1. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 1www.sitecore.net Patrick Schweizer Director of Sales Enablement pas@Sitecore.netApril 2013

2. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 2www.sitecore.net Industry / Macro Trends Content Marketing has emerged as a cornerstone marketing strategy Open / click-through / Conversion at an all time low and continue to trend down Customers are increasing engaging across many devices and channels Managing a version of the content across all channels and languages

3. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 3www.sitecore.net Challenge 1 – Content Marketing OVERLOAD Success in content marketing requires a rich set of content: Not all of the content can / should come from the marketer. Social content is high credibility content, but difficult to store/manage Large volumes of content can be difficult to organize and manage Marketers want to personalize the customer experience but are wary of the overhead. Customers want more sophisticated ways of finding, filtering and consuming content. To be successful, you NEED to be able to handle more content.

4. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 4www.sitecore.net Challenge 2 – Relevancy to drive engagement Customers are attention poor. Marketers need to use relevancy to cut through the noise to gain attention. Presenting relevant content to the right person at the right time, in the right place is the holy grail for marketers Large volumes of content and customers make it difficult to be agile in terms of offers and promotions Marketers need to be able to react quickly to poorly preforming campaigns, most of these adjustment center around more relevant content. Personalize experiences need to become easier to manage and maintain Not all social content is relevant (or helpful), locally storing, approving, and filtering this content is necessary.

5. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 5www.sitecore.net Problems that Sitecore 7 solves “I have 1.3 million products, I don’t need all the content to live in Sitecore but I want to be able to use all CEP features.” “My customers need to be able to refine their search results quickly and we want to easily be able to manage their search experiences.” “Our promotion department needs a way prioritize featured products during a search.” “I know my customers are using words when searching for our content that are not returning any results.” “The list of services on the home page frequently change and manually choosing them takes too much time.” “The development and configuration time of our new system needs to be significantly shorter, our ROI needs to start in the same year as the software purchase”

6. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 6www.sitecore.net Sitecore 7 Goals Store and retrive a LOT of content Sitecore customers can store, but more importantly, easily manage massive volumes of content. Content and websites don’t always fit neatly into tree structures, and customers certainly don’t feel compelled to adhere to a website’s navigation. Better way for developers to access content New content access APIs such as LINQ make quering content easier with less lines of code. Development and testing time can be reduced dramatically with content structures now being higly visible durring the coding process. Provide a best in class search and personalized experience Search facets, result boosting, and tagging give the customers a relevant as well as immediate search experience. Once static lists of content now can be dynamic and based on personalized queries, easily defined by marketers.

7. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 7www.sitecore.net New Features Sitecore 7

8. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 8www.sitecore.net Store 10s of millions of content items. Items are now retrieved using a search tool instead of time intensive browsing. Batch actions can happen on a list of results such as keyword tagging. Content Scaling “I have 1.3 million products, I don’t need all the content to live in Sitecore but I want to be able to use all CEP features.”

9. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 9www.sitecore.net Search facets can be defined and maintained by the marketer. These facets appear in the backend and optionally appear in the frontend search's. A single facets can span many different types of content, forming a aggregated result set. Items counts are displayed along side each facet. Search Facets “My customers need to be able to refine their search results quickly and we want to easily be able to manage their search experiences.”

10. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 10www.sitecore.net Search boosting allows content to be pushed higher in the result set of searches. Boosting rules can be created and maintained by business users with the standard rules editor interface. A boosting value is applied once a rule condition is satisfied, which can both increase or decrease an items position in the search results. Search Boosting “Our promotion department needs a way prioritize featured products during a search.”

11. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 11www.sitecore.net Search tagging lets a term be quickly and easily signed to content, ultimately returning that content in a search when the tag is used. Tags are not metadata but more of a semantic field used for shaping search results. Tags can be applied to an entire result set. There can be multiple and/or shares tag libraries across sites. Search Tagging “I know my customers are using words when searching for our content that are not returning any results.”

12. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 12www.sitecore.net Business users are able to build queries using a simple search interface. Personalization can be used to multiple multiple queries for each component. Example: All people that have been looking at summer clothes, now sees a list of summer sale items on the home page. Content Queries “The list of services on the home page frequently change and manually choosing them takes too much time.”

13. Sitecore. Compelling Web Experiences Page 13www.sitecore.net Hibernate Ultimately allows developers to write C# classes and properties that are strongly typed and map to Sitecore items and fields. Currently works with the new search and will eventually fall into the category of object relational mapping (ORM) software. Caution: not a strict implementation of hibernate but hibernate-like. New search APIs Give Sitecore a competitive advantage in the long run Provides the ability to integrate faster and with more search vendors. Other vendors who also support LINQ Most of the C# open source competitors support LINQ at some level, and so has Sitecore in the past. Most apps just use LINQ to SQL or XML and say they support it. Sitecore is actually implementing the LINQ API instead of just using it with existing implementations. New Developer Stuff “The development and configuration time of our new system needs to be significantly shorter, our ROI needs to start in the same year as the software purchase”