Sitecore Experience Platform 8.0 (XP)
Federated Experience Manager (FXM)What is this beast?~Liam
Mepham [email protected]
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What isFederated Experience Manager?FXM is an out of the box
core feature of the Sitecore platform.Available since Sitecore
v7.5, was completely rebuilt for v8.0+
It simply lets you add some Sitecore functionality into a
external website.Setup and track goals, profile cards, campaigns
and outcomes.Ability to add renderings/sublayouts.Functionality to
personalise user journeys.All interactions are tracked into the xDB
(analytics).
It lets us mitigate the risk which customers could be hung upon
around committing to a full Sitecore build.
~Liam Mepham [email protected]
Federated Experience Manager is a core out of the box piece of
functionality which has been available since Sitecore v7.5 where it
was a module you needed to install, it was then fully rebuilt for
v8.0 and pre baked into the core product.It is a very simple piece
of the platform, with quite considerable power if its fully
utilised.FXM simply allows you to add sitecore functionality to a
external website that you either have development ownership of, or
the ability to get JavaScript into the website.It allows us to
track goals, assign profile cards, trigger campaigns and
outcomes.FXM also allows you to add renderings and sublayouts to
the external website that are built within a sitecore instance
that's running FXM.All these features are designed to be interacted
with, and its all of these interactions data is then tracked into
the Sitecore experience database, which is then reported upon, as
you will see later.The real selling point to this functionality is
the tracking of these interactions and how we could leverage this
added insight to mitigate the risk that clients are seeing as the
overwhelming factor when talking around a full site migration to
Sitecore.
So you must be thinking this must take a considerable amount of
time to configure and get working right?2
Setup EffortThis is assuming you have a Sitecore instance with
xDB license and the ability to get JavaScript on the external
website.Add the generated script to the pages you wish to
modify.Register the script with Sitecore FXM.Thats it!~Liam Mepham
[email protected]
Its quite the opposite in fact!The setup effort for a local
environment is very simple, and a production environment its not
much harder!Assuming we are running a sitecore v8.0+ instance with
an experience database enabled license file and the ability to get
JavaScript onto the page then we are almost there already.We just
need to take the JavaScript that the FXM dashboard will produce for
us and place this into the code of the website.Then check that
Sitecore can find this piece of JavaScript and all should be
good.Thats it!.you can then do all them lovely things I have
mentioned on the previous slide.So lets see how this actually
works.3
Mini demo time..~Liam Mepham [email protected]
I have a short mini demo here, this has been squished together
so some parts might seem very rushed and if anything is unclear
just reach out to me and I will be more than happy to go over this
again.4
What it doesnt do, Gotchas & whats coming.Experience Editor
(Formally Page Editor) functionality is quite basic.No workflow
integration currently.No path analyser tracking to report the most
and least valuable paths to conversion.No testing to test which
page/rendering/sublayout is more effective over another.No
integration with Web Forms For Marketers (WFFMs).~Liam Mepham
[email protected] It must share the same connection
protocol HTTP/HTTPS.If the external site and the Sitecore instance
are on different domains:Chrome & Firefox FXM can track the
same contact across both websites.Safari, iOS & IE FXM assigns
each contact a unique contact ID per website.
With the good there is sometimes the bad and this isnt an
exception.There are lots of things that FXM currently doesnt do,
some of these missing features there are plans for and other
features there are not.
Some major issues from my point of view are:Workflow this means
there isnt any iterative sign off process for website changes to go
live, be that content or page structure, so things can easily go
live that shouldnt.Testing there is currently no ability to test
content, renderings or sublayouts against another one to determine
what content or rendering combination works most effectively. This
has been talking about quite considerably throughout the
community.WFFMs currently no integration for this, although there
is a work around thats available in the Sitecore dev community.
Now there is a gotcha thats a known issue to Sitecore.You have
to imagen the setup where there is a static website built in
anything other than sitecore or even the .net stack, so it could be
a php site for example that you are injecting sitecore
functionality into.But you also have the sitecore instance, the
same instance that FXM is used on, which maybe could be hosting the
sister site of the static site.When visiting both these sites in
Chrome or Firefox both visits will be tracked as one, once they are
known and identifiable, so they might login to both sites using
their facebook account for example.But when visiting using safari,
iOS or IE FXM assigns each visit a unique ID for each site, which
will get merged eventually if they use the same matching
identifiers, like a facebook account, but it wont be in real
time.What this means is that the personalisation experience across
browsers and websites that are tracked using FXM might not be
always consistent.
So whats the silver lining from all of this? Well I personally
dont think its a bad first crack at producing a tool that helps us
as partners get our foot in the door by mitigating the risk of a
full sitecore build, the development team with a simple integration
setup and for the most part consistency with the editing/authoring
environment within Sitecore that marketers are exposed too.5
Thank you!Any questions?~Liam Mepham [email protected]
@[email protected]@dogdigital.com
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