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4:45 PM

Be a part of #SUGTOUREU ! - SUGPL#7 & SUGCZSK#1

What an unforgettable days we have had recently! I'm still fighting with the flu since that after-parties days.

I had a pleasure to be a part of SUG Tour Europe which did Jason Wilkerson and Akshay Sura. Because of that we have organized SUGPL#7 meetup in Poznań and later with SUGPL delegation went to Czech Prague for 1st SUGCZSK meetup, which was on the road map of SUGTourEU for Akshay and Jason.


From the begining, the first one meetup was in Poland, in Poznań. Recently I have become official co-organizer SUGPL group, hence I went a day before to Poznań, to be sure everything gonna be alright.

Day #1

5h trip to Poznań, even as a driver ;)

 
Day #2
Just before the meetup I had a big pleasure to pick up Jason Wilkerson from the airport. I've even made an a special card to be sure he will find me ;)


It worked even with benefits like big smile on Jason's face :)

Just after we finally have arrived with Jason to meetup place, because of being organizer I've had an honor to welcome our special guests and of course whole Polish community people, introduce agenda and plan for after party :)




After that we had 3 presentation made by Akshay, Jason and Adam Najmanowicz who has been our 3rd speaker. Right now we can see how strong presenters team we had :)

Akshay presentation title was: „SiteCron”


Secondly Jason presentation: „Driving an immersive customer experience with Sitecore Experience Commerce + IoT”


Third presentation by Adam Najmanowicz: „Beyond the SXA toolbox”


After great presentations, where audience had a lot of questions we moved to the old town in Poznań to rest and make networking ! :)

There was a lot of us ! :)

Day #3

Since early morning full of energy we start our trip from Poznań to Czech Prague on 1st SUGCZSK meetup! Akshay with Jason was took by Marek Musielak to his car and we as a SUGPL delegation went by second car, driven by myself :) Next over 5h trip in last 2 days ;) !


As I wrote, everyone full of energy! Night was too short ;)

After mentioned over 5h drive we achieved Prague !


Later, just had some lunch we came to SUGCZSK meetup location and we had there 6 presentations !

We have started with:

1st: Petr Kocian & Matyas Havel, Topic: Worklfow for shared components


2nd: Una Verhoeven, Topic: Where machine learning meets social #ThinkYouKnowMe


3rd: Peter Procházka, Topic: Sitecore Commerce 9 Update 2 New Features


4th: Jiri Padera & Rene Naplava, Topic: Sitecore 9 Marketing automation pilot - xConnect/DEF implementation


5th: Jason Wilkerson, Topic: Driving an immersive customer experience with Sitecore Experience Commerce + IoT


6th:  Akshay Sura, Topic: SiteCron


We had a lot opportunities to get some news from the guys presentations, but besides that we had opportunity to meet each other in reality! It's so nice to shake a hand with guy who you know from Sitecore Community Slack channel for instance ;)


When we finish presentation time we had an opportunity to integrate and later to go sightseeing at Prague old town :)


Day #4
Next early moring we packed ourselves and start our comeback trip to Białystok in Poland, which took us over 9 hours !


It was a pleasure to be in that places, with that people, thank you everyone for the cooperation and fabulous time spent together, see you soon !
3:31 PM

xCommerce - Extend Storefront scaffolding! - Overview


Hi all,

I think that many of you had a chance to work with SXA Storefront connected with xCommerce solution provided in Sitecore 9.0.2.

With the box we get also whole Storefront solution which helps especially during first contact with xCommerce. It provides for us a lot already prepared sites with mechanisms which allow xCommerce capabilities.

One of the this Storefront feature is scaffolding plan. This mechanism allows for editors to create a new site in Sitecore with sites, datasources etc. already prepared. It helps to skip re-creating content items each time for a new site, hence it reduces amount of work significantly.

By default Sitecore xCommerce SXA scaffolding prepare for us below structure:

We see how many things we get out of the box in this scaffolding.

But right now we should have ask a questions:

"It's so cool, but what if I have multisite solution and for instance each market has own site and I would like to:
- share my custom component during creation of a new market (new site)? 
- add a new page to this structure during site creation
- link custom datasource to some component during site creation

Is it possible?"

Yes, it is !

You can create you own scaffolding plan or modify current one.


It is also worth to mention that there is no only one scaffolding plan in whole project. There is a few of them. You can find components plan, templates or foundation tenants plan as well.

Under the path: "/sitecore/system/Settings/Feature/Commerce Experience Accelerator/Storefront Components/Storefront Components Scaffolding Plan" you will find item component scaffolding plan:



But for instance if you will check path like: "/sitecore/system/Settings/Project/Commerce Experience Accelerator/Storefront Template Scaffolding Plan" you will find template scaffolding plan:





Very nice feature which is not easy to find is editor of this plan. To check it we will go to the components scaffolding plan. Now it's available after mouse right click as it is shown on below image:


When you click it window is opening and you have something looks like that:


Moreover, scaffolding plan are not only items which are in Sitecore to service thich functionality. There has to be some more structure to let it work in some way. So when we will dig one layer below we will find items called - Scaffolding Item Plan File which exists in Media library under the path:
"/sitecore/media library/Files/Scaffolding Plan Files/"

 
Now we can see there is more than one scaffolding plan file item, what means that there is more scaffolding plans.

But you will ask at this moment:

"Robert, but what information keeps this file?"

What is very good question! Well, this file is a JSON file, which keep all information about the items and structure which has to be created. It is kind of snapshot of each item in JSON.
It's generated based on Branch templates which are located in the similar structure like scaffolding plans items. So if we would like to check templates plan it will be like:



Mentioned JSON file:

How it works?

Well to make it possible we have to select 2 things for scaffolding plan:
  • Source item
  • Reference item
Source Item - is an item from branch templates which define structure for the item which has to be created during scaffolding process.

Reference Item - is an item from content node, which currently exists and which will deliver values for the new item, which will be created based on source item (branch template).
During creation new site, scaffolding mechanism gets

I think that more it can be more clarified when we take a look on the image below, which shows window during editing component scaffolding plan:


So, what we have under the hood?

The main point in mentioned previously JSON file is special attribute/tag (whatever we will name it) - "dynamic".
This tag is sort of mock which cover place which will be replaced by the new ID during creation of new item during scaffolding process. Let's take a look on some row:


Now it should be more clear for everyone :)
How we can customize it ?
 
Like I wrote at the beginning there is a few options, you can modify current items, you can add own plans. You can do it only for templates or maybe for the components. You can even write your own Powershell script and generate this scaffolding plan file in JSON. Then just assign this file to some plan and it's done.

Because in this post we have made sort of overview and general description, example of customization we will do in next blog post.


Stay tuned ! :)


Hope it will help you ! :)
7:10 PM

xCommerce - GDPR approaching

We are developers, so we like coding, making something that work and make it possible to say - "It's alive!". But last days, we are also has to be aware of other life parts that have an influance on our work. Especially the most often case is - Law.

Why Law? My old friend said few years ago:

"You cannot drive own business without a lawyer."

What means that if you want to have a company, you have to make it according to the law rules. Hence, we as a developers mostly, work on projects that solves issues for our clients that have own business. So we as a developers must endeavour to deal with law constraints.

Going ahead with introduction above we come to the topic of GDPR.



In my current project where we use awesome technology stack like: Sitecore 9.0.2 + SXA 1.7 + xCommerce in the newest version we also struggling with GDPR constraints.

Of course everybody knows that Sitecore 9 provides functionality to anonymize (I hope this word exists in English 😉) users data. But what about xCommerce?

Well, in general xCommerce by default is not removing users from DB, but making "soft delete". It means that is selecting this user as an inactive guy.
It's done in particular purpose. To keep possibility for returns, guaranty rules and so on. But if somebody is still wants to get ride of users that ask about this possibility basing on GDPR, what we can do?

We can change standard xCommerce behavior and make possible "hard delete" users. To do that we can change the settings. In:
CommerceAuthoring_Sc9\wwwroot\data\Environments\PlugIn.Habitat.CommerceAuthoring-1.0.0.json we have:


Since the "ForgetCustomer" setting is set to true, the removing action in the UI removes the user completely, making "hard delete".  Propagation will take about 5 minutes for minion which will update the index, and you will see the changes.  

This is it, I hope it will help for someone!

4:38 PM

SUGPL #6 Białystok - Organizator feelings

Our SUGPL operates very dynamically, hence we had a new meetup! This time, Białystok! For me it was special, because I was generally responsible for organization. It sounds proudly ;)


Organizers feelings, well, you have to do everything and think about everything. It remind my my wedding in some way :) But I like it! Because of that feelings and activities I want to do it!




It also worthy to notice that we had high attendance, but moreover we saw a lot of new faces, what is even better in that. I hope it will start a new journey for some people to became a dynamic part of our Sitecore User Group Poland.



Besides the community, we had 3 great presentations. Two of them was presented by our friends from Belarus - Alexei Vershalovich and Andrei Paliakou. The third one has presented my close friend - Tomasz Juranek.

During first presentation Alexi was describing Marketing Automation in Omni Channel. Great topic that he mentioned during last SUGCON in Berlin. It was an opportunity for other people that join this event to hear a lot of very interesting things, how we connect Sitecore in so many ways.


 Nest speaker was Tomasz Juranek whom presentation topic was "Sitecore Forms and Marketing Automation in practice". Tomasz has shown us haw we can use this two tools and combination of them to achieve our business goals and be better marketing masters :)




At the end presenter was Andrei, Commerce MVP who presented topic "Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 - expectations and reality". He has described how many differences have been made in new xCommerce and how improvement it contains currently. Great to see that !




When we finished all presentations it was time for afterparty! It was good to talk with earlier mentioned new faces 


As picture shows, a lot of smile on the faces so it had to be good time :) I hope we will see all together in next meetups as well! 

Thank you all!



9:45 PM

SUGPL #5 Wrocław - XConnect Speaker feelings

Spring has come (or even summer, looking at temperatures) so our meetups  also have a new scene, meetup in Wrocław is just behind us. Well done meeting when I had an opportunity to present XConnect with my friend Tomasz Kłos.


This meetup was special because of our guest - Paul Urban, who came from Canada and he join our meetup with own presentation! Thank you Paul for willness to be a part of SUGPL meetup and this presentation. I hope that's only the beginning of our cooperation ;)

First presentation was... my presentation with Tomasz Kłos. Topic of our presentation was:

"eXtremeConnect - where and how to not lost in new reality"


We would like to show the whole new approach of communication in Sitecore Platform which XConnect service provides with description of possibilities. Additionally second part of our presentation was application that generate mock data in xDB - xGenerator for Sitecore 9. If you need to generate dummy data for e.g. Experience Profile, that tool is for you!.

If you are interested in app, try this from Github link.
More information is on my friend blog - Tomasz Kłos


Second presentation was made by earlier mentioned our special guest - Paul Urban. He prepared for us topic: "GDPR compliance with Sitecore 8 implementation". We discussed many important topic that very often are over IT topic, to be more law area. But for that we are making that, IT should helps and solves problems in other live areas, right? ;)




The third presentation was prepared by Szymon Kuźniak, who presented topic: "Sitecore roles without Sitecore users". Very interesting topic, I hope it will solve some issues for us in the future.

At the end we met in nice place (12 krok) for the most important - networking !


Cheers guys! It was a pleasure for see you and all other new faces as well !

1:03 PM

Winners of Sitecore Hackathon 2018 - Feel like a star- SUGCON Berlin 2018

Hi all!

In this post I would like to share with you my memories from lat SUGCON which was placed in Berlin, Germany.
At the beginning I would like to say it was one of the best time I've ever had in my professional 'career' ;) Hence, my description could be a little bit subjective :) , but in other hand it should be a better motivation for those, who haven't attend in this conference to change it and join!



First of all,

Berlin

It was my first visit in this city. The main building which dominates over others is Berlin TV Tower, besides that I was surprised what a beautiful old town there is, so small stroll was a pure pleasure. Just take a look on pictures below.





Conference

It has started like good party in the club. I felt this power in the air.


It's good point to notice that before the conference has started, we had an opportunity to pass Sitecore Certification exam on the newest Sitecore 9 version. That was 1st success during that days, new Sitecore 9 certificate.

Also I would like to congratulates for the organizers for whole services like catering, which were on really top level. Perfect job guys !

Presentations

Hard to cover all topic were available during this two days, we can mention GraphQL with JSS team, Marketing Automation by Alexi Vershalovich and of course presentation about SIX by Robert Senktas, my good mate from SUGPL community and same company as well :)
If you are more interested in SIX, try to check this link: SIX


Hackathon 2018 - Winners Announcements

One of the best moments in my life! Nobody knows before that time who won Sitecore Hackathon this year, so there were some hopes, some tension in the air. Akshay Sura has come on the stage and after little kick of he announced that this year Sitecore Hackathon won... LasVegans!!! What means, my team!
I would like to thanks my partners, Tomasz Juranek and Wojciech Urban who has this motivation, power and trust to build together solution that win competition this year!
One more time, Thanks guys !



Afterparty

After all of peresentations, I have still felt endless joy.  Attendees could met at hotel lobby (which was really good and huge) and what we did.



Great time, great people ! :)

Who still haven't been on SUGCON or is wondering is it worth to go, I definitely recommend to take bag, put some clothes, book tickets and meet together in London in 2019.

Hope we will see next year !