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Introduction: Cloud-First Sitecore 4

Sitecore 9: What’s New & What’s in It for You? 6

World-Class Marketing with Better Customer Insights, Machine Learning,

& Marketing Automation 7

Seamless Omnichannel Experiences 12

Powerful Commerce Journeys That Can Easily Be Personalized,

Customized, & Extended 14

An Intuitive, Performance-Driven Experience for Content Authors &

Marketers 17

Cloud-First but Not Cloud-Only: A Native Integration with Microsoft Azure 18

Intelligent Search, Streamlined Forms, Better Data Accuracy, & More 19

The Downside of Failing to Upgrade 21

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Velir’s Sitecore Upgrade Approach 22

The Road to a Newer Sitecore: Upgrade or Start from Scratch 23

Understanding Your Solution & Needs via Audits 25

Work with Velir on Your Next Sitecore Upgrade 26

About Velir 27

Related Resources 29

Connect with Us! 30

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The Sitecore Experience Platform has

undergone a dramatic transformation

since its initial release, Sitecore 6.0, came

out in 2008, mirroring the revolution

being faced by the digital marketing

industry.

In October 2017, Sitecore realized its

vision of a cloud-first approach to

customer experience management with

the Sitecore Experience Cloud™ — an

overarching brand that encompasses

Sitecore XP 9, a digital experience

platform, Sitecore Experience Manager

(XM), a web content management

system, and Sitecore Experience

Commerce (XC), a natively-integrated

commerce platform.

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With XP 9, Sitecore provides a comprehensive suite of features that enables your marketing,

content, and IT teams to better communicate with, engage, and convert your target audiences.

Sitecore XP 9 delivers on the promise of a complete,

360-degree view of each customer.

This latest version of Sitecore allows for the creation of hyper-personalized digital experiences

across every brand touch point. It introduces Sitecore xConnect and Sitecore Cortex and together,

they empower your marketing team with connected data sources and deeper contextual insights.

There’s lots to get excited about on the IT side as well — the native integration with Microsoft

Azure allows for significant advantages in terms of the real-time scalability and performance of

your digital properties. Let’s dive in to the various business cases for why Sitecore 9 should be top

of mind!

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Sitecore XP 9 puts the power in

the hands of the people who are

most responsible for creating and

delivering experiences that

delight your customers — your

marketing team.

With xConnect, your marketers can now

optimize content and experiences

independently, allowing them the flexibility

they need to get to market on time. This

reduces the total cost of ownership and the

resource load that comes from having

different teams using disparate systems.

xConnect is a new service layer

(comprised of a set of APIs and various

services) in Sitecore XP 9 that facilitates

easy integration and data interchange at

scale, to external data sources and

applications.

These applications could include CRM

systems (there are specific connectors to

Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics),

email marketing tools, ERPs, PIMs, and the

list goes on. This allows all your customer

data to be standardized and stored in a

single place (xDB), and is a major step

towards creating that 360-degree view of

your customers in real-time.

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For example, if your company provides

an app that is separate from your websites,

xConnect easily enables integration and data

flow between these different properties,

allowing the experience on each to be

informed by all the others.

With the ability to access intelligence on

all customer interactions (past and present)

across all channels (even offline), your

marketing teams can now deliver experiences

based on the context of these prior

interactions, creating hyper-personalized and

tailored interactions.

This has tremendous implications,

especially with the increased prevalence of

IoT devices and other channels for customers

to interact with your brand.

xConnect is built on the OData industry

standard, so developers do not need to

learn Sitecore-specific code to work with this

service layer. Therefore, it is much easier to

set up than a custom integration between

different applications.

With this new industry standard, you

can now connect to third-party business

tools like Power BI or Tableau to do your

reporting and data analysis on all of the

data stored in xDB. This gives you added

flexibility to create beautiful, easy-to-

understand dashboards that can be

digested by your senior management and

executive teams.

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Fig 1:1 – Flow of data with xConnect.

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Another key feature that was introduced

with Sitecore XP 9 is compliance with the

GDPR. As marketers and IT teams scrambled

to ensure that their programs and systems

adhered to the new regulations, introduced in

late May this year, Sitecore ensured that its

platform was compliant with several

engineering updates.

In addition to data being secured by

default, xConnect provides a ‘Right to be

Forgotten’ feature, where specific data can be

marked as sensitive and subsequently be

anonymized. This has been executed in such

a way that it doesn’t impact the data and

totals in reports, it just ensures that any

involved data is anonymized.

xDB has also been updated to now use

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (as an alternative

to MongoDB), which is compliant with the

GDPR.

Finally, the third big reveal in this new

feature trifecta is Sitecore Cortex, the

machine learning capability that’s woven

through the Sitecore Experience Cloud.

With Cortex, your marketing efforts now

get the added bonus of an internal “data

scientist” working to optimize them.

It continuously looks for patterns and

can identify common attributes in visitor

behavior and usage. Cortex automatically

suggests new segments and

personalization criteria for them,

optimizing the path to conversion.

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Sitecore XP 9’s marketing capabilities are

rounded out by integrated site analytics and

optimization features. This includes A/B and

multivariate content testing, marketing

taxonomies to organize activities in a

structured way, and campaign management.

These distinctive features enable your

marketers to have a thorough

understanding of your audiences, how they

engage across digital channels, and what

works best to nurture the relationship and

convert them into customers and advocates.

Fig 1:2 – Experience testing & optimization in Sitecore.

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As we’ve noted, Sitecore XP 9

empowers you to use Sitecore as a

central hub to manage all your

digital properties, Sitecore and non-

Sitecore, and seamlessly share

content, customer data, and

analytics between them.

Beyond xConnect, other supporting

factors that have enabled this unprecedented

level of connectivity between different

applications are Sitecore XP 9’s headless

content management, embedded detection

services, and email marketing capabilities.

Headless content management

involves the separation of the creation

and management of content (back-end)

from the delivery of this content to a web

page, application, IoT device, etc. (front-

end).

Sitecore’s approach with XP 9 allows

for personalization data from each

involved front-end to be stored in XP and

XM. This further supports the ability for

your marketing team to gain a holistic,

continuous view of customers, as their

interactions with your brand transition

across multiple channels, devices, and

other touchpoints.

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Email performance management and

delivery have also undergone significant

updates with XP 9.

Sitecore’s Email Experience Manager

(EXM) now uses xDB and integrated

marketing automation capabilities to allow for

emails to be triggered based on various

actions taken by a lead, prospect, or

customer.

The addition of new tools like List

Manager and Campaign Creator provide

added support for managing marketing

campaigns, with a step-by-step guide for

creating and sending an email campaign.

Finally, an overhauled UI makes these tools

more intuitive to use and enhances the

efficiency and effectiveness of your

marketing teams.

Fig 1:3 – Step-by-step instructions for setting up a Sitecore email campaign.

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Sitecore Experience Commerce

(XC) 9 represents a significant step

in Sitecore’s ambition to bring their

core competency as an infinitely-

customizable platform to the online

commerce market.

Although Sitecore has had a commerce

platform for several years, this is the first

release to completely retire the legacy

Commerce Server elements. These have been

replaced by a new Commerce Engine built on

top of the recent .NET Core stack using a

microservices architecture.

In a microservices architecture each

element of functionality is contained in a

separate plugin. So, for example,

functionality involving inventory is in a

separate package from catalog

functionality.

This provides you with “opt-in

complexity” when building your

commerce solution, allowing you to use

the plugins you need, while discarding

those that are not relevant to your

business needs.

Having less code as part of your

system makes it easier to extend and

evaluate the impact of a future upgrade.

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This microservices architecture takes root

in a key design goal of this platform, which is

to support extensibility while preserving

upgradability (avoiding the “too customized to

upgrade” trap).

Another fundamental evolution in the

commerce product is the use of SxA to house

a standard set of commerce components, and

to generate both a reference storefront and a

sample catalog, providing a starting point for

building your solution. SXA comes with a rich

set of drag-and-drop commerce components

(shopping carts, order displays, etc.) and

allows third-party developers to build drag-

and drop functionality for their plug-ins.

Sitecore XC also features a new Catalog

System. It uses the Schema.org product

standard, improving SEO and facilitating

interoperability with external systems such

as Google Product search.

A noteworthy feature of this new

Sitecore Commerce system is the flexible

way in which it combines elements such as

inventory, pricing, and promotions. For

example, inventories of individual products

can be combined into inventory sets, as can

price books and promotions.

This provides support for high-powered

commerce operations including catalog-

wide price and promotion adjustments,

management of multiple online storefronts,

inventory tracking across locations, and

expanded fulfillment abilities. Flexibility and

loose coupling are hallmarks of the system.

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Fig 1:4 – Sitecore Commerce 9 out of the box sample storefront site.

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A simpler, modern, consistent

user experience across the entirety

of Sitecore Experience Cloud 9

guarantees that the platform is

more intuitive to grasp and use.

This empowers your marketing team with

greater independence and flexibility, and

reduces overall training and support costs.

The performance of Sitecore’s in-page

editing tool, Experience Editor, has been

improved through better engineering,

ensuring that pages load quickly and the

interface responds quickly to commands

from content authors.

Sitecore XP 9 also incorporates the

Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SxA),

which allows content and marketing

teams to create and deliver content

across web channels with less

dependence on development resources.

With pre-built, mobile-first

components and templates that can be

dragged and dropped onto a page and

repurposed, SxA greatly speeds up time

to market.

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Sitecore Experience Cloud 9

provides customers with the

widest array of deployment options

(on-premise or hybrid cloud, in

addition to Platform-as-a-Service

(PaaS) cloud).

With XM and XP optimized for Azure, your

Sitecore solution can now be deployed in

under 30 minutes through Azure Resource

Manager (ARM) or Azure Marketplace.

Additionally, major updates to xDB will

allow you to deploy this database on

Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SQL

Azure, in addition to providing continued

support for the current MongoDB option.

This is a further step on Sitecore’s part to

provide the required flexibility to support

your organization’s business

requirements, existing technology stack,

and preferences.

Ultimately, these infrastructure

changes will allow your IT teams to

capitalize on the scale and speed benefits

of the cloud, while ensuring your

marketers achieve their desired time to

market, and website and campaign

performance.

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An enterprise-class search

capability uses powerful features

like customizable facets to allow

your audiences on the front-end,

and your authors on the back-end,

to find their desired content quickly

and efficiently.

In Sitecore XP and XM 9, Solr is now the

tool of choice for behind-the-scenes indexing

operations and working with xConnect. While

Lucene can still be used in your solution, it is

no longer officially supported by Sitecore,

especially in solutions that use a

distributed environment (multiple content

delivery and management servers).

Lead-capture forms are most likely

your marketers’ bread and butter, and

Sitecore 9 has completely redesigned this

capability to ensure better data capture

and reporting. In version 9, Sitecore Forms

replaces the previous Web Forms for

Marketers (WFFM).

This new product allows you to drag

and drop fields onto your forms and

optimizes them for the channel that they

will be delivered on. Forms can be

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repurposed and reskinned taking you to

market faster when you’re delivering content

to different sites, channels, or devices. The

data captured by these forms is stored in xDB

in real-time, enabling you with exceptional

opportunities to deliver personalized, in-

context experiences.

In addition to the improved data

collection ability with Sitecore Forms, Sitecore

9 also ensures better data accuracy by

providing stronger defense against constantly

evolving web crawlers, spiders, and bots.

By consolidating all your customer data

to Sitecore xDB, you can have more

confidence in your data and be rest assured

that your different channels are being tracked

and reported upon appropriately.

Fig 1:5 – The new Sitecore Forms.

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Beyond not being able to take

advantage of the security of a new

release and its powerful new

features, a key downside of failing

to upgrade is the lack of official

support from Sitecore for its older

versions.

Therefore, if your solution is on an older

version of Sitecore (listed to the right), you will

no longer receive support for bugs and

unexpected errors that you run into during

development, compatibility fixes for

supported platforms or hot-fixes, and patches

for product defects.

Older Sitecore Versions That Are No

Longer Officially Supported:

Mainstream support for

• Sitecore XP 7.2 and 7.5 ended in

December 2017

• Sitecore XP 7 and 7.1 ended in

December 2016

• Sitecore 6.6 ended in December

2015

• Sitecore 6.5 and earlier ended in

June 2015

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We recognize that every Sitecore solution

and corresponding upgrade is unique to

an organization, given its business-specific

goals, strategies, and technologies.

With the varying customizations and

setups that we might run into as a result,

our Sitecore Upgrade approach

incorporates both strategic aspects as well

as technical ones.

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The approach you take for your

upgrade depends on several

factors including your current

Sitecore version, the amount of

content you have and how much of

it can be migrated, your technology

stack and preferences, and any

custom features and integrations.

Let’s walk through some of these

different factors to identify how they can

impact your upgrade process, along with

other points you should keep in mind.

If you are moving from Sitecore XP 8.1

or later versions, the upgrade is very simple

and involves a single upgrade package,

allowing you to upgrade directly to XP 9.

If you are on Sitecore 6.6, 7.2, XP 7.5, or

XP 8.0, you have the option of creating a

fresh Sitecore XP 9 install and migrating

your content to it using the Express

Migration Tool, rather than upgrading

version by version.

If you are on Sitecore 6.5 or lower, 7.0,

or 7.1, you will have to step through each

upgrade version until you get to one

supported by the Express Migration Tool.

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Points to Note:

Setting up a new instance of Sitecore 9

requires you to use the Sitecore Installation

Framework (SIF).

Your upgrade process might include the

need to migrate and convert data from

MongoDB to SQL Server if you wish to move

to an entirely Microsoft-based stack.

Your Sitecore 9 solution will need to

utilize SQL Server 2016 to be compliant with

the new GDPR regulations.

Each of the custom modules, features,

and integrations in your solution will need to

be evaluated to determine any impact to their

functionality in the new version.

Deploying the upgrade across your

various environments will require a carefully

planned approach, especially if you have

complex setups between your higher and

lower environments with multiple content

management and delivery servers.

Make sure you test the upgrade in each

environment with thorough test cases and

comprehensive regression tests so that

there are no surprises once you go live!

The Express Migration Tool allows

you to move all the content and code

from your current Sitecore solution to the

new instance of the version you are

upgrading to (even accounting for content

schema changes). Once this migration is

complete, it then looks at your custom

code and modules to indicate what will

work in the migration and what won’t.

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Occasionally, the solution to a

given business problem might be

broader than an upgrade. In these

cases, we conduct various audits to

identify the best path forward.

The types of audits we execute depend

on our level of familiarity with a solution and

the client’s business goals/desired outcomes.

Digital Strategy Audit – This audit allows

us to get a sense for the current state of your

digital marketing programs, the depth of your

understanding of your audiences, the

complexity of your customer journeys, and

your relevant goals, KPIs, and success metrics.

Content Audit – During a significant

Sitecore project (redesign, upgrade,

migration, etc.), we also usually review

your IA and conduct a content inventory.

This is done to identify stale content to be

sunset and special content types, features,

or customizations to be accounted for.

Technical & Infrastructure Audit:

Our Sitecore Audit is focused on the

quality of your solution's architecture and

implementation. It covers an assessment

of your environments, hardware, code,

integrations, server configuration,

performance, and Sitecore logs, and

includes recommendations for getting

your solution on the right track.

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We are one of the most experienced and

capable Sitecore Platinum Partners in

North America. We are a pioneer in the

industry, being among the first to partner

with Sitecore when they entered the US

market in 2006. We have since completed

hundreds of Sitecore implementations,

projects, and upgrades.

We also maintain one of the deepest

benches with 40+ Sitecore-certified

developers. We continually invest in our

Sitecore partnership through ongoing

training, participation in the annual

Sitecore Symposium, and hosting of the

New England Sitecore User Group, where

we share our expertise and innovative

work of our 6 Sitecore MVPs.

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We are a full-service digital agency based

right outside of Boston, in Somerville MA.

Being surrounded by world class higher

education institutions like Harvard and MIT,

as well as cutting-edge businesses in

healthcare and technology, infuses our work

with incredible ideas, talent, and creative

energy. With a team of over 130 digital

experts, we are best-known for our

collaborations with some of the world’s

largest and most influential organizations

across a variety of verticals such as:

• Healthcare

• Education

• Non-Profits & Foundations

• Professional Associations

• Professional Services

• Publishing

Our core competencies in digital

strategy, experience design, web analytics,

content management, marketing

automation, enterprise technology

implementations, and data storytelling

have helped shape the digital presence for

brands such as Bayer, The Metropolitan

Museum of Art, Harvard University, AARP,

Main Line Health, and others.

We were recently selected as the

“Small Business of the Year” by both the

Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce

and the Somerville Chamber of

Commerce.

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• Our Sitecore Capabilities as a Platinum Partner

• Sitecore Rescue & Audit Services

• Sitecore Hosting with Microsoft Azure

• Support & Managed Services

• Blog: The Cognitive Core - Velir’s Solution for Using Machine Learning APIs with Sitecore

• Blog: Why You Need to Consider Azure PaaS for Your Sitecore Implementation Now

• News: Velir Presenting as a Platinum Sponsor at the 2018 Sitecore Symposium in Orlando,

Florida

• News: Digital Agency Velir Wins 6 2018 Sitecore MVPs in the Technology, Ambassador, &

Strategy Categories

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Thank you for taking the time to read through this whitepaper!

If you are considering an upgrade of your Sitecore solution or have questions regarding any of the

topics described above, we’d love to hear from you! Please reach out to us using any of the

following methods:

Email: info@velir.com Phone: 617.491.6900 Web: velir.com/contact

We’re also active across a variety of social channels and our blog, posting industry news, our

thoughts on the latest trends, and details about the projects we’re working on. If you’d like to hear

more, make sure to connect with us on your platform of choice!

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