Product Meetup: Uniform for Sitecore 5 is out!

back to uh and cut so hello everyone and welcome back to another product meetup and we actually have a huge release today for our sitecore product and with me here is christian so dude how are you i'm fine tim thanks for for doing this and i'm fine how are you all good you asked me for an intro there it is yeah there it is let's talk a little bit about this side course thing that we've done yeah so not too long ago though we we released the latest version of our cycle product which is called uniform four cycle in which we have essentially combined all of the learnings that we've picked up over the years working with our uniform for sci-core product and now the combined product is available to partners and customers and with that product we truly have an offering that can solve some of those typical problems that we see with with traditional cycle implementations okay that makes sense we've been actually doing that for over a year now i think and we are now at version five it was i guess one of the biggest releases we've done and so um i've used this stuff before right because i've been working with sitecore at agencies for a while and the funny thing is i guess the things we've come up with in this product you can do them without but it costs a lot of effort and a lot of money for your team to actually take all that time and do those things and so can you maybe highlight for the people that were watching what are the main features of this product so that maybe you can just get our license from us rather than spending months and months on coding something yourself so the this release or the release of uniform for psycho helps businesses really make a better business case with their existing or new builds of cycle so we help businesses decouple cycle and the applications that they built to make sure that the performance and scalability is sort of never heard even when you want to turn on personalization furthermore we help them make a much better infrastructure which means it's less costly less complex and easier to maintain over time jam stack is a principle for how you create modern web applications that i essentially decoupled so in a traditional cycle you would have cycle running all of the page execution page builds and all of that whereas with uniform for cycle we can help remove a lot of that work from cycle and do it ahead of time which also means when you want to scale for black friday or something else and you don't necessarily have to scale the infrastructure underneath which means you don't have to scale your cd infrastructure xdb infrastructure because essentially the execution of these things are no longer touching the cycle environments which means it's much faster it's much more resilient the cycle servers do not go down and a lot of the inherent problems that we typically see with psycho builds are solved using uniform for cycle okay so when you're saying we don't actually call that cd server anymore how does that work with personalization because as far as i know this is dynamic right you have to go to an origin ask for hey in what persona or segment or rule does this user fit give me some information so i can render something dynamically but in gemstock that doesn't happen so no true how did we solve that yeah true that's one of the really beauties of of what what we have done with uniform for cycle we have created a product that allows you to utilize all of the benefits that you normally have with psycho so great cms the ability to set up personalization and experience editor work with experienced citizen and then when you publish uniform for psycho will essentially do all the hard work and also take out personalization rules and taxonomies around personalization and essentially create a build of your site in a format that can be executed outside of cycle so we take the whole the whole site including the personalization and lift that into a cdn and on that cdn we then allow we execute the personalization and run it from the cdn instead of running it from the cd servers and doing all the origin callbacks and in this in this context an origin callback would be as as you said before uh calling back to the infrastructure to understand how and what do i now need to show to the user so a scenario i come from a different country somewhere in the world and when i hit the website i should see a different hero banner for instance traditionally that would require you to go back to cycle cd infrastructure get that basically understanding and then have a piece of content sent back to you that's an origin call with uniform for cycle that doesn't happen we have everything gathered already on the edge so that you don't do those callbacks and that generates an extremely fast response when you want to do personalization and it is also now scalable because there's no dependency on the back end so no more scaling of infrastructures yeah so um when i worked at agencies and we used to use sitecore all the time we loved that product and i still do because it really enabled businesses to transform and do great stuff and every brand that we worked with always wanted personalization but it was kind of um hard to do and so it's important that i'm saying this it's not impossible it really is possible we've seen amazing personalization with sitecore it's just that it becomes a little bit slow sometimes when you skate it up and it's it's complicated that way so what we do with uniform for cycle to alleviate that you come from the agency side i come from the product side i spent a significant amount of my time and professional career working on the product side and with psycho as well and what we typically saw was clients were finding it very difficult to enable personalization for for a few reasons and one of them being cycle is a great platform but it also has a very complex infrastructure to maintain build out and scale and that infrastructure is tough to handle it is it's expensive to scale because you have to scale servers and infrastructures and so many companies essentially never got around to actually fully utilizing the personalization features of cycle because of that also when when it was then enabled um because you you had a had an infrastructure or an architecture where you would have to go back to cycle multiple times especially turning on personalization that would also put additional strain on your infrastructure and make your site perform even slower and with uniform we are essentially solving all of those problems so when i first saw these these or this architecture from uniform also before joining the company i was quite intrigued because i i saw here based on my experience in my career that this was actually something that solved more or less all of the problems that i had seen again and again and again when i was talking to customers in my previous professional career and that was very intriguing to me so how about we just show something right let's demo a little bit how we do these things and how easy it is to actually do the personalization and i think one of the cool thing is at one point we can turn off sitecore and still see the website working right okay so let's let's go for it let's share your screen and let's go over it here we are at our familiar ui in psycho where we can open up the content edits and experience edits and all the other tools that that we're familiar with when we work in cycle let's navigate to the desktop and then from here on open up the content editor because then i'll show you our fairly simple mvc based side it's also super important to mention here that with uniform for cycle you can do this from cycle 8.2 and up so we work with mvc builds we work with sx8 builds and of course we also work with jss builds so you can do what i show you here you can essentially start doing all the way back from cycle a2 and and what we're working with here is we're focusing on personalization today to sort of really show how you can use the common and standard features in cycle but now you have a very different model for executing this and you will see when we go through the demo and also when we start turning off cycle that these things work even though the cycle infrastructure is not there and one of the things that we typically talk to customers about is also how can we help you cut cost on your current cycle infrastructure because with this approach you can put yourself on a path where you can consider scaling down or altogether turning off parts of your infrastructure depending on how far you sort of take um take uniform and take the whole move to a more sort of decoupled stack and but this is very familiar to most that are working in psycho so of course i can choose to work work in the content editor with my content or i could uh directly go and open up the experience editor so let me just work in the experience editor here sure so the experience editor loads up and shows me my site i have a simple site that i composed of a set of pages so i have a front page and on the front page i have a content block that holds a set of different personalization patterns or rules so i have one that is based on my guip i have one that is triggering a goal i have one that is related to a pattern and a profile and cycle and last but not least we can trigger it based on a campaign okay so some very common ways of trying to do personalization in psycho and they have all been set up here and when we go through this we'll basically do some changes here and see them get published and then we'll show how this now works completely decoupled from psycho before we do that i'll just briefly show you how these personalizations work on the live site now so that we can see the changes we're doing how they flow through the system so the site is running in this scenario i'm working with the cloudflare cdn and on cloudflare i have deployed my site and i'm running all of this completely decoupled from psycho in what is called a cloudflare worker but essentially this is just a cdn smart cdn and on the front page here i have all of these different personalization rules and i'll just trigger them one by one now starting off with triggering the guip based signal i'm based in denmark so right now i'm seeing hello stranger but as soon as i switch over to a vpn where i'll be based in the us and i refresh the page we'll see that it will now trigger a guip based rule so i will just navigate to my vpn client here and i'll connect to the us i'm now connected to a vpn node in in the us and if i go back to my website and refresh this we now see that it is personalizing for me as if i was truly physically based in the us and so there's a rule inside sitecore now that says hey yes you are from the us show this little piece of content right exactly exactly okay so this is standard cycle personalization we have made no changes to the workflows and cycle so for marketers and editors and people that are that are used to working cycle all of the workflows are maintained and uniforms actually just hooks in when you get to the publishing so part of the publishing routine is communicating with uniform and let uniform do what uniform does to make this available on the cdn so one of the other really big benefits of this is when you work with uniform like this this is working outside of cycle and we still have the personalization and we still want to understand what is going on traditionally all of this data would be tracked on your sitecore servers so when a visitor comes to your website the cd server would essentially track what was going on which page was seen was there any profile information which goals were triggered all of this and then all of this information would be put into xdb when we are working like this completely decoupled and we don't have that connection to the cd servers then we need to do something else luckily uniform provides full tracking and full analytics on all of these parts that cycle cd servers would normally do so all of the data is still tracked and uniform can then push all of this data back to xdb or we can push all of this information into google analytics and if we push it into google analytics what we essentially do is that we augment your traditional google analytics with additional information on personalization and cycle page views so all of the regular xdp data now essentially becomes available in google analytics which again allows you to do some really clever things in terms of remarketing based on personalization and stuff that happens inside of cycle so the next thing that will happen is we want to trigger a goal so i click and go to the goal page so this is essentially a a sub page in my website called gold and on this page inside of cycle we have attached a goal and when i now go back to my front page you will see the trigger sorry the goal that we triggered has now been used for personalization the next thing is we click the pattern page so now we come to a different page and on this page we're triggering a pattern that has been configured in cycle let me just go into to this to the back end here or the the the extension and show you this is essentially the profile and the pattern that are configured inside of cycle so we can see which profile and which pattern are being used inside of os has been configured in cycle and that it has now been triggered on the front end and again this is what we're tracking and sending into google analytics when we've gone through the demo i'll just open up google analytics to show you how these things come in as well so now we've seen that we we triggered an a pattern and if you go back to the front page we basically now see that this demo pattern card has been matched and are now used for personalization so now we have seen uh essentially most of the personalization rules that were configured in cyclone the last two to take a look at is the campaign um rule that has been set up the campaign rule is looking for utm underscore campaign equals demo which means if i send out an email maybe from email cycles email marketing tool or some other it could be salesforce anywhere and people respond to a call to action in the email or from somewhere else and they come to the website with this particular query string that has been set up in the rule we use that again for personalization so now we see campaign personalization based on the utm campaign match and again all of this is available inside of the tracker that uniform supplies and we push all of this to google analytics so that essentially concludes the initial demo of of the personalization that are happening so let's go back to cycle do a change and see that change flow all the way through and once we have done that let's turn off cycle and see that all of these things still work even though we turn off cycle so this is to prove the point that working with uniform can put you on a path to essentially creating a different approach to how you you set up your cycle environments and your production infrastructures yeah good cool living on the edge let's demo this and play another sidecar in a sec i love it yeah yeah let's do that so going back to cycle now as you remember from before i have my desktop running and i have opened up experience editor experience editors for most editors and marketers the preferred tool um unfortunately there are still quite a few customers out there that are not working with experience editor and all of the things that you see here can of course still be done in the regular content editor as well we'll just use experience editor to do the changes that we'll work with today so i will find my first personalization rule for usa so i'm changing the content block inside of cycle and then i want to add just some simple content and now we have changed the headline we want to save this and once that is saved into cycle we can publish this and when this gets published we'll see that this has gone through to the edge and we can reload the site and see the change and once that is done we'll turn off cycle as as a whole and then see that everything is working still so clicking the publish button and as this goes through then we'll switch over and see that the publishing or that the um that the change has gone through approximately 10 hours later there we go publishing done so so what we see here is essentially a full readout of what has happened of course we've seen that the publishing is started and in a traditional publishing um screen psycho we basically just see that it has done and how many items have been created or deleted et cetera et cetera what we also see here is everything that uniform has done as part of this deployment so uniform does quite a lot in the deployment for us and what we should see now is going to our live website i will just clear out what we did before there it is yeah there it is it already works so what i just did was i essentially cleared out all of the information that was in uh that had already been tracked to make sure that we could show this new change coming through so this is now again deployed onto the edge it is not connected to cyclone is running independently of cycle so the next thing that we'll do is essentially turn off our cycle instance so that it no longer responds and then i'll show you that all of this personalization still works and the last bit would be then let's log into google analytics and take a look at the analytics that are coming in from uniform into in this demo in google analytics so this is my virtual machine running cycle the cycle instance so i'll open up all of the services here and then we'll turn off the worldwide web service that is essentially running the web server so i'll scroll down and find it down here in the bottom and just stop that all together so what happens now is that the web server and cycle is completely shut down and if i try to access it locally here this is on my actual machine will now see that cycle no longer and if i shut down my virtual machine here again go back try and open up my desktop here this no longer responds either so there is nothing on the end that will connect anymore cycles effectively gone so now i'm back on my demo and if i refresh this we'll see that this is still running so i can now go to my gold page i can go back see that my goal is triggered i can go to my pattern page see that my pattern gets triggered and used for personalization and of course i still have the ability to run my campaign personalization still so all of this is now working but psycho has been shut down so let's just very quickly dive into google analytics to see what was actually tracked in google analytics as part of the demo in google analytics what i've done is i've gone to real-time events and show the events that has been triggered in the last 30 minutes so what you can see here is all of these different events were being triggered by our demo so you could see that we had page views on the home page on the gold page and on the pattern page and you can see different personalizations have been triggered so looking at this so looking at this you can see that the usa the campaign the pattern and the goal personalization rules were all triggered in google analytics well this is awesome so now based on this you can create some goals or funnels or whatever you want to do with analytics right this is great yes exactly maybe you want to see you know also push this could you then also push this back to xdb if you wanted to yes you can get the same information in xdb that's a simple configuration of uniform in cycle and you could essentially also do both so you could push to google analytics but also push to xdb maybe you want to do this in a transition period or something yeah exactly so it's kind of an offline thing but that's fine i guess yes absolutely all right so now we've seen a lot of things let's do a quick recap i think for me the most interesting part like has two things for me well i'm a front and death right so i love the gem stack and the workers thing that's cool that just makes it all so much faster and so much cooler as a developer to work with but the other one is you don't have the cost of the cd servers anymore no i remember being on azure having to scale cd servers like a lot because of christmas time or whatever that just costs so much money right now we're on the cloudflare workers i don't know the cost exactly but i'm assuming it's a little less right what do you think yeah it's it's much less of course depending on your traffic but of course cloudflare workers essentially i'm running on a on a standard cloudflare account and the workers are involved or included in the standard cloudflare account and of course if you want to scale it it does come with a cost but it is significantly lower than hosting entire environments of of cd infrastructure around the world yeah so what what this also is and conclude and creating or making a conclusion on what you have seen is because we can remove a lot of the load from the infrastructure that traditionally did this you can put yourself on a path to massive cost reductions because you can scale down all remove your cd infrastructure you can scale down or choose to not work with for instance xdb that will give you a much simpler infrastructure at a much smaller cost than you would traditionally have some of these things or all of these things can also be used to scale and expand your reach for instance into china which for many psycho clients traditionally have been very hard to reach as well but with uniform for cycle china is definitely uh an option as well because you could essentially just deploy this into a cdn that that also operates inside of china or at least very much on the borders of china so think of that one it's a very interesting one so based on what i'm hearing if that cost is lower and your architecture is simpler i would suggest keep the same budget but give your agency that will build your website much more money to talk about storytelling business values personalization experiences all of that becomes now much more possible in let's say a first version of a website and i think to me having a product like this is exciting because it it shifts where the budget goes basically and so priorities can change and to me that's a bright future for brands that use sitecore and use agencies to build their websites exactly and just one little thing to add to that is this is the same for existing builds instead of doing full recycling of your platforms or your builds you can use this to create a much more smooth transition towards not doing full rebits but doing incremental builds and shifting budget around so you essentially use more budget to do your as you say your storytelling and your marketing rather than spending on on infrastructure exactly so um thank you very much christian for for giving us this overview thank you peace please anyone who watches this reach out to us if you want more information you can go to uniform.dev sign up to get well a demo in person or reach us on twitter or anything we'll put that in the description of the video yes cheers everyone and i'll see you next time yeah see you