Sitecore Technical Workshops - Top FAQs customers asked on XM Cloud

Hi Readers,

I want to talk to you about interesting things which we have been doing which is "Technical Workshops" for our customers, so here goes the scenarios.

So, we have been doing multiple types of technical workshops. 

1) Training customer and their Sitecore technical team on latest and the greatest technologies like XM Cloud & Another composable stack and try enabling them for new Sitecore tech stack.

2) Customers / Potential Customers have their agenda of existing pain points, and we take a workshop on topics around them with best practices etc. little on new technologies, so they also know the future.

Basically, we prepare custom targeted presentations & demos for individual workshops, and make sure it helps them answer their questions and they get insights of where Sitecore eco systems has to offer from their versatile toolset and try to keep them up to date with it.

So, Purpose of this blog is, because in all these customer & their technical team's engagements we get lot of questions from customers around Sitecore & Composable stack and where the world is moving, and I feel all those questions are so valid and so applicable to anyone, so why not to share it so community can know and have answers too.

Some of the questions they get are below.

QUESTIONS

1) We have our own content storage and asset management system in house, where content approval etc. takes place before making it public, is it possible to keep using it and not move to another DAM like Content Hub? 

          

Answer - 

Well, the whole purpose of composable is to use "Best of the breeds", That means customers ("you") are in control to select which tools they want to use, You will get the ultimate ROI by utilizing the tools you already have, Provided it has standard eco system of APIs which can be consumed, It could be pluggable but how much efforts is needed is purely depending on the system you use, but answer is YES, You can.

2) Can I select data center of my choice? 

Answer -

Yes & No, Because XM Cloud has predefined support for existing data centers, So there are couple of choices. 

But for example, if you already have a data center location in mind and if you want to set up XM Cloud for that region, it could be possible that currently that data center does not exist.

3) In XM Cloud, what is the disaster recovery plan? Because things are controlled by Sitecore.

Answer -

Backup and Disaster Recovery All SaaS Products are designed and configured for high availability and resiliency against local outages. Sitecore runs all critical components of each of the SaaS Products in at least 2 cloud provider datacenters in separate availability zones within the selected cloud provider region. In addition, as part of its backup procedures Sitecore replicates the backup of all Customer Data to at least 1 other region (the paired cloud datacenter region). Whenever possible the paired cloud datacenter region(s) are at least 300 miles apart, but this is not always possible given that, to satisfy data residency, tax and legal enforcement requirements, the paired cloud datacenter regions must be in the same geography.

 

Sitecore will implement and update on a periodic basis its disaster recovery policies, standards, and procedures, and will maintain strict compliance with its disaster recovery policies, standards, and procedures. Sitecore will report disasters (or potential disasters) to Customer Named Contacts promptly upon identification. Sitecore will schedule and test the components of its disaster recovery plans at least twice a year. In case of a disaster, when one of the cloud datacenter regions is disrupted or inaccessible and deemed non-recoverable by the cloud service provider, Sitecore will use best efforts to achieve a Recovery Point Objective of 24 hours and a Recovery Time Objective of 3 working days recovery at the paired cloud datacenter region. Sitecore shall use reasonable commercial endeavours to restore the lost or damaged Customer Data from the latest back-up of such Customer Data maintained by Sitecore.

See below link for more information.

Sitecore SaaS Service Level Agreement (SLA) | Sitecore Legal Hub 

4) Experience Edge has limit of 50 MB, what happens we have > 50 MB data.

Answer - 

This is the size that you are storing inside a content tree and publishing to experience edge, if you have media item size more than 50 MB, then it is advisable to use Content Hub to store your contents and not inside Sitecore Media Library.

5) To enable our team for composable stack and XM Cloud, How much of the training will be needed & what kind of training for different departments and what will be typical timeline for it? 

Answer -

If we talk about full XM Cloud Enablement for below departments 

1) Technical Developers for Headless Development (1 week training can bring them to speed)

2) Content Authors – 3 days of training for “Pages” and “Components” apps and normal Sitecore XM Cloud familiarization training – (2-3 days)

3) DevOps – Creating custom CI/CD, Different hosting options, Understanding XM Cloud Deploy App and things around it, Containerization etc. (1 Week)

NOTE: Above is very customer specific, and very case by case, this was for very specific questions and requirement of training they had. 

6) How about GDPR, HIPAA and other compliance requirements.

Answer -

As of May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects the rights of Europeans to access and control their personal data. This means any brand that markets to prospects in Europe needs to be able to comply with such requirements as transferring an individual’s data to them or deleting it completely upon a user’s request. At Sitecore, we’re working across our organization to ensure compliance with the GDPR and other privacy laws, and understand that our customers will want to know how they can configure Sitecore products and services in a way that will help them with their own compliance efforts.

Please refer these links too - https://doc.sitecore.com/xmc/en/developers/xm-cloud/data-privacy-compliance-with-xm-cloud.html

and https://www.sitecore.com/gdpr 

7) What is not available on XM Cloud which is available in XP?

Answer -

Following items are removed from XM Cloud Features and modules.

Features and modules

• XP/xConnect/xDB functionality including existing personalization rules (a new 
• embedded personalization experience is available for XM Cloud)
• Marketing applications, including Experience Analytics, Experience Profile, FXM, 
• Experience Optimization, List Manager, Campaign Creator, Path Analyzer, Marketing 
• Automation, and the Marketing Control Panel
• Email Experience Manager (EXM)
• SXA with MVC, and SXA Search components
• Sitecore Forms
• Custom search indexes
• Identity server
• Sitecore Publishing Service
• Universal Tracker
• Device detection
• IP Geolocation
• MVC
• The Update Center

Roles

• Content Delivery
• Content Publishing
• Forms database
• Web database
• Web index
• Sitecore Identity Server
• Device Detection
• IP Geolocation

• Can you tell us difference between Vercel & Netlify?

• Is it possible to make content available or exported from one XM Cloud project to another?

8) What it takes to migrate from XP to XM Cloud?

Answer -

This is a very subjective discussion. But it depends on a case-by-case basis. Some of the factor to be considered are.

1. Which version of Sitecore XP it is
2. How many modules have been used.
3. How much of the content architecture can be utilized and reused.
4. How many processors/pipelines have been used and many more such factors.
5. What are the existing systems and how deeply it is integrated?
6. Are you existing system MACH Compliant?
7. And many more questions like these. 

9) We are using existing geo-location services, is it available in XM Cloud?

Answer -

As the world is moving to headless and XM Cloud works in a headless way, now anything related to GEO IP based attributes will be driven from your front end services like vercel, netlify etc.

This will not be provided by Sitecore, Because XM Cloud will not receive the first request, but it will be front-end application which will receive so XM Cloud will never be able to determine the visitor's location.

10) We are using lot of modules like dianoga and other Sitecore modules, are those compatible with XM Cloud?

Answer -

No. The customer should look at what they are using these modules for and evaluate if they even need anything extra at this time. If the functionalities which your modules are providing are something which is must to have, you will need to think different options which are composable in approach.

So, if we take dinoga as an example, Experience Edge, included with XM Cloud, is able to act as a CDN for the images removing the need for the caching of the asset files. The use of Vercel, or Netlify, or other delivery platforms for the head usually have some form of image caching/optimizing/delivery available with them and this also can remove a major use case for having Dianoga. DAM tools also offer web optimization capabilities, if they have this available to them.

11) We have lot of content and those contents are approved contents, so how do we migrate those content from old instance to new XM Cloud?

Answer -

There are three options here

1. Serialization - If you are using Sitecore serialization (SCS) and using .yaml files, those can still work and you can migrate all serialized things and use to in XM Cloud.
2. RAZL - Sitecore provides Razl, which has been tested, which is a content migration tool that is also built on serialization and works with XM Cloud as well. If a customer would like a more visual way of picking and choosing which content gets moved, they can install Razl, but Razl does require a license. A customer can install Razl, connect to their existing Sitecore XM instance, and then also connect it to their XM Cloud instance. At this point, the developer will have a source and a destination and can move content using Razl. A customer or a partner can perform that function.
3. Content Migration Tool - It only works with XM, so if you have XM, you can use XM Cloud Content Migration tool. https://developers.sitecore.com/downloads/xm-cloud

12) It is said that there is no WEB DB in XM Cloud? Then how publish works? and how all the content are stored in XM Cloud? Does that mean our existing code will break if we have a WEB DB reference?

Answer -

Very good question, It is correct, XM Cloud uses CaaS which is Experience Edge, and instead of WEB in the publishing target, you publish it to "Experience Edge" which geo replicated CDN provided by XM Cloud which comes inbuilt with XM Cloud. https://developers.sitecore.com/content-management/edge-xm

13) We know everyone is going Composable DxP? If we decouple our presentation, Currently we host everything on CD and replicate it and load balance it, but how does it work on XM Cloiud?

Answer - 

100% valid question, Here "Unlearning is as equally important as learning", With composable stack, everything is decoupled so, you write you presentation in modern javascipt frameworks like react / NextJS and host them on hosting providers like vercel / netlify etc.

Your backend i.e Sitecore will still have its hosting but that is managed inside XM Cloud only and your publish content goes to CDN i.e Experience Edge

Your front end app to draw the presentation will be hosted platform of your choice like vercel or netlify or azure, and Sitecore provides JSS SDK for NextJS using which you can read content from experience edge and use components created in NextJS to render those data.

Your presentation and content are now decoupled, in XP all were on same CD.

NOTE : All these questions are real questions came from those workshops and which customer asked.

Before ending this blog, just want to make sure i share some of the photos where our team can be seen presenting, myself, my partner in crime Varun Shringarpure & from higher leadership, you can see Hardeep Singh Bhamra supporting us in questions related to infrastructure and cloud engineering for XM Cloud, and those who are not seen in photos but are responsible to make sure our customers are getting what they want were also there with us & supporting us Arpit Shah and Shilpa Darshini 

Some fun part, I have been part of these workshops along with my friend and colleague Varun Shringarpure and without his help and load balancing, it's never possible to cover these workshops along with project work and presales work we already have, so let me share a moment capture around 4 am in the morning where we were at the airport waiting to land at one of the potential customer's location :) 

Everything should start and end with a smile :) 

I hope this blog will get you answers of some of the common questions which are being asked by customers.