Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best Sitecore’s MVPs identify features they couldn’t live without and what they think businesses, IT, and developers will appreciate most DEMAND MORE PERFORMANCE White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best Contents Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 2 What’s your favorite feature of Sitecore XP 8.1? E.g., what part do you think businesses couldn’t live without?����������������������������������������������������� 2 What in your opinion is the greatest benefit of Sitecore XP 8.1 for digital technologists and IT leaders?������������������������������������������������������������������� 7 What in your opinion is the greatest benefit of Sitecore XP 8.1 for developers?������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 10 The MVP nomination process������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 12 Next steps��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 12 Participating MVPs���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 13 About Sitecore������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 16 Published 11/15. © 2001-2015 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners. This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore. 1 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best Introduction Sitecore’s Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) program was founded in 2007 as a way to acknowledge those individuals who actively participate in online and offline communities around the world and share their knowledge of Sitecore with other partners and customers. At the end of each calendar year, Sitecore employees and existing Sitecore MVPs nominate community members to become either a Technology MVP or a Digital Strategist MVP. One of the benefits of being a Sitecore MVP is access to early product releases. For the debut of Sitecore XP 8.1, which launched officially on Oct. 20, 2015, the MVPs were given access in August. To acknowledge and introduce the MVPs and share their initial reactions of Sitecore XP 8.1 to a nonMVP audience, we asked them to answer three questions: 1. What’s your favorite feature of Sitecore XP 8.1? E.g., what part do you think businesses couldn’t live without? 2. What in your opinion is the greatest benefit of Sitecore XP 8.1 for digital technologists and IT leaders? 3. What in your opinion is the greatest benefit of Sitecore XP 8.1 for developers? This white paper curates their responses. Most MVPs say they welcome the integration of some common tools like IP Geolocation and Device Detection, and Language Fallback, which previously were add-on modules. Other favorite features include SPEAK upgrades, the CMS-only mode, persistent behavioral profiles, Experience Editor improvements, faster performance, and the overall maturity of the platform. Federated Experience Manager also gets several mentions as a favorite feature, as does the Campaign Creator functionality. Read on to discover the best of what Sitecore XP 8.1 has to offer, from the MVPs who know Sitecore best. What’s your favorite feature of Sitecore XP 8.1? E.g., what part do you think businesses couldn’t live without? “In Sitecore XP 8.1, a contact’s behavioral profile persists between sessions. This sounds like a relatively small enhancement, but I think it’s a massive improvement for marketers. For the first time, Sitecore provides out-of-the-box functionality to personalize the experience of returning visitors— they can pick up exactly where they left off. Profiles gradually decay with each subsequent visit. This means that a visitor’s current session provides the most relevant data for personalization, but their past activity still informs your overall view of them.” — Martin Davies, 2015 Technology MVP “Sitecore XP 8.1 brings the complete promise of the Experience Platform to the table. There is no single new or updated feature in Sitecore XP 8.1 that peaks above all, rather the cumulative effect of the matured platform is what businesses are waiting for. Sitecore XP 8.1 marks the completion of a great amount of things that Sitecore 8.0 started. It now integrates capabilities that’d been supported from the community into the core product and irons out some of the bumps in terms of services and contracts required to support the rich experience marketing. Native platform adoption and addition means faster 2 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best time to market which makes all the difference in today’s economic market. We live in the era where relevant experiences need to be delivered yesterday rather than today. Sitecore XP 8.1 might not be able to do that but it’s the closest you’ll get.” getFieldValue pipeline looks like it could make some other customizations much easier. I think a couple of people are probably already working on a new version of the Field Fallback Module.” — Ben Golden, 2008 Technology MVP — Ivan Lieckens, 2015 Technology MVP “…One of the features that always seems to pique interest for our customers is FXM [Federated Experience Manager]. It is certainly valuable to collect analytics for other sites, but the feature that always has everyone ‘wowing’ is the ability to pull content from Sitecore and present it on other websites. We’ve demonstrated this a few times to potential customers and the marketing folks definitely consider this a novel concept, because they can create all their marketing content in one place and be able to present it on all their other (nonSitecore) properties.” — Bhavik Patel, 2015 Technology MVP “The integration of common features that we implement often, like Language Fallback and IP Detection. We have a lot of customers looking to upgrade because of the deprecation of the version they are on.” — Jason Hedlund, 2011 Technology MVP “My favorite part of 8.1 is probably the Language Fallback. We use the module on nearly all multi-lingual solutions, so it’s nice to have it as part of the core product now. On top of that, the new “The new, unified approach to IP Geolocation and Device Detection solves a common website need that is traditionally solved through independent vendors. Having the features baked right into Sitecore means less of an infrastructure headache for marketers and puts these tools front and center for developers when architecting a solution, rather than it being a late-breaking bolt-on feature.” — Richard (Rick) Cabral, 2010 Technology MVP “The feature which instantly caught my attention was Language Fallback— something here at True Clarity we must have implemented into almost every one of our projects. When something like this is provided out of the box, it really is of interest. The ability to provide field-level fall back in such a flexible way also is extremely interesting. The simpler it is to get up and running, the better. Indeed it was really intuitive to set up, which is fantastic.” — David Leigh, 2015 Technology MVP “I really like the improvements made in SPEAK, but I think the single most helpful Sitecore XP 8.1 feature will be Language Fallback as part of the core installation. Certain businesses won’t be able to live 3 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best without certain features, but I think the ability to do item- and field-level fallback out of the box makes it more automatic for companies doing business in various regions and cultures.” with SPEAK using prebuilt components regularly used within the Sitecore CMS. This can reduce training costs.” — Michael Robbins, 2015 Technology MVP — Mark Servais, 2014 Technology MVP “My favorite feature of 8.1 is the advanced integration of testing to the interfaces that we already know. The prompt to test should be in the forefront of every content editor / marketing strategist at every point. Know what the impact of the change is.” — Nathanael Mann, 2015 Technology MVP “Experience Editor Validation is a small but really a very important thing that has been missing. That wasn’t a day too early. Also good to see that it validates related items as well.” — Mikael Högberg, 2013 Technology MVP “The upgrade to Sitecore SPEAK with version 2.0 in Sitecore XP 8.1 is huge, pushing Sitecore SPEAK further. Developers have the ability to create business applications within the Sitecore platform, and leverage Sitecore framework features such as user management, security, content, the media library, and workflow. This is a huge benefit for business. Applications can be created faster, with Sitecore acting as a single unified interface and platform. Knowledge for Sitecore content editors can be transferred to SPEAK-built applications, “From my point of view, the features that have been added to improve the Experience Editor (EE) are the best because they are the most used on a day-to-day basis. At its core, most content editors spend a lot of time in the EE, whether they are editing content, making tests, personalization rules, etc. Making this experience easy and smooth makes using Sitecore pleasurable. Features such as optimization on the EE elements loading (I noticed they load much faster!) are key in making sure content editors are able to do everything they want without any obstacles. I also definitely like the ‘edit all versions’ for the layout. If I am not mistaken, in pre-8.1 you couldn’t edit the shared layouts in EE, which would make it difficult for someone to add a new component across multiple languages, and this opens it up for more granular control, which again, makes their lives easy.” — Mickey Rahman, 2015 Technology MVP “I still think the coolest feature is the core CMS. If I had to choose from the new features, I would definitely say working with layouts in the Experience Editor (now it has become much more applicable) and the built-in Language Fallback.” — Sebastian Winslow, 2009 Technology MVP 4 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best “One area that clients are getting keen on are the possibilities that FXM [Federated Experience Manager] is opening. Client-side analytics really appeals as they can make use of their existing edge caching providers but also achieve personalization. Based on this, the improvements to FXM would get my vote, things like the ability to pass data back to the beacon through the framework are great.” — Nick Hill, 2015 Technology MVP “Sitecore XP 8.1 introduces the ability to personalize based on visitor behavior from previous visits, with a built-in decay mechanism. This further advances Sitecore’s capabilities to enable a continuous, coherent visitor experience across visits, devices, and channels, and is a big step in realizing the full potential of the xDB Contact.” — Dan Solovay, 2013 Technology MVP “Federated Experience Manager. Omnichannel is huge right now, and this tool seems pretty unique.” Favorite Sitecore XP 8.1 features from Reactive, part of Accenture Interactive ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ xDB can now utilize actions from previous visits as well as decay aspects of profiles over time, which should allow us increased accuracy and continuity in personalization. Packaging of the product into Experience Management (CMS-only) and Experience Platform versions should help get the product into a lower price point. Ability to associate marketing actions to a venue (e.g. kiosk vs. mobile device) allows more relevant personalization for each device. Federated Experience Manager now supports Web Forms for Marketers, meaning Sitecore forms can be displayed on third-party sites. Supports Mongo DB 3.0, which is the most mature release to date. Starting to become a very stable and reliable platform. — Michael Tandrup, 2014 Digital Strategist MVP “My favorite feature is Device Detection. Up until this point it has been a bit of a hassle to implement something that would take into account different conditions. Having rules to define how devices are resolved is a big deal.” — Julia Gavrilova, 2014 Technology MVP “I’m very happy with the improvements to the content management parts of Sitecore. Of course we all value its marketing features and, to be honest, we base most of our pitch story lines on them. But I think Sitecore XP 8.1 is really a release for the content managers and developers working on the content-centric features of a website. A true highlight obviously is the 5 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best Language Fallback feature, which relieves us from using the language fallback module. And last but not least the Page Editor improvements bring this tool one step closer to being a full replacement for the Content Editor for page creation tasks. Especially with component-enabled presentation layers (maybe even with dynamic placeholders), the Page Editor is a must for power editors, too. And now it seems the Page Editor gets the attention it deserves.” — Reto Hugi, 2013 Technology MVP “My favorite thing is the performance. Sitecore XP 8.1 feels a bit quicker than 8.0, especially once the AppPool is warmed up. It feels like Sitecore improved some of the stuff that was new to 8.0.” and are run in a more ad hoc fashion by marketing managers who have no qualms spinning up a new Wordpress or Drupal site that only needs to live for six months. FXM helps fix the major problem with this—loss of centralized data. Since FXM isn’t new with 8.1, I enjoyed the Campaign Creator [CC] functionality. It really helps to solve the problem that arises when non-technical marketers need campaign metadata in a time-sensitive fashion. With CC they can specify campaign details themselves, get their campaign code, and move on quickly.” — Andrew Blackmore, 2015 Digital Strategist MVP — Charles Turano, 2014 Technology MVP “I’m very excited about the ability to act on historic behavioral data. Personalizing based on visit was powerful, but this historic view of the customer significantly expands the scope of personalization decisions. This is a capability we are very excited about.” — Corey Caplette, 2010 Technology MVP “My favorite feature, by a mile, is FXM [Federated Experience Manager]. It answers the reality that most organizations are not in a dream world of single-platform, neat-and-tidy IT environments. The reality is, as marketing leverages digital channels more and more, there is an increasing likelihood that IT projects are less controlled in a top-down fashion 6 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best What in your opinion is the greatest benefit of Sitecore XP 8.1 for digital technologists and IT leaders? presence and customer retention practices become more robust. Indirectly, customers benefit by utilizing the CMS that implementers prefer, and have invested talent, infrastructure, and process to support—the ‘value add’ for CMS implementations in the first place.” — Richard (Rick) Cabral, 2010 Technology MVP MVPs claimed digital technologists and IT leaders would benefit from more tightly integrated features, the new packaging, expanded FXM capabilities, xDB, the integration capabilities of the .NET framework, improved analytics capabilities, and more. “Tighter integration with Page Editor, through which users can now do the majority of their work. That and Campaign Creator functionality.” — Jason Hedlund, 2011 Technology MVP “The historical personalization with the decay algorithm sounds pretty cool. It has the potential to make personalization seem much more natural and less noticeable to the end user. The integrated GeoIP also sounds like it would be nice for this group.” — Ben Golden, 2008 Technology MVP “From a licensing perspective, Sitecore XP 8.1 allows implementers to recommend Sitecore to a wider audience. Sitecore’s incredible ability to scale and flex can serve growing businesses and marketing departments for years as their digital “The platform continues to evolve to meet the needs of marketers, which I think serves marketers as much as it serves IT in making it easier for IT to provide a solution to marketing. The platform is continuing to move in the direction of having marketing fully integrated into every aspect of the solution. With marketing as a first-class stakeholder for the platform, I expect to see greater collaboration between IT and marketing to make truly great customer experiences.” — Andrew Blackmore, 2015 Digital Strategist MVP “Sitecore XP 8.1 brings back a CMSonly mode and along with it a new array of pricing. This will heavily influence decision-making as the platform no longer is ‘all-in’ or ‘nothing.’ It enables enterprises to dip their toes in the water and be supported all the way through this journey of digital transformation both in platform capability and pricing. We are in the era of cloud where everything can infinitely scale, and you pay for only what you use. Bringing these concepts to the 8.1 platform will convince digital technologists and IT leaders to select Sitecore as their bedrock upon which to build a successful strategy.” — Ivan Lieckens, 2015 Technology MVP 7 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best “In my opinion, a key feature here is the complete xDB and all its possibilities.” — Kevin Brechbühl, 2015 Technology MVP “I still think Sitecore’s extensible capabilities as a platform and the abilities of the .NET framework allow easier integration with existing investments within an organization. I think out-ofthe-box features make it easier for a technologist to manage versus having to worry about add-in modules. But the fact I can leverage the Sitecore investment to tie into other systems not necessarily on the same platform is gold to me as a technologist.” provided a massive added value for IT leaders to enable their marketing organization to really see how their content is working (via all the different analytical tools). I think 8.1 adds to that by refining some of those features, such as Device Detection. Given this feature, implementations can now have this data point in the already rich analytics to give even more insights. Venue tracking is another one, that when added to the bigger set of data points, add a lot of value. So, in my opinion, it’s the whole package of all the individual features that add up to a big benefit that IT leaders can implement for their organization.” — Mickey Rahman, 2015 Technology MVP — Mark Servais, 2014 Technology MVP “From a digital tech point of view, I think the most important benefit is actually that Sitecore continuously stays up to date with technologies from its partners, like Mongo, Microsoft MVC. So upgrades to match release cycles are important.” — Nathanael Mann, 2015 Technology MVP “Ability to edit the shared rendering in Experience Editor is key. The new Device Detection feature and the new IP Geolocation service are good.” — Mikael Högberg, 2013 Technology MVP “I’m not sure there is ONE thing that makes 8.1 a standout, for IT leaders, but more a combination of the whole package. The changes in 8.0 already “I think for one set of customers the option of having a CMS, while still retaining the in-session personalization option, and for the other set of customers (using Analytics) I think [the greatest benefit] is the improvements in the Content Testing.” — Sebastian Winslow, 2009 Technology MVP “I think four features of Sitecore XP 8.1 will be beneficial for IT and digital technologists: 1. Outcome tracking: Being able to roll a bunch of goals up under an Outcome is a great leap forward for Experience Analytics. I’m looking forward to tackling exactly how we go about using Outcomes as a way of validating performance. 2. Addition of real-time live engagement tracking: Being able to do real-time state tracking will be awesome for changing the experience as users move through engagement plans. 8 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best 3. Content Testing with Reach and Effect metrics in context will be very useful. 4. Path Analyzer: I’m looking forward to using this as a way of assessing customer goal-funnels for different segments and outcomes. This could be an incredibly powerful way of assessing what’s working for specific audiences to achieve specific outcomes—I’m trying to wrap my head around exactly how we’ll utilize it, but am excited by the promise of it!” — Stephen Foxworthy, 2014 Digital Strategist MVP “Sitecore XP 8.1 has greatly enhanced reporting capabilities, such as Reach and Effect metrics on personalization rules, drill-down in dashboard reports, and a significantly extended Path Analyzer, which now provides visualization of which paths are leading to goals being met or contacts being acquired. This will make it much easier for business users to understand what is happening from an experience marketing perspective on the website and across channels.” “I think that the expansion of the FXM [Federal Experience Manager] capabilities in 8.1 is going to be welcome for digital technologists who have to maintain a landscape of legacy sites in addition to Sitecore. The ability to support WFFM [Web Forms for Marketers] over FXM is of particular interest. I think that’s a fantastic feature. This together with the acknowledgment that Sitecore is continuously improving their analytics I think means that people will begin centralizing customer engagement within Sitecore instead of using additional products like Marketo or Pardot.” — Matthew Kenny, 2013 Technology MVP — Dan Solovay, 2013 Technology MVP “Improved interface. Both a slightly better UX, but also better integration of the tools, which will make it easier to use them as part of the workflow. Testing is a good example.” — Michael Tandrup, 2014 Digital Strategist MVP 9 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best What in your opinion is the greatest benefit of Sitecore XP 8.1 for developers? “Scalability has always been an important asset of Sitecore, and 8.1 does a lot to simplify the process for developers working with customers of varying sizes and requirements.” — Martin Davies, 2015 Technology MVP Not surprisingly, many MVPs thought developers would benefit most from SPEAK 2.0, while others pointed to MVC upgrades, WFFM improvements, and a speedier start-up in Sitecore XP 8.1. “I would list several: ■■ Better integration of common modules. Less dependency on separate modules, which in turn makes the upgrade process more seamless. ■■ Better integration with Page Editor. ■■ More maintainable configuration files. ■■ New SPEAK controls.” — Jason Hedlund, 2011 Technology MVP “Aside from the Language Fallback, I think the best part for developers will likely be SPEAK 2.0.” — Ben Golden, 2008 Technology MVP “I know it’s not actually a core feature per se, but actually I’m quite excited about the SPEAK 2.0 ‘guidance repository.’ I think it will make SPEAK development practices a lot more accessible to everyone.” — Matthew Kenny, 2013 Technology MVP “Sitecore XP 8.1 is the first stepping stone to a more complete SPEAK framework, [which helps] adoption and migration paths transition smoother. Aside from this, the fact that an existing community module was included into the core product is a boost to all developers [trying to improve] the platform. Everyone from the Sitecore community can add value to the platform as a whole, making the Sitecore Experience Platform the powerhouse it is today and will be tomorrow.” — Ivan Lieckens, 2015 Technology MVP “I like the new implementations coming for Microsoft MVC. And I like that a lot of features implemented [address community requests].” — Kevin Brechbühl, 2015 Technology MVP “The SPEAK improvements, including the changes to the ListControl and the introduction of EntityDataSource (which takes the place of the WebDataSource). I think the new data source allows me to process JSON a bit easier and, based on the SPEAK Component Guidance and examples in the related assembly, I should be able to quickly create abstractions to existing data stores of information 10 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best to consume in SPEAK applications without the additional needs of extra parsing or integration directly into Sitecore.” — Mark Servais, 2014 Technology MVP “MVC areas out of the box I think is probably the greatest benefit. The segregation of independent sites on the same installation is a constant challenge in the Sitecore development arena.” — Nathanael Mann, 2015 Technology MVP “The MVC upgrade will probably be very much appreciated. Performance improvement of the Experience Editor and the revised Language Fallback is really nice, too.” “xDB Mongo upgrades and xDB Cloud make accessing and utilizing data easier, with less server/ infrastructure issues.” — Stephen Foxworthy, 2014 Digital Strategist MVP “With Sitecore XP 8.1, developers will be able to build authoring experiences around the Experience Editor, with confidence that it is now fully featureequivalent to the Content Editor. It loads much faster than before, supports item validation when items are saved, allows managing versions, and editing shared fields and layouts. In addition, client-side JavaScript errors are now logged, making troubleshooting of Experience Editor and end-user front-end issues much more effective.” — Dan Solovay, 2013 Technology MVP — Mikael Högberg, 2013 Technology MVP “From a development perspective, I like the improvements on the Web Form for Marketers module. Little things, like having switchmastertoweb. config as part of the main repo, is also helpful. And the greatest one would probably be the start-up time. I’ve noticed that getting to the login screen and firsttime previews (with no cache) is much faster than in 8.0.” “The possibility to work with MVC. And improved browser capability.” — Michael Tandrup, 2014 Digital Strategist MVP “Device Detection and the new version of SPEAK. … If the new version provides a more consistent and documented way of creating applications, it would be awesome.” — Julia Gavrilova, 2014 Technology MVP — Mickey Rahman, 2015 Technology MVP “The default edits to configuration, which free up a ton of web configuration space.” — Kam Figy, 2013 Technology MVP 11 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best The MVP nomination process Wondering how you can become a Sitecore MVP? At the end of each calendar year, Sitecore employees and existing Sitecore MVPs nominate community members for the MVP award. You may also nominate yourself, but only Sitecore MVPs and employees may recommend a nominee. The nomination period lasts one month, starting November 1st and closing December 1st. All nominees then undergo an evaluation by a panel of teams from Sitecore, which considers the quality, quantity, and level of impact of the nominee’s expertise and voluntary community contributions for the past year. The Technology MVP award is awarded to individuals who are actively participating in online and offline communities and events. They share their expertise and experience through different types of media with other partners and customers all around the globe. Criteria includes: Content contributions (e.g., writing/publishing of white papers, articles, blog posts, videos, and presentations) ■■ Sitecore Marketplace contributions ■■ Online podcasts and webinars The Sitecore Digital Strategist MVP award is for individuals with strong experience executing datadriven marketing and using the Sitecore Experience Platform to drive business results. These individuals are capable of using Sitecore Experience Marketing capabilities, such as Analytics, Testing, Experience Automation, Social Connect and/or Personalization. The individuals are also strong advocates for Sitecore Experience Marketing and have evangelized its use through either public speaking, webinars, blogs, articles or in case studies. Sitecore Community forum product contributions and feedback Contributions on community.sitecore.net and other online communities More information on Sitecore’s MVP program can be found on our website. General (technical) advocacy ■■ Blog contributions ■■ ■■ Sitecore User Group Management, contributions, and participation For 2016, Sitecore is introducing a Commerce MVP award. This will be awarded to commerce experts and enthusiasts who use Sitecore to empower e-commerce solutions and who are actively participating in online and offline communities and events. Commerce MVPs will share unique commerce-related expertise and experience through different types of media with other partners and customers around the globe. ■■ ■■ ■■ Next steps Interested in hearing more from Sitecore’s MVP community? You’ll find them answering questions and discussing issues in the Sitecore Community, where you’re welcome to join in the discussion, and posting guest blogs on our Technical Blog site. And if our MVPs have piqued your interest in Sitecore XP 8.1, you may be interested in our white paper “Why upgrade to Sitecore XP 8.1?”. That paper outlines what users on Sitecore 6.x and 7.x systems gain from upgrading to 8.1 and discusses upgrading from a TCO perspective as well as upgrading vs. migrating from scratch. 12 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best Participating MVPs Technology MVPs Kevin Brechbühl Senior Application Architect Unic AG Technology MVP since 2015 ctor.io @aquasonic Julia Gavrilova Architect XCentium Technology MVP since 2014 sitecoreexperiences.blogspot.com @julia812 Richard (Rick) Cabral Director of .NET Development Genuine Interactive Technology MVP since 2010 Blog @sitecorerick Ben Golden Dir. of Technology/Sr. Solution Architect Aware Web Solutions, Inc. Technology MVP since 2008 Blog: Aware Insights @BenGGolden Corey Caplette Chief Technology Officer Velir Studios Technology MVP since 2010 velir.com/blog @cjcaplette Jason Hedlund VP of Technology Aware Web Solutions, Inc. Technology MVP since 2011 Blog: Aware Insights @hedj17 Martin Davies Consultant Developer Kagool Technology MVP since 2015 sitecoreskills.blogspot.co.uk @twentygototen Nick Hills Sr. Web Developer True Clarity Technology MVP since 2015 blog.boro2g.co.uk (Not on Twitter) Kam Figy Sr. Technical Architect ConnectiveDX (formerly ISITE Design) Technology MVP since 2013 kamsar.net @kamsar Mikael Högberg CTO / Solutions Architect Stendahls Agency Technology MVP since 2013 mikael.com @mikaelnet 13 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best Reto Hugi Senior Consultant, Section Leader Unic AG Technology MVP since 2013 sitecore.unic.com @retohugi Bhavik Patel Technology Manager SymSoft Solutions, LLC Technology MVP since 2015 Blog @bushland25 Matthew Kenny Sitecore Architect Codehouse Group Technology MVP since 2013 matthewkenny.com Mickey Rahman Senior Techncial Architect MindShift Technologies, Inc. Technology MVP since 2015 mickeyrahman.wordpress.com @mickrhm David Leigh Principal Developer True Clarity Technology MVP since 2015 daveleigh.co.uk @technologytalks Michael Robbins Senior Software Developer True Clarity Technology MVP since 2015 mikerobbins.co.uk @Sobek85 Ivan Lieckens Sitecore Architect Cegeka NV Technology MVP since 2015 @ivanlieckens Nathanael Mann Sitecore Solution Architect Test-Aankoop / Test-Achats Technology MVP since 2015 cardinalcore.co.uk @cardinal252 Mark Servais Director, Software Research and Development XCentium Technology MVP since 2014 markservais.com @mservais Dan Solovay Lead Architect XCentium Technology MVP since 2013 dansolovay.com @dansolovay 14 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best Charles Turano Sr. Developer, Partner Hedgehog Development, LLC Technology MVP since 2014 hhogdev.com/blog @charlesturano Sebastian Winslow Partner Codehouse A/S Technology MVP since 2009 Digital Strategist MVPs Stephen Foxworthy Strategy Director Reactive Digital Strategist MVP since 2014 @stephfox Michael Tandrup Senior Digital Strategist Dis/Play DK Digital Strategist MVP since 2014 @michaeltandrup Andrew Blackmore Solution Principal Slalom Consulting Digital Strategist MVP since 2015 slalom.com/thinking @amblackmore 15 White paper // Sitecore® XP 8.1: What you need to know, from those who know best About Sitecore Sitecore is the global leader in experience management software. The Sitecore® Experience Platform™ manages content, supplies contextual intelligence, and automates communications, at scale. It empowers marketers to deliver content in context of how customers have engaged with their brand, across every channel, in real time. More than 4,400 of the world’s leading brands—including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, easyJet, and L’Oréal—trust Sitecore for context marketing to deliver the personalized interactions that delight audiences, build loyalty, and drive revenue. Visit us at sitecore.net 16
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