecore OMS to update your installation to this version. Especially when you’re still in the development process of your website. Directly after the final release we’ve been working for a full month to make sure this release would fix every annoying issue which was introduced with our newest release feeded by the earliest Customer and Partner feedback.

So to give your site an optimal boost: install this version!

Later this week, I do expect some more exciting news… I’ll keep you posted!

In the 15 years I’ve been working with Web CMS technology, there’s always been a gap between what vendors say their tools can do, and what customers actually accomplish with those tools. Upon the 20th edition release of our Web Content Management vendor evaluations, it’s become clear that this gap has never been wider.

You might think it would be otherwise. You might think that with savvier customers — bringing greater experience and higher expectations — enterprises would be leveraging the full breadth of what modern Web CMS tools can bring. For the most part, this is simply not the case.

Media and analyst reports can contribute to the sense that you’re falling behind. Well, you’re almost surely not. Today’s analyst-vendor echo chamber is mostly an insiders’ discussion over PowerPoints between current and former product managers. The latest breathless case study — or the success stories you may see get posted in comments below — are alluring, but also more the exception than the rule.

So while the products are increasingly feature-rich, from everything I can see, customers are using a smaller percentage of their web publishing tools than ever.

Implementation partners often know the real score. I recently listened to two different Sitecore integrators caution a prospect about Sitecore’s Online Marketing Suite (OMS), one calling it "demo candy" that none of their customers were actually using. There’s nothing wrong with the ambition behind OMS, except that in the real world it’s extraordinarily complicated to deploy, and assumes you possess sufficient time and resources to properly exploit its personalization and metrics functionality. (It also assumes you’re not obtaining those services from a 3rd-party provider — a different story for a different post.)

What’s going on? Well, for starters, you can find many dozen credible but smallish WCM vendors and open source projects competing out there. A rising tide is lifting all their boats, but they’re all trying to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. Those vendors have also largely (though not completely) ceded Intranet scenarios to SharePoint, and therefore focus more intently than ever on providing e-marketing services. Nothing wrong with that, except those features require substantial effort to exploit.

Sure, online marketing is increasingly important, even in an intranet context. Some advice: try to improve your internal competencies and datasets before investing in new tools. When you’re ready to venture into the software marketplace, our updated evaluations now critique vendors across a wide range of engagement and experience-management services.

Lately I started thinking if the “Online Marketing Suite” (OMS) offered by Sitecore was really offering enough. According to analysts we’re doing pretty good in this area already, but there’s always room for improvement So I wondered, what else could the package offer. What first came to mind, is actually very simple and will require a mix of the already existing features. Basically OMS

It has been some hectic weeks lately in Sitecore, mainly because we closed our fiscal year on June 30th – but also because we at the same time released our new version (Sitecore 6.1 including the OMS). Doing both of these major events at the same time might seem as overkill and downright crazy, but we have actually managed quite well. At this point we cannot reveal any figures of the closed