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Sitecore Symposium 2020 will be a virtual event. In the previous blogs I blogged on the must-see sessions for developers on Day 1 and Day 2:

This blogpost is part of the Sitecore Symposium 2020 series:

But luckily, since it’s virtual, Sitecore offers on-demand sessions as well + free training sessions on various topics. In this blogpost I’m going to highlight the on-demand sessions I think are a must watch for developers.

On-Demand sessions

Best practices in SXA – Adam Najmanowicz (Senior Product Manager, Sitecore) & Mark van Aalst (Sr. Technical Evangelist, Sitecore)

One of the greatest strengths of the Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) is its flexibility; however, this also is one of the pitfalls. In this session, Adam Najmanowicz and Mark van Aalst will explain what they see as best practices when developing an SXA website. You will learn how SXA has been developed and the intentions behind specific features. Learn about features you use every day and what’s coming next. Each feature we demonstrate can be used right away in your existing projects.

Contain yourself: Why Kubernetes – Jimmy Rudley (Azure Architect, Rackspace Technology) & Kelly Rusk (Sitecore MVP / Manager of Rackspace Application Services for Sitecore, Rackspace Technology)

Containers represent a large change with various impacts across your organization. Come learn the basics of containers and Kubernetes and what this means to you, specifically. From C-level executives to marketers to infrastructure and development teams, we invite all to come find out if containers are right for you.

Get cracking with Content Hub – Deepthi Katta (Sr Technical Architect, Verndale) & Richard Leiva (Technical Architect, Verndale)

So, you made a choice to pursue Content Hub as your Asset Management Platform! It is an excellent choice to ensure all your assets are managed and served better. It also will help you to lean on your wins and maximize success in the future. But with a new system, the hiccups often come in the process of embracing it. You’ll need to address concerns and ambiguities to ensure no data is lost and manual steps are kept to a minimum. In this session, we’ll provide you with paths to a successful transition.

Introducing modular content – Chris Williams (Chief Customer Officer, Read Watch Create) & Nabil Orfali (Founder/MVP, TechGuilds Inc.)

There are many pitfalls to modular content, but also many benefits. This session will discuss some of these pitfalls and how to avoid them, along with best practices for developing your modular content strategy and leveraging Sitecore Content Hub to implement it.

Is your Solr knife sharp enough for production? – Mahendra Singh (Lead Developer, Rightpoint) & Surya Narayan (Sr. Solutions Architect, Rightpoint)

Do you know and understand all of the key considerations when building your system with Solr and Sitecore? In this session, our technical experts will discuss best practices for your Solr production setup, including backup, monitoring, vulnerability patching, index speed, performance, permissions and security. We also will cover the key elements that must be addressed when preparing to launch a website using Sitecore and Solr.

Make Azure Networking work for you – Ashish Sharma (Cloud Operations Engineer, Sitecore) & Gurveen Kaur (Cloud Operations Engineer, Sitecore)

Several services available within Microsoft Azure focus on traffic management and load-balancing workloads, and they provide a great option for commercial websites with more complex topology, fault tolerance or geo-distribution. During this session, we will look at Azure Networking components like Azure CDN, WAF and Azure Front Door to show how you can use them with your Sitecore infrastructure in Azure.

Optimizing and scaling the online food ordering process with JSS – Nick Hills (Principal Developer, Valtech)

When Valtech needed to achieve very high throughput on a deployment for our client in the global online food ordering business, we launched the new home page using Vue and JSS. This step represents a critical part of the company’s booking process, and we knew that any minor delay would be noticed by the in-house monitoring team. The platform had to be as stable as possible for an optimal customer experience. Join us to learn more about this global deployment and see how we implemented and optimized this large scale JSS deployment at both the code and infrastructure levels.

Seamlessly extend your Sitecore content to billions of voice and chat devices. Yes, billions! – Adrianna Grant (UX Consultant, Slalom Consulting) & Angela Gustafson (Solution Principal, Slalom Consulting)

I added this sessions due to my private interest in Voice technology. See also my SUGCON Europe 2017 Event bot video recording and code post.  This session will show you how to leverage the power of conversation design. We’ll showcase how Sitecore + Voicify can power personalized digital experiences at scale through a demo of a hotel chatbot powered by Sitecore content. Voicify’s Conversation Experience Platform allows brands to utilize new or existing Sitecore content to deploy voice experiences rapidly across any voice assistant and/or chat device. See how your Sitecore content can reach people in this new and innovative way.

Show and tell: How we upgraded 100+ Sitecore environments to 9.3 in an automated way with zero-downtime – Alex van Wolferen (Sitecore Architect, Achmea)

Upgrading 100+ Sitecore environments to a new version of Sitecore is a huge challenge for our relatively small platform team. Saving time by taking the right decisions and striving for highly automated migrations were key to keeping the lead-time as low as possible. In this session, Alex will take you through Achmea’s approach and challenges that the team faced and overcame during this migration with near-zero downtime.

The invisible art of content architecture – Vasiliy Fomichev (Sr. Director, Altudo)

Are you prepared to be a Content Architect? This new role has emerged in response to the complexity of omnichannel content marketing demands placed on organizations by modern consumers. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Don’t take on this role until you understand how to do it well. Come to this session and learn the foundational theory and practical concerns of digital content architecture.

Use Sitecore Host plugin architecture to transition on-prem Active Directory workloads onto Azure – Julius Angwenyi (Senior Consultant, Avanade)

With Sitecore 9.x, the Active Directory Module is no longer supported. Some businesses trying to upgrade from 8.2 to 9.3 may face the challenge of a deprecated Active Directory Module. In this session, we’ll amplify the Sitecore Identity Server and the extensibility that it brings using the new Sitecore Host plugin architecture. We also will share how to resolve the issue of deprecated Active Directory Module by creating a custom ADFS Sitecore Host plugin.

Training Sessions

There are some amazing training sessions that will take max 5 hours in total and will get you quickly up to speed with SXA/JSS, Horizon & Sitecore Content Hub.

Discover how SXA empowers JSS site development – Nikden Rumba (Technical Trainer, Sitecore)

In this class we will demonstrate how SXA empowers us to create JavaScript Services (JSS) tenants and sites that make it easier to work with JSS apps. We will demonstrate how JSS integration with SXA enables, SXA site management for JSS apps, cross-site presentation sharing using page designs and partial designs, cross-site content sharing, cross-site reusability of renderings, and cross-site linking.

Session duration: 2 hours

Get to know the new Sitecore editing experience – Siao Voon (Brian) Lee (Trainer, Sitecore)

In this class we will introduce Horizon, the new Sitecore editor; walk through how to create, edit, preview and analyze your web pages; and explore the why and how content authors and marketers use Horizon.

Session duration: 1 hour

Introduction to Sitecore Content Hub Digital Asset Management – Lorne Breen (Software Engineer, Sitecore)

In this class we will introduce the essentials of digital asset management using Sitecore Content Hub. We will examine the relationships between various key entities in the system beginning with assets and then expand our understanding of the schema by incorporating PCM into our domain model.

Session duration: 2 hours

I hope you have a fantastic first virtual Sitecore Symposium 2020!

This blogpost is part of the Sitecore Symposium 2020 series:

Happy Sitecore-ing…

–Robbert