Sitecore – Page 2 – Sitecore Practice

Sitecore send – a composable offering for Email automation and marketing

Sitecore is moving towards a SaaS-based platform offering for enterprise solution and a composable digital experience platform (DXP) centered around content. Sitecore has acquired in May 2021 with the effort of adding best of the breed to the class of composable offerings.

Moosend is microservices-based, API-first and cloud-native marketing platform that offers greater personalization and customer engagement with AI-powered analytics and reporting. Moosend has been working with around 2500+ small to large and massive organizations like hewlett packard enterprise, Forbes, NASA, CITYAM, Tedx, health organizations like UNICEF, etc. All these organizations are using moosend for different business cases and marketing needs for market automation, newsletter, better website experience, etc.

It simplifies the way we execute email marketing and customer engagements by providing :

Complete SaaS Platform
Holistic Customer database
Omnichannel digital experience
AI driven Email Experience
Campaign management
Advanced list segmentation
Reduce developer dependency
Simple marketing automation workflows
Powerful real time reporting and analytics
Fast and real time customer journeys

If you like to use Sitecore send, you will get package starting from $10/month that includes up to 2,000 subscribers and an enterprise plan with custom pricing. Sitecore also offer trial version of 1 month to explore Sitecore send however, you may not be able to explore all in trial version.

What XM cloud brought to us?

Today we announced the most significant milestone in @sitecore history – XM Cloud, which puts our flagship product in a modern cloud architecture. With this we complete the picture giving brands the most expansive, composable, end-to-end, truly SaaS architecture. pic.twitter.com/7Zmf67k8Gl
— Steve Tzikakis (@Tzikakis) July 13, 2022

Recently, Sitecore has officially released their Sitecore Experience Manager, XM Cloud and as the tweet by Sitecore CEO, Steve Tzikakis, it is most significant milestone in Sitecore history.

So, we are going to discuss how Sitecore Experience Manager, XM cloud going to be such significant milestone in Sitecore History and what it has brought to us that will make customer experience mind blowing?

Sitecore XM Cloud is a step towards the Sitecore’s 100% SaaS platform offering for enterprise solution and a composable digital experience platform (DXP) centered around content. With this, Sitecore took its core CMS solution to modern cloud architecture achieving speed to market with implementation of the immersive customer experience and overcoming challenges faced in flexibility, scaling, including variable traffic, multi brand architectures, and site security.

Following are some of the features and challenges overcame by XM cloud:

Continued innovation – with XM cloud, there are various new features, and all features are SaaS based. These features and capabilities will continue to receive updates and innovation going forward. In addition to this, new features will be released seamlessly as part of the product lifecycle.
Elastic scaling – It manages scaling and elasticity and easily set-and-forget traffic volume demands.
Composability – XM cloud follows the composable architecture and any Sitecore’s platform solution can now be purchased independently and will fit in any marketing technology stack easily
On-the-Fly Engagement – XM cloud makes it possible to cope with changing demands in the market at high rate and create experiences to fulfilling market needs.
Multichannel content management – Following headless architecture makes it achieve omni channel content delivery without any challenges.
Simplicity for marketers– XM cloud brought content authors with easy to use, business-focused tools and intuitive content authoring workflows
Agility for developers – XM cloud follows agility workflow for deployment with customized builds utilizing modern frameworks.
Future Upgrades – with the continuous innovation, there will no longer be need for significant cost and effort spent on upgrades. The XM cloud has its own automatic upgrades. However, there can be costs involved while switching from existing Sitecore customers to Sitecore XM cloud.
Edge Caching & GraphQL Querying Sitecore XM Cloud uses a technology called Experience Edge that will provide a level of performance better traditional web server architecture. Experience edge is kind of network of servers all around to cache to deliver your content quickly.

Prefill Sitecore form fields with query parameters using custom value provider

Recently we had a requirement that if some user wants to buy the same product again on site then he/she can scan the QR code provided to him/her in the first purchase. By scanning the QR code, user will be navigated to form with prefilled fields

After Sitecore 9.3 version, we have Value Providers for pre filling the data in Sitecore form fields. These can be found in Sitecore at location – /sitecore/system/Settings/Forms/Value Providers.

By default, we can prefill your Sitecore Form with contact data from the xDB profile. However, prefilling the fields from query string needs custom value providers.

Following are the steps to accomplish this:

Create custom value provider:

You may create a folder ValueProviders.
In that folder, you may create your custom value provider classes and inherit from the IFieldValueProvider class.
Implement the GetValue method to return an object of any type. You can pass any type of parameters and then parse it to be using in custom class.

Following is the example of code for pre filling first name from query string parameter ‘shiptoname‘

using Sitecore.ExperienceForms.ValueProviders;
using System.Web;

namespace Demo.Classes.ValueProvider
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Defines the "FirstNameQueryString" />.
    /// </summary>
    public class FirstNameQueryString : IFieldValueProvider
    {
        public FieldValueProviderContext ValueProviderContext { get; set; }

        public object GetValue(string parameters)
        {
            HttpContext httpContext = System.Web.HttpContext.Current;
            string fName = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(httpContext.Request.Url.Query).Get(parameters);

            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(fName))
            {
                return string.Empty;
            }

            return fName;
        }
    }
}

Create corresponding value provider items and link the custom methods:

In /sitecore/system/Settings/Forms, create a separate folder for query string value providers.
Create value provider items from /sitecore/templates/System/Forms/Value Provider template. Add model class details on the item in field Model Type.
Save the item.

Link the value provider to Sitecore form fields:

Click the Name field, and in the Form elements pane, in the Advanced settings section, in the Value provider field, select the custom provider you have created.
In the Value provider parameters field, enter shiptoname.
Save the form.

Similarly, any type of logic can be used Custom value provider to autofill fields based on the requirement.

Tag: Sitecore