Introduction: Cloud-First Sitecore 4

Sitecore 9: What’s New & What’s in It for You? 6

World-Class Marketing with Better Customer Insights, Machine Learning,

& Marketing Automation 7

Seamless Omnichannel Experiences 12

Powerful Commerce Journeys That Can Easily Be Personalized,

Customized, & Extended 14

An Intuitive, Performance-Driven Experience for Content Authors &

Marketers 17

Cloud-First but Not Cloud-Only: A Native Integration with Microsoft Azure 18

Intelligent Search, Streamlined Forms, Better Data Accuracy, & More 19

The Downside of Failing to Upgrade 21

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 Velir’s Sitecore Upgrade Approach 22

The Road to a Newer Sitecore: Upgrade or Start from Scratch 23

Understanding Your Solution & Needs via Audits 25

Work with Velir on Your Next Sitecore Upgrade 26

About Velir 27

Related Resources 29

Connect with Us! 30

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 The Sitecore Experience Platform has
undergone a dramatic transformation
since its initial release, Sitecore 6.0, came
out in 2008, mirroring the revolution
being faced by the digital marketing
industry.

In October 2017, Sitecore realized its

vision of a cloud-first approach to
customer experience management with
the Sitecore Experience Cloud™ — an
overarching brand that encompasses
Sitecore XP 9, a digital experience
platform, Sitecore Experience Manager
(XM), a web content management
system, and Sitecore Experience
Commerce (XC), a natively-integrated
commerce platform.

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 With XP 9, Sitecore provides a comprehensive suite of features that enables your marketing,
content, and IT teams to better communicate with, engage, and convert your target audiences.

Sitecore XP 9 delivers on the promise of a complete,

360-degree view of each customer.

This latest version of Sitecore allows for the creation of hyper-personalized digital experiences
across every brand touch point. It introduces Sitecore xConnect and Sitecore Cortex and together,
they empower your marketing team with connected data sources and deeper contextual insights.

There’s lots to get excited about on the IT side as well — the native integration with Microsoft
Azure allows for significant advantages in terms of the real-time scalability and performance of
your digital properties. Let’s dive in to the various business cases for why Sitecore 9 should be top
of mind!

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 Sitecore XP 9 puts the power in
the hands of the people who are
most responsible for creating and
delivering experiences that
delight your customers — your
marketing team.
With xConnect, your marketers can now
optimize content and experiences
independently, allowing them the flexibility
they need to get to market on time. This
reduces the total cost of ownership and the
resource load that comes from having
different teams using disparate systems.
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xConnect is a new service layer
(comprised of a set of APIs and various
services) in Sitecore XP 9 that facilitates
easy integration and data interchange at
scale, to external data sources and
applications.
These applications could include CRM
systems (there are specific connectors to
Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics),
email marketing tools, ERPs, PIMs, and the
list goes on. This allows all your customer
data to be standardized and stored in a
single place (xDB), and is a major step
towards creating that 360-degree view of
your customers in real-time.
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 For example, if your company provides
an app that is separate from your websites,
xConnect easily enables integration and data
flow between these different properties,
allowing the experience on each to be
informed by all the others.
With the ability to access intelligence on
all customer interactions (past and present)
across all channels (even offline), your
marketing teams can now deliver experiences
based on the context of these prior
interactions, creating hyper-personalized and
tailored interactions.
This has tremendous implications,
especially with the increased prevalence of
IoT devices and other channels for customers
to interact with your brand.
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xConnect is built on the OData industry
standard, so developers do not need to
learn Sitecore-specific code to work with this
service layer. Therefore, it is much easier to
set up than a custom integration between
different applications.
With this new industry standard, you
can now connect to third-party business
tools like Power BI or Tableau to do your
reporting and data analysis on all of the
data stored in xDB. This gives you added
flexibility to create beautiful, easy-to-
understand dashboards that can be
digested by your senior management and
executive teams.
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 Fig 1:1 – Flow of data with xConnect.

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 Another key feature that was introduced
with Sitecore XP 9 is compliance with the
GDPR. As marketers and IT teams scrambled
to ensure that their programs and systems
adhered to the new regulations, introduced in
late May this year, Sitecore ensured that its
platform was compliant with several
engineering updates.
In addition to data being secured by
default, xConnect provides a ‘Right to be
Forgotten’ feature, where specific data can be
marked as sensitive and subsequently be
anonymized. This has been executed in such
a way that it doesn’t impact the data and
totals in reports, it just ensures that any
involved data is anonymized.
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xDB has also been updated to now use
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (as an alternative
to MongoDB), which is compliant with the
GDPR.
Finally, the third big reveal in this new
feature trifecta is Sitecore Cortex, the
machine learning capability that’s woven
through the Sitecore Experience Cloud.
With Cortex, your marketing efforts now
get the added bonus of an internal “data
scientist” working to optimize them.
It continuously looks for patterns and
can identify common attributes in visitor
behavior and usage. Cortex automatically
suggests new segments and
personalization criteria for them,
optimizing the path to conversion.
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 Sitecore XP 9’s marketing capabilities are
rounded out by integrated site analytics and
optimization features. This includes A/B and
multivariate content testing, marketing
taxonomies to organize activities in a
structured way, and campaign management.
These distinctive features enable your
marketers to have a thorough
understanding of your audiences, how they
engage across digital channels, and what
works best to nurture the relationship and
convert them into customers and advocates.

Fig 1:2 – Experience testing & optimization in Sitecore.

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 As we’ve noted, Sitecore XP 9
empowers you to use Sitecore as a
central hub to manage all your
digital properties, Sitecore and non-
Sitecore, and seamlessly share
content, customer data, and
analytics between them.
Beyond xConnect, other supporting
factors that have enabled this unprecedented
level of connectivity between different
applications are Sitecore XP 9’s headless
content management, embedded detection
services, and email marketing capabilities.
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Headless content management
involves the separation of the creation
and management of content (back-end)
from the delivery of this content to a web
page, application, IoT device, etc. (front-
end).
Sitecore’s approach with XP 9 allows
for personalization data from each
involved front-end to be stored in XP and
XM. This further supports the ability for
your marketing team to gain a holistic,
continuous view of customers, as their
interactions with your brand transition
across multiple channels, devices, and
other touchpoints.
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 Email performance management and
delivery have also undergone significant
updates with XP 9.
Sitecore’s Email Experience Manager
(EXM) now uses xDB and integrated
marketing automation capabilities to allow for
emails to be triggered based on various
actions taken by a lead, prospect, or
customer.
The addition of new tools like List
Manager and Campaign Creator provide
added support for managing marketing
campaigns, with a step-by-step guide for
creating and sending an email campaign.
Finally, an overhauled UI makes these tools
more intuitive to use and enhances the
efficiency and effectiveness of your
marketing teams.

Fig 1:3 – Step-by-step instructions for setting up a Sitecore email campaign.

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 Sitecore Experience Commerce
(XC) 9 represents a significant step
in Sitecore’s ambition to bring their
core competency as an infinitely-
customizable platform to the online
commerce market.
Although Sitecore has had a commerce
platform for several years, this is the first
release to completely retire the legacy
Commerce Server elements. These have been
replaced by a new Commerce Engine built on
top of the recent .NET Core stack using a
microservices architecture.
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In a microservices architecture each
element of functionality is contained in a
separate plugin. So, for example,
functionality involving inventory is in a
separate package from catalog
functionality.
This provides you with “opt-in
complexity” when building your
commerce solution, allowing you to use
the plugins you need, while discarding
those that are not relevant to your
business needs.
Having less code as part of your
system makes it easier to extend and
evaluate the impact of a future upgrade.
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 This microservices architecture takes root
in a key design goal of this platform, which is
to support extensibility while preserving
upgradability (avoiding the “too customized to
upgrade” trap).
Another fundamental evolution in the
commerce product is the use of SxA to house
a standard set of commerce components, and
to generate both a reference storefront and a
sample catalog, providing a starting point for
building your solution. SXA comes with a rich
set of drag-and-drop commerce components
(shopping carts, order displays, etc.) and
allows third-party developers to build drag-
and drop functionality for their plug-ins.
Sitecore XC also features a new Catalog
System. It uses the Schema.org product
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standard, improving SEO and facilitating
interoperability with external systems such
as Google Product search.
A noteworthy feature of this new
Sitecore Commerce system is the flexible
way in which it combines elements such as
inventory, pricing, and promotions. For
example, inventories of individual products
can be combined into inventory sets, as can
price books and promotions.
This provides support for high-powered
commerce operations including catalog-
wide price and promotion adjustments,
management of multiple online storefronts,
inventory tracking across locations, and
expanded fulfillment abilities. Flexibility and
loose coupling are hallmarks of the system.
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 Fig 1:4 – Sitecore Commerce 9 out of the box sample storefront site.

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 interface responds quickly to commands
A simpler, modern, consistent
from content authors.
user experience across the entirety
of Sitecore Experience Cloud 9 Sitecore XP 9 also incorporates the
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SxA),
guarantees that the platform is
which allows content and marketing
more intuitive to grasp and use. teams to create and deliver content
across web channels with less
This empowers your marketing team with dependence on development resources.
greater independence and flexibility, and
reduces overall training and support costs. With pre-built, mobile-first
components and templates that can be
The performance of Sitecore’s in-page
dragged and dropped onto a page and
editing tool, Experience Editor, has been
repurposed, SxA greatly speeds up time
improved through better engineering,
to market.
ensuring that pages load quickly and the

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Sitecore Experience Cloud 9
provides customers with the
widest array of deployment options
(on-premise or hybrid cloud, in
addition to Platform-as-a-Service
(PaaS) cloud).
With XM and XP optimized for Azure, your
Sitecore solution can now be deployed in
under 30 minutes through Azure Resource
Manager (ARM) or Azure Marketplace.
Additionally, major updates to xDB will
allow you to deploy this database on
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Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SQL
Azure, in addition to providing continued
support for the current MongoDB option.
This is a further step on Sitecore’s part to
provide the required flexibility to support
your organization’s business
requirements, existing technology stack,
and preferences.
Ultimately, these infrastructure
changes will allow your IT teams to
capitalize on the scale and speed benefits
of the cloud, while ensuring your
marketers achieve their desired time to
market, and website and campaign
performance.
18 -

An enterprise-class search
capability uses powerful features
like customizable facets to allow
your audiences on the front-end,
and your authors on the back-end,
to find their desired content quickly
and efficiently.
In Sitecore XP and XM 9, Solr is now the
tool of choice for behind-the-scenes indexing
operations and working with xConnect. While
Lucene can still be used in your solution, it is
no longer officially supported by Sitecore,
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especially in solutions that use a
distributed environment (multiple content
delivery and management servers).
Lead-capture forms are most likely
your marketers’ bread and butter, and
Sitecore 9 has completely redesigned this
capability to ensure better data capture
and reporting. In version 9, Sitecore Forms
replaces the previous Web Forms for
Marketers (WFFM).
This new product allows you to drag
and drop fields onto your forms and
optimizes them for the channel that they
will be delivered on. Forms can be
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 repurposed and reskinned taking you to Fig 1:5 – The new Sitecore Forms.
market faster when you’re delivering content
to different sites, channels, or devices. The
data captured by these forms is stored in xDB
in real-time, enabling you with exceptional
opportunities to deliver personalized, in-
context experiences.

In addition to the improved data

collection ability with Sitecore Forms, Sitecore
9 also ensures better data accuracy by
providing stronger defense against constantly
evolving web crawlers, spiders, and bots.

By consolidating all your customer data

to Sitecore xDB, you can have more
confidence in your data and be rest assured
that your different channels are being tracked
and reported upon appropriately.

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 Beyond not being able to take Older Sitecore Versions That Are No

advantage of the security of a new Longer Officially Supported:

release and its powerful new Mainstream support for

features, a key downside of failing • Sitecore XP 7.2 and 7.5 ended in

December 2017
to upgrade is the lack of official
support from Sitecore for its older • Sitecore XP 7 and 7.1 ended in
December 2016
versions.
• Sitecore 6.6 ended in December
Therefore, if your solution is on an older 2015
version of Sitecore (listed to the right), you will
• Sitecore 6.5 and earlier ended in
no longer receive support for bugs and
June 2015
unexpected errors that you run into during
development, compatibility fixes for
supported platforms or hot-fixes, and patches
for product defects.

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 We recognize that every Sitecore solution
and corresponding upgrade is unique to
an organization, given its business-specific
goals, strategies, and technologies.

With the varying customizations and

setups that we might run into as a result,
our Sitecore Upgrade approach
incorporates both strategic aspects as well
as technical ones.

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The approach you take for your
upgrade depends on several
factors including your current
Sitecore version, the amount of
content you have and how much of
it can be migrated, your technology
stack and preferences, and any
custom features and integrations.
Let’s walk through some of these
different factors to identify how they can
impact your upgrade process, along with
other points you should keep in mind.
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If you are moving from Sitecore XP 8.1
or later versions, the upgrade is very simple
and involves a single upgrade package,
allowing you to upgrade directly to XP 9.
If you are on Sitecore 6.6, 7.2, XP 7.5, or
XP 8.0, you have the option of creating a
fresh Sitecore XP 9 install and migrating
your content to it using the Express
Migration Tool, rather than upgrading
version by version.
If you are on Sitecore 6.5 or lower, 7.0,
or 7.1, you will have to step through each
upgrade version until you get to one
supported by the Express Migration Tool.
23 -
 Points to Note: various environments will require a carefully
planned approach, especially if you have
Setting up a new instance of Sitecore 9
complex setups between your higher and
requires you to use the Sitecore Installation
lower environments with multiple content
Framework (SIF).
management and delivery servers.
Your upgrade process might include the
Make sure you test the upgrade in each
need to migrate and convert data from
environment with thorough test cases and
MongoDB to SQL Server if you wish to move
comprehensive regression tests so that
to an entirely Microsoft-based stack.
there are no surprises once you go live!
Your Sitecore 9 solution will need to
utilize SQL Server 2016 to be compliant with The Express Migration Tool allows
the new GDPR regulations. you to move all the content and code
from your current Sitecore solution to the
Each of the custom modules, features, new instance of the version you are
and integrations in your solution will need to upgrading to (even accounting for content
be evaluated to determine any impact to their schema changes). Once this migration is
functionality in the new version. complete, it then looks at your custom
code and modules to indicate what will
Deploying the upgrade across your
work in the migration and what won’t.

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Occasionally, the solution to a
given business problem might be
broader than an upgrade. In these
cases, we conduct various audits to
identify the best path forward.
The types of audits we execute depend
on our level of familiarity with a solution and
the client’s business goals/desired outcomes.
Digital Strategy Audit – This audit allows
us to get a sense for the current state of your
digital marketing programs, the depth of your
understanding of your audiences, the
complexity of your customer journeys, and
your relevant goals, KPIs, and success metrics.
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Content Audit – During a significant
Sitecore project (redesign, upgrade,
migration, etc.), we also usually review
your IA and conduct a content inventory.
This is done to identify stale content to be
sunset and special content types, features,
or customizations to be accounted for.
Technical & Infrastructure Audit:
Our Sitecore Audit is focused on the
quality of your solution's architecture and
implementation. It covers an assessment
of your environments, hardware, code,
integrations, server configuration,
performance, and Sitecore logs, and
includes recommendations for getting
your solution on the right track.
25 -
 We are one of the most experienced and
capable Sitecore Platinum Partners in
North America. We are a pioneer in the
industry, being among the first to partner
with Sitecore when they entered the US
market in 2006. We have since completed
hundreds of Sitecore implementations,
projects, and upgrades.

We also maintain one of the deepest

benches with 40+ Sitecore-certified
developers. We continually invest in our
Sitecore partnership through ongoing
training, participation in the annual
Sitecore Symposium, and hosting of the
New England Sitecore User Group, where
we share our expertise and innovative
work of our 6 Sitecore MVPs.

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 We are a full-service digital agency based
right outside of Boston, in Somerville MA.
Being surrounded by world class higher
education institutions like Harvard and MIT,
as well as cutting-edge businesses in
healthcare and technology, infuses our work
with incredible ideas, talent, and creative
energy. With a team of over 130 digital
experts, we are best-known for our
collaborations with some of the world’s
largest and most influential organizations
across a variety of verticals such as:
• Healthcare
• Education
• Non-Profits & Foundations
• Professional Associations
• Professional Services
• Publishing
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Our core competencies in digital
strategy, experience design, web analytics,
content management, marketing
automation, enterprise technology
implementations, and data storytelling
have helped shape the digital presence for
brands such as Bayer, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Harvard University, AARP,
Main Line Health, and others.
We were recently selected as the
“Small Business of the Year” by both the
Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce
and the Somerville Chamber of
Commerce.
28 -
 • Our Sitecore Capabilities as a Platinum Partner 

• Sitecore Rescue & Audit Services 

• Sitecore Hosting with Microsoft Azure 

• Support & Managed Services 

• Blog: The Cognitive Core - Velir’s Solution for Using Machine Learning APIs with Sitecore 

• Blog: Why You Need to Consider Azure PaaS for Your Sitecore Implementation Now 

• News: Velir Presenting as a Platinum Sponsor at the 2018 Sitecore Symposium in Orlando,
Florida 

• News: Digital Agency Velir Wins 6 2018 Sitecore MVPs in the Technology, Ambassador, &
Strategy Categories 

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Thank you for taking the time to read through this whitepaper!

If you are considering an upgrade of your Sitecore solution or have questions regarding any of the
topics described above, we’d love to hear from you! Please reach out to us using any of the
following methods:

Email: info@velir.com Phone: 617.491.6900 Web: velir.com/contact

We’re also active across a variety of social channels and our blog, posting industry news, our
thoughts on the latest trends, and details about the projects we’re working on. If you’d like to hear
more, make sure to connect with us on your platform of choice!

Blog Twitter LinkedIn

Facebook YouTube Medium

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