--- title: "CDOBC 5: Transitioning from DXP to DXC" description: "With the history and the basics of creating DXP out of the way, in this lesson we focus on how to transition from the Digital Experience Platform to Digital Experience Composition Platform." date: "2023-01-12T16:30:40.000Z" url: "https://timbenniks.dev/videos/headless-creator/000-m8on6zkr7q4" youtube_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8On6ZKr7Q4" playlist: "headless-creator" image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/m8On6ZKr7Q4/maxresdefault.jpg" tags: ["composable-architecture", "cms", "personalization", "content-ops", "cloud-infra"] --- # CDOBC 5: Transitioning from DXP to DXC With the history and the basics of creating DXP out of the way, in this lesson we focus on how to transition from the Digital Experience Platform to Digital Experience Composition Platform. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8On6ZKr7Q4 ## Transcript [Music] well welcome welcome to the composable orchestration with uniform boot camp course lesson number five the last lesson in this boot camp today we are talking about transitioning from dxp to DXE and our presenter is the one and only Tim benx he's the principal developer advocate ad uniform if you want to learn more about him I have a great interview that you could you probably know him already but if you don't know him go check out the interview I did with him uh it's located in the uh interview section the overview section of this uh boot camp with that said let's go ahead and bring Tim in Tim welcome glad to have you back I'm going to let you get started uh for those of you watching live if you have any questions put them in the chat Tim it's all yours all right here we go so today we will be talking about transitioning from the traditional dxp to DXE the new kit in town so um here we go let's see if we can go to the next slide there it is so I think the question on most people's minds is like what is the difference between these two because they're both saying digital experience the one is a digital experience platform the other one is digital experience composition and we might even call that digital experience composition platform so I think today I want to go over all kind of the differences between these two and then we dive into DXE a little bit more um especially about what it is not and then later on even of the extra little bits that uniform attaches to the traditional DXE ideas that we have now so um actually dxp and DXE both have the same outcome because what they do is they deliver an easy way for business users and content editors to kind of visually create experiences and add some personalization and whole bunch of stuff and the main thing here is that it's visual it's usable um content editors can go a very long way without bothering developers things like that so they both have that goal in mind the difference is that the underlying architecture is fundamentally changed from dxp to D DXE so let's dive into that a little bit first so let's start with the dxp the traditional architecture and so generally a dxp um has a CMS as its core as its base and it has a bunch of tools added on top to make it more of an experience platform because when we started way back when we had this web CMS thing and then it slowly people needed to have more control as content editors and less developer Focus first right and so they started with the CMS and then bolted stuff on and this is what generally what dxp architectures are dealing with and so um generally I'm not saying for all of them but most of these dxp architectures um are actually running on like a self-service hosting or maybe managed hosting and with that comes a whole bunch of things like because when the dxp updates you apply these updates because you manage the hosting right you have to deal with these things and then if you have customized something you will also have to then deal with that customization and the applied update and so um if you get a Christmas Peak or a Black Friday Peak you scale that hosting up and you deal with it and if you have to do maintenance database cleanup whatever it all comes on your plate as the architect or the devops owner or whatever you want to call it right and so on top of that also because these dxps stem for from a slightly older time they have a legacy and Legacy is not per se bad they chose a certain programming language on how to build certain things and because of that if you want to attach things to this dxp or ex you know extend it to other things you have to take into account that you have to do a programming um in the same way as the dxp has it done and so we know this a little bit as fender loog in especially as frontend developers like me if they have chosen a certain approach and then you have to keep choosing that and then because otherwise you don't have success with the the system um it's sometimes quite challenging for developers in an everchanging world to keep using that stuff from three years ago and you know what sometimes that stuff is great sometimes it's not it's all based on how much flexibility do you want as a developer as a brand um how flexibility in maintenance um Buck fixing but also changing up your system right and um because they started from a general CMS and then added stuff on top they are not always fully um uh there's not full coverage with apis for all the features and also because a lot of dxps didn't start out to be hatless they only added that on top another bolt on and kind of call this like a semi hatless because if they go full hatless right now they kind of alienate 10 years of history of people using their tool at different way so they have to find a mix so it's semi hatless and that can sometimes be tricky if it works it works be happy but generally it's hard and so now let's talk about DXE and remember it has the same goal but it you the tech below it is very very different so gen generally dxc's are Cloud native and all the tools they connect to are also Cloud native and with Cloud native a lot of cool things come like um updates are automatic because um the company that you are paying to actually build your DXE orchestrator or your platform actually does these updates for you right it happens in the cloud where it stays no worries um they are API first because they're built in a modern time and the big big thing is that they're Tech agnostic they're just apis talk to the apis you use them you might have sdks for specific Tech to make things easier but that doesn't mean that you cannot use them with tech that you choose it generally just works and that's a huge one for us developers and also that means it's it's also great for marketeers and maybe product owners because if you want to change and you want to add another Channel like an iPhone app or something the fact that it's Tech agnostic makes your Tech Team say do you want it this week or next rather than maybe in six months right it's a very different conversation um and it's not a CMS and you might um we'll talk a little bit later on this CMS business because you can store information in your DXE but it's not at its core a CMS a CMS is just part of the DXE as one of the components you kind of composed with so um and we'll talk about that a little later um so essentially this is a sentence that would say what DXE is it DXE allows you to select modern API first fenders and integrate them while enabling business users to work easily across these tools and so what that means is um you connect all these tools but then your content editors don't always have to understand exactly how that Dam system works or how that Pim system works because in DXE in the end editor interface of that DXE they are so well integrated that they're we almost we kind of don't call this integration anymore we call this orchestration the content editor doesn't have to understand the other system to use it so oh Marcelo is in yes I'm in real quick on on that if you go back so that means that uh not only you have your content editors that really don't need to know where this data is coming from or this content right cuz they're just working on the web mobile whatever but that means you also have domain specific people right that can be continue working on Salesforce and continue working on their pin and continue working on their Dam um and and that has nothing to do with how it's going to be delivered right so you can you can have separations of concerns like that as well yeah and uh in a few slides we will get there and I'll give you a good because um you're right of for coming in here with this because this is a huge point that we love to see with DXE right the separation of concerns but we'll get there I promise excellent let's first talk about what DXE is actually not because there's a few other players in this space and DXE is really new right and so we're all trying to kind of figure out what is DXE if I do this am I now a DXE and can I get the traction of the market or do I need to do a little bit more or a little bit less this direction and so what DXE is not it's just a data aggreg aggregator layer like you have a bunch of tools out there that say okay you have five headless sources let me just grab all their data and put it in one place so your developer can just query that one place so you get all the stuff right that's a lovely thing to do on its own but you are not a DXE if you just do that part because DXE also allows content editors to work with these Integrations rather than just tech people connect to them um it's also not a backend for front end this BFF that we like to call this um a back end for front end is generally um a system where components are defined and you add data to this components and marketers can really easily work with these so that kind of sounds like what you have in a DXE as well that we just discussed however BFFs only do that and also BFFs generally have a lot of opinion of okay we made these components but they are only in react or they're only with PHP or whatever language you want so they kind of lock you in a little bit you have to use their SDK to be able to work with that system it's not very open and of course these BFF systems out there now realize this and they're of course expanding and changing up but if you're just one of those backend for frontend layers you are not a full dxa and also if you are a CMS you're not a DXE because the whole idea is to not um have one center of the universe where everything is plugged in you should actually be able to plug out the DXE and everything still works or take out right so it's not CMS Centric we'll talk about that in a second because that's also why Marcelo just jumped into talk about that the DXE changes the Paradigm of how data flows but we'll get there in a sec so what is DXE actually right well actually it's a combination of all those three that we just mentioned and a bunch more things and so this is a pretty big slide here so I'll leave that on for a second and so what you should know about this that this is actually DXE in the eyes of uniform right so this is DXE plus the added fanciness of uniform and so uniform in our opinion is DXE plus a little bit um correct me if I'm wrong if I'm wrong my dear bosses but this is what I'm going with right now so if we have a look at what we see here in this um image we have the composable surfaces below which is like your content your media your you know your Salesforce all the sources and then you have this API orchestration bit then we have an experience layer where you can actually build your pages but there's a whole bunch more there's some front end related things there's Edge hosting there's Edge personalization and so there's a whole bunch more so let's let's start here first so um this composable API orchestration is basically where you integrate all these different sources of your data into and this system allows you to plug systems in really easily and always in the same way it works extremely well and it has super solid API for developers to query but also for the next bit which is here the experience layer to talk to because in your no code editor where you can drag and drop components that you have defined um you should also be able to talk to all the data for multi systems and that's what this API orchestration layer gives you and um in a proper DXE you can do it in a way where you can attach a resource let's say something out of a CMS or a list of things from let's say defense platform you connect that as a resource to a page and all the components have different fields right and so what you can do in a proper DXE with a nice no code experience editor you can actually select that resource attach it to a component and select only the fields that you want and it fills it up but if you then also like to enrich it with the YouTube API because of a whole bunch of extra metadata you attach that Resource as well and then you literally just click and drag the data that you need and your components are filled with data what that also means if you want to change your CMS to another one you do a few clicks and you remap the result of the API to your Fields you're good to go um then there's an extra magical bit where uniform shines specifically which is Edge caching and xge rendering and tracking so what that means is you can have all these sources all together um imagine you're not caching that well that's going to be one page with 100 API calls that's going to be slow right and uniform has this amazing ability to kind of very um kind of cache the results of the composable API orchestration layer the first red dots that we saw and then surgically uncache and Purge that cache specifically and because it's on the edge it's close to the user so you can have a fully server side rendered page cached from from the edge in 50 milliseconds which is amazing and if you do your job right you uncache it correctly as the DXE and then all should be good nothing too complex and on top of that it can um actually do personalization on the edge as well so if you go to a page that's in France and I go to one in Germany that same fast result actually has a different personalized output because that's what you want with DX's you want to be able to personalize all that stuff and so the last red dots on the right side is basically like in the context of all these things we have to be able to do some experimentation testing tracking of users insights all the stuff that sits there um so I hope this um kind of helps you out with seeing how this DXE fits because all of these things are Loosely coupled you can remove one and everything is still fine generally so um Marcelo here's your um about your question there is a new flow of data there's a new paradigm of how this works and we call this domain data versus design data and this is where things start to be really different from the dxp because in a dxp you have all your data in that CMS and then you build pages in your CMS right so your CMS is a data store for your base data for that stuff that worked in 10 years but it also hosts po s how you design a page in a certain context for a user so that's more volatile data data that might maybe after this campaign dies and you change it up right and so mixing these two things in a CMS can be quite messy and so in um a DXE this does not happen it's actually very different the DXE simplifies everything the page design of the context of the user so if I'm on a phone from France my page design looks this way if I'm on an iPad in Germany my page looks that way if I'm on a desktop in New York my page looks that way and it doesn't all have to mean personalization it's context towar and all your design data of how all these components work live in the DXE and all the rest is separated out into all the tools that you have connected so your hatless CMS has specific data that we call domain data that is data that defin your product your brand stuff that worked in 10 years right just like product um or pims or things like that where um the product data is enriched but only product data so as an example for example think about let's say you have a hatless CMS and you have an events website so in your CMS what you have is you have event venues you have artists you have dates you have things around the event that you need to know to be able to go there or like finding your way things like that and that's fully data modeled in that CMS because a new event happens next week um there's an artist there's a date there's a venue there's an amount of people that are allowed to go their tickets all that stuff right and your tickets are probably in your PIN right so domain data is specific to the domain of what that system is amazing at because imagine let's say that that event is next week in a traditional system in dxp um what you maybe want to do is add a checkbox to that event to make it featured because on the homepage now next week the new event is coming up let's make it big and flashy and add like a a banner and maybe add make it red whatever right make it more popping um if you now actually go into your data model and add that checkbox for Featured that works for that week right but what happens if that event is shown let's say in a search result that checkbox makes no sense but it's in your data model and will forever be there and I've seen projects where you had 25 checkbox and and drop downs and extra Fields just to be able to switch the context in for different things to then in for mobile this checkbox is red and for desktop this checkbox is red and let's show it like this and then in a year you look back and you're like I don't know why these checkboxes are here let me just remove one because I don't need it and then your Indian website is completely crashed and you didn't know why I I want to jump in here because I'm this is getting into that content modeling which I you know I'm a big fan and um and I think it's really important you know another example is you have an FAQ right where you're storing everything in the CMS and it's question answer but and you want to display it like you said you display it on the mobile or on the website one way but you also want to share with Salesforce for customer support so they can share it with their right and over there you need no design at all you're just sharing FAQs when you're mixing it up right in the CMS now you have basically uh dirty data right that you're you're providing that has nothing to do so it's not domain data anymore so yeah I love those examples and I love that fact that in a DXE you can totally keep that design uh content completely separate from the domain content really important uh aspect of it in my opinion what I love about this as well is the more mature you get as a company the bigger you get the more specialist you're going to hire to deal with certain data like I've worked with companies in the past when I was an agency that had four people that were dealing with search results these shoes cannot be next to that bag and stuff like that and we had people that were like there was like eight people writing copy that is approved by the president of the company right and so what if a Content editor had to do that and then put it in the CMS in 60 languages or whatever right that's really messy right so if you have this system like a DXE where you have your domain data on different places you can just connect it up the content editor the job of the content editor is just pick the right stuff and then make it look amazing but then you can have a team that is just dealing with approved copy you have a team that is just dealing with translations you have a team that is just dealing with maturing your products in the pin system or updating your algolia index so it's really well tuned you separate out how people work and if you scale to a big scale like you have 50 markets and you have different tools DXE is almost inevitable right and I'm so surprised Ro Roi on it is huge oh it's huge the bigger you get the more serious you are as a company with all these different levels the ROI shoots up basically yep definitely cool so I really wanted to talk about that difference in approach and um it makes it extremely flexible so in the end the DXE and the dxb actually have different outcome or sorry similar outcomes in goals but how they get there is quite different and the tech below it is especially different and so DXE kind of offers more flexibility and it's also technically agnostic um where content editors can just deal with stuff without calling developers because that happened to me a lot when I was a developer where something just wouldn't work right and in here of course things always don't really work that's normal but at least here you have flexibility to fix it really easily all right so we are now at our um terminology recap um luckily this wasn't the longest boot camp session so we we don't have to go too deep so what is a dxp you have to notice it's a digital experience platform that is now becoming Legacy still works but it's Legacy then we have DXE which is the new kit on the Block which is digital experience composition um and well we just went over all the differences so hopefully you remember that for your um later on when you do the test um also you need to know what cloud native is we we went over that quite fast so Cloud native is basically a tool that lives in the cloud and is using tools that are also in that cloud so there's um not that much custom stuff and there's not so much that you for you to maintain because the cloud servers offers that for you so it's it's a lot easier um then we have managed hosting um basically this can be in the cloud but you control how it's hosted or a company controls that server for you and they proficient it for you but it's still managed you have to do stuff for it um then we have the domain data versus the design data which we just spoke about so domain data is data that is non-changeable and defines your brand or product it works in every channel um from a bus stop to a phone and it's still good in 10 years design data is much more volatile because it's in context of a thing at a time for example we have one Camp campaign this week so everything looks this way that's much more design oriented or it's two columns or five columns that's design data um that's it um thank you very much for listening and um if you have any questions feel free um Marcelo any last thoughts um the last one I got to say as a Content modeler the last one to me is extremely important because it sets up your organization for scalability for the future where when you throw away that that design that now looks old and you want to add new channels you are you haven't polluted your domain content with stuff that you don't need in there so that to me is amazing but the only other thought be besides that is Tim as always amazing job man always thank you I like it we can always count on you doing a great job so thank you so much people want to get a hold of you the Twitter right there is the best here this is Twitter come on you can do it you can do it yeah you've done that many times I just oh I can do this in my sleep man you can wake me up and I go right there I'm not there yet all right Tim thank you so much and thanks for the rest of you um for attending this boot camp it's over this boot camp is done uh but you can continue your journey learning all about DXE we have a course called beginners got to DXE it's on headless creator.com so go get your free account there and you'll be able to uh start that course we're going to be adding tons of lessons to it so uh make sure you get that account also if you want to get your knowledge certificate on this boot camp U make sure you study uh use the study guides which are included uh in the advanced section uh you'll be able to study all of that and then you'll be able to go ahead and get the exam and get your certificate and tell the world that you are fully knowledgeable on DXE and as always if you want to get a hold of me right there see see I could do this no problem Marcelo listc creator.com so uh we will see you on the beginner guide to DXE course have a great one everybody cheers [Music] oh