SDL Innovate 2014: Web Points and Questions

There were plenty of great questions and points that came up at SDL Innovate related to Tridion. Here are three that came up with my perspective as a consultant in Professional Services.

Disclaimer: mentions of future releases and functionality are public to the extent they were mentioned at an industry conference, but nothing is official until it's released on official channels (i.e. SDL.com or TridionWorld).

Tridion Upgrades?

What will the upgrade impact be of the site factory features, reference implementation, delivery-side content model, and the cloud options?

We'll have to wait for the official details, but moving from on-premise to cloud would likely use a mix of database migration, the Content Porter, and/or the Core Service if needed. Though an in-place upgrade doesn't make sense, consider how a cloud solution will change future upgrades.

I suggested the hardest parts aren't the upgrade, but understanding how companies will use the features. Do you have ideas for a "templated" site, are you using the latest Web approaches to take advantage of the reference implementation, and do you prefer fields over component presentations and pages in delivery?

One-Stop CXM Shop?

The Forrester session that there isn't a single vendor who can provide Customer Experience Management.

Well, that's part of the point of SDL Innovate, to demonstrate how and where it can help businesses manage their customer experience. Insights, orchestration, and contextual experiences aren't necessarily technological, but SDL provides software to analyze website behavior as well as social sentiment (commitment), detect context, translate content in multiple ways (people, machines, or both, and now over the cloud), manage Web content, manage documentation, manage campaigns, serve matched or targeted information, and more.

An important point is that companies have much of the tools they need to manage their customer's experiences and any one vendor shouldn't attempt to replace existing solutions. SDL doesn't sell call center software (workforce management/optimization), but can use call center data or otherwise provide content, documentation, or translation to or for customer service.

If you look at the Ambient Data Framework, the common integration piece between SDL's offerings, you'll see the opportunity to integrate with nearly anything.

What About QA?

How can you test these multiple, contextual experiences?

Tridion's in-context editing interface, Experience Manager, has three features to help here:

• Device preview, which changes the header sent to your Staging or Preview (non-Live) website
• Personas, which show the site according to a given persona's segments as set up in Audience Manager
• Footprint sets, which let you customize session information such as content language, search term, referrer URL, or even custom settings

Did you ask or answer other interesting questions at SDL Innovate? Engage and leave a comment!