--- title: "CDOBC Lesson 1: Intro to DXP: Defining Digital Experience Platform" description: "In this lesson, you'll learn what DXP is, get the history behind how we got to where we are today, what being truly composable means and the basic terminology of composable DXP." date: "2022-02-04T16:48:08.000Z" url: "https://timbenniks.dev/videos/headless-creator/004-hshm8hlopka" youtube_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHm8HLOpKA" playlist: "headless-creator" image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HsHm8HLOpKA/maxresdefault.jpg" tags: ["composable-architecture", "cms", "personalization", "content-ops", "frontend"] --- # CDOBC Lesson 1: Intro to DXP: Defining Digital Experience Platform In this lesson, you'll learn what DXP is, get the history behind how we got to where we are today, what being truly composable means and the basic terminology of composable DXP. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHm8HLOpKA ## Transcript [Music] oh [Music] well welcome welcome to the composable dxp with uniform bootcamp course i am marcela lewin the headless creator as always right there get a hold of me marcelo at headlesscreator.com in today's lesson the very first lesson of this bootcamp introduction to dxp we're gonna define the digital experience platform and you can find this um lesson on demand later under the foundation section of this boot camp and we're going to talk about dxp what it is the history behind it what what does it mean to be truly composable and we're going to cover basic terminology but before we get started you know how this works i'm going to tell you real quick about headlesscreator.com go get your free account get in your free account you'll have access to this lesson on demand but then you'll have access to the entire course and you can see we have a bunch of lessons coming up many of them and on top of that you'll have access to the content modeling weekly the discover headless tech a bunch of headless cms courses another boot camp focus on personalization a lot of stuff so get your free account uh it won't hurt and you're gonna learn a lot of stuff all right and you just go to headlesscreator.com and click on sign up having said that you know how this works for those of you that attend every week i'm going to restart the intro because the intro won't have any um or i'm sorry i'm going to restart the intro because the on-demand version won't have any marketing whatsoever so i will see you in just 10 seconds [Music] well welcome welcome to the composable dxp with uniform boot camp course lesson number one intro to dxp defining the digital experience platform presented by tim bennex he's the principal developer advocate at uniform if you want to learn more about him just watch the interview in the introduction section of this course on com headlesscreator.com right let's bring on tim hello welcome i'm gonna let you get started if any of you have any questions you have a comment put him in there and we'll ask him otherwise tim it's all yours all righty then thank you for that lovely intro marcelo um let's get this going so we're talking about dxp today so an intro to dxp and we're going to be trying to define the digital experience platform and as marcelo said this is part of a boot camp and this is lesson number one so bear with me while we go through this and then i would love it if you enjoy this content feel free to look at all the rest okay let's get this going and let's get started by having a look at what gartner has to say about the dxp because gartner is one of them the huge players to help us to define our space basically and so they say a digital experience platform is an integrated set of core technologies that support composition management delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences phew that says a lot and they actually scope it extremely wide here and that actually makes it very interesting but also you can really interpret it in different ways and dxps can be huge or they can be very very small right if it's my personal website i have a couple of things that have um you know a compositional like thing where i have different technical things together that is my kind of my experience as a digital person but you can also have a look at let's say amazon or google that have huge ones and so if you step away a little bit from this relatively complicated sentence how i generally explain it is that a dxp is the digital output of you as a brand so it's you as a person or you as i am a brand and i need something digital and everything that that touches is part of your dxp and so if you have a look at the next slide here and basically there's a bunch of technical things that together form this platform and so it's not just your cms it's also things like commerce or search or your front end or your analytics or your digital asset management or many many more things that you might use maybe you have an address book finder or you have a wish listing system or many many systems that work together to do what you need as your brand in a digital space that's what's in there right but what a lot of people don't actually consider or think about is that it's not only technical things that make your digital endeavor successful you also have the practitioner side and by practitioner i mean people who can be maybe the developers or the content editors or the marketers and of course we have the end user that you can even see in bold here and so it's not just the end user and it's not just the technical things that we have on our previous slide it's actually a combination of all these things and what we've learned over the years if the team that is working in this digital space with your for your brand is happy the technology is good you work together and then the path to success is open you just have to walk it and so there's not as many roadblocks than if that all works but does it not all the time and this is part of this boot camp where you'll learn where where i work at uniform here you go where we help with that but not for this lesson so let's talk a little bit about um the history that is surrounding this dxp because it wasn't always a thing it's been around for a while but when we started all this we have something like that forester which is some similar group to gartner they call this the web cms and you can see that the practitioner side is actually only web cms and then the technical side is everything else from administration to localize or globalization things to templates and components how everything works it's fully technical and it's basically on premises hosted so you can see it as i have a server in my basement with an internet connection and that's where my website lives i'm just connected to the internet and you can visit my computer and see the website and also back in the day when this came up there were of course companies that made this kind of software and so you could license it and then install that stuff on your computer or on something in a server firm somewhere if that already existed and so this is very static it's completely technology driven and i think maybe when i got started about 15 years ago this was still there but it was kind of dying so i'm just too young to have really used this and then when we continue something shifted right we went to something we call the experience cms where practitioners just wanted to do more more more more and more so the software kind of changed from you have to do everything in code and you have to click everything together and know everything too much more this software gives you what you see is what you get and we will combine things like content and commerce and we will help you with your marketing and optimization and testing and personalization and generally these systems were also hosted but they were managed hosting and so when things like rackspace came up and other like server farm-related companies this is where these systems would live and they would be managed by other people for you so you would actually pay them a license to host it and there's still lots of crossover between web cms and this experience cms where certain things were working on premise others were managed so it's kind of a mix here and um we're talking 2012 2013 and then it's where headless cmss or headless systems came up and this is probably 2015 2016 like when contentful got started there were some early players there and this is a very different world right where it's fully technical again you do have a user interface to get this content there but nothing more what comes out is actually a rest apis like json or maybe we had xml right and we have to use xslt to do some stuff back in the day or we had graphql a little bit more recent and so this is quite different where companies said okay our output is going to be structure data and we're going to give you an sdk for your mobile device or for your programming language in this case i wrote down javascript but it could also be a php sdk or whatever to actually query our system and build something with it and these systems are generally cloud native as well and we know of some that are still around where if you want to set up a new environment for your cms that they actually have to do some work so it's a little bit managed but then in the cloud it's not scaffolding itself but it's all technical right and there's you see now that lots of these headless cmss are like okay we need to do something to make the developers and the content editors both happy so we'll make you like a really good preview or some small things like that that slowly come on top and then we actually this happened and this is not what lots of people anticipated and so basically the experienced cms vendors that were building this suite with everything in it they just kind of decided to re-brand themselves to we are a digital experience platform because we have everything already and let's just add a bit of headless on top of it right and this is started to happen around 2018 2019 and there's lots of players in this field that finally are like okay but we are not just a headless cms we are a cms with many more things and we are actually already a full platform a suite and let's add a bit of headless connectivity we might not get a full api coverage of everything we do but kind of so you can build a website but we can still feel like what you see is what you get so you have all these kind of hybrid systems coming up and so we just spent about 20 years in a very short time so if you have any questions or maybe you have some relevant um experience feel free to share because i'd love to hear your experiences in this field so now let's have a look at where we are today and how what we see happening so within this around headless cms to this dxp rebrand of experience cms we started to see things like this right so this is that sweet um so in this slide you can see this is basically like um yeah thank you marcelo if you can maybe put my um video yeah there we go so we can see so there's the suite everything is connected in one box and you can see there's actually little locks there so they're all connected and then over time and we're talking a few years back now is that okay you can keep your system but us front-end developers we just want our own front-end we don't want fender lock-in we don't want road map control we want to build our own front-ends because we're better at that because if you can imagine if you are a fender that builds everything you cannot excel at everything you can be decent but not super super super awesome and these front enders they needed that and so with this the full stack developer came along as well because we needed apis on top of that suite we needed our own hosting in the cloud and then figuring out how this all worked and then this is much closer where only the cms remains and then everything else is basically just bolted on the way we want it and you can probably imagine that suite is no longer that important anymore because when you looked at the suite before that there was the cms was kind of the base right and everything was built on top but now you can see it's actually a puzzle piece farther away and so let's talk about right now or yesterday or tomorrow where are we so real quick on that so basically at the end of the day the the where we are today or where we're trying to get to finally is to have every piece everything be completely uh composable right um whereas um the cms is just like you said just another piece there's no more sweets um and i'm sure you're gonna talk about why um the positives and negatives of swedes and stuff so we're not gonna get into that right right yeah right now but but that's the that's where we're trying to get at right it's not having a suite that has everything and you you can add a couple of pieces where everything becomes truly composable like like uh bricks like um lego pieces we're showing legos now right right exactly and that's the bit of the interesting thing because if you look at these suites they are also a dxp right if you because suites probably fit for a lot of people we'll talk about that in a sec the differences and stuff and so