Facets

How to store data in custom facets within Sitecore’s Experience Database (xDB)

Index custom xDB Facets to Segment Contacts in Sitecore’s List Manager

/ Jonathan Robbins / 3 Comments

It’s a new year! And fresh from a short break from the blog, to focus on presenting at the xDB training course in New Orleans and Sitecore User Group in Cardiff, I’m back. So let’s get to it!

I talk a lot about the value of extending xDB to store data relevant to the client and how to surface that data for Content Editors to use. I now want to cover how to use that data on a grand scale. From accessing that data for all your contacts in a performant way. Then using that data to create lists of similar contacts based on their interactions. Finally allowing you to target groups of individuals with relevant email communications, via EXM, or synchronize with a CRM (more on that in a future blog).

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Extending Sitecore Experience Profile – The SPEAK App

/ Jonathan Robbins / 2 Comments

Part 2 – The Experience Profile App

Sitecore’s Experience Profile shows a detailed breakdown of each Contact (visitor of the site) and is built using Sitecore’s SPEAK, so to modify the app it we are going need to use the Sitecore Rocks Visual Studio Extension. To refresh, here is an overview of what we’re trying to achieve.

We’re going to create a new Tab on the Experience Profile App for our Interaction Facet we built previously, the Tab will show the actions the User has completed on the site which are unique to the client. Within that Tab we have a collection of Sub Tabs, one for each Element of the Facet, e.g. Sample Orders, Videos Played etc. Then each Sub Tab has a Panel to display the data.

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Extending Sitecore’s Experience Profile – The Pipelines

/ Jonathan Robbins / 4 Comments

Part 1 – ExperienceProfileContactViews Pipeline

I’ve been writing this series on Sitecore xDB, Contacts and the Experience Profile for a while now. I’ve been covering how to identify Contacts for Sitecore’s Experience Database (xDB) and how to extend xDB so it can hold custom data.

This time I’m going to explain how to surface that useful BIG DATA you extended xDB to hold so that it is accessible to Content Editors. This is a large topic so I’ll be splitting it between two posts, this first part will focus on the ExperienceProfileContactViewsPipeline which retrieves the data in a format that the Experience Profile can use.

It’s worth noting that I figured most of this out by just jumping into it, decompiling code and a reasonable amount trial and error. Just take that into consideration 🙂

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How to Identify and Merge Contacts in Sitecore xDB

/ Jonathan Robbins / 9 Comments

In my previous post I explained how to extend Sitecore’s Experience Database so that you can store custom data against each Contact (visitor) of your site. I also recently posted about updating an xDB Contact with basic information. This post will explain how to uniquely identify Contacts from one another and how to merge Contacts, and their data, once you have determined that they are the same User. Continue reading →