Whats up SDL

SDL Web 8.5 was last major release by Sdl around start of this year. This year has been very challenging in IT for everyone. SDL ranked as Challenger in Gartner's magic quadrant. Sdl sold its  non-core products: “Social Intelligence, Campaigns, and SDL Fredhopper to focus on core.

SDL is working hard and there are number of changes happening under the hood, and impressive Roadmap.

Lets start with Major change:

SDL Tridion DX

SDL rebrands SDL Web to SDL Tridion Sites and SDL Knowledge Center to SDL Tridion Docs, and "Tridion" is back and i am so happy like any other community member.

SDL Tridion DX combines SDL Tridion Sites (WCM) and  DITA-based Structured Content Management (SDL Tridion Docs) and translation technology supported by artificial intelligence (AI)

Check Press release for more information on above

Graphene UI: is awesome, Check this Future UX & UI blogs to check the impressive work that is happening. I am impressed!!

GraphQL services: GraphQL will be replacing OData services.

Integration & connectors: As per connector strategy SDL is developing connectors for lots of products, tools and services.
e.g Sales force marketing cloud, Marketo, Microsoft dynamics, Experience Regions, SDL ETS on AWS and many more eg. Image Editing with in CMS

Salesforce Community Cloud integration: this is just released check out.(updated after release)

DXA Form Builder Modules:

Form builder is always requested by clients but SDL gets X in the capability matrix, , but i just to get know Niclas Cedermalm from SDL just released form builder DXA module with name "Alpaca Forms", Also its open source. I am writing it here for community awareness. i will write a separate blog on it. It currently supports DXA 1.7 more supporting version later.

HTML5 forms module is based on Twitter Bootstrap and Alpaca.JS which uses JSON and inturn used to generate form on Delivery side.

Forms are CMS component like any other component and can be added to pages. End Points can be configured to APIs. Customization is also possible as you can write your custom code to pass data to required ice. The Forms DXA module also comes with a built-in controller that can send form data to different endpoint such as DB, e-mail and CRM.

Personalization:

SDL is redesigning the whole experience for personalization and it looks very promising.

Prescriptive Personalization:  this is based on predefined  rules by author.
Adaptive Personalization: Machine language based personalization. 

Content migration from Gather Content to SDL Tridion

Content Migration Automation in SDL requires use of custom code written using Sdl Core services. Core services are set of APIs which helps in ingestion of data in to CMS system. But i have found people writing repetitive code to ingest data into CM.

Its not as complex as Elon Musk reusable Rockets. I mean its not rocket Science.

So write code to interact with SDL once, and use that to deploy the payload into required system.

Here is the process:


Gather Content:

Instead of getting content into excel or world, having content in Gather Content gives lots of advantages.

Gather content tool provides very simple and intuitive interface to enter the content and images. it allow collaboration, simple workflow, activity trails and CMS like interface. Collecting data from various users becomes very simple.

GC comes with direct import feature for various CMS, but Tridion is not yet supported.

Content Export:

After getting content into GC, its must be exported, there are multiple ways you can export the content,
- API
- Export to CSV

Adapter:

Adapter is system which converts above exported content into required format, this would be typically Schema format of  SDL component. This is little tricky but not that complex, Little  complexity is involved when dealing with linked component is required. Output of adapter is set of Xml files and config files which provides other required information for component to ingest.

Migration Tool:

Your organization should have this tool which accepts Content as XML and config files and ingest the content into system. As this tool is already tested and proven, so ingestion should be smooth if your adapter has created files well formatted.

In this way you can speed up the content migration part

SDL MVP retreat 2017

MVPs are few chosen Tridion professional who are selected based on yearly contribution to SDL community. SDL pampers those professional with work, sea food, music and unlimited Daaru in retreat. SDL retreat provides chance to visit Portugal again if you miss any place during last years.

SDL retreat is one of the most awaited event of the year for MVPs. It motivates for next year.

"This is always 5 days event, SDL treats you like Damad except few Fatwas:

• From the moment you arrive to your departure airport until you fly back home, nearly all expenses are covered. If you decide to get drunk in a bar at the airport, I expect that you earn enough to pay for it yourself and not present me with an expense receipt for it, or I’ll remember next year.
•  If you lose your flight due to above mentioned state of drunkenness, I also expect you to be man enough to realize it’s your damn problem to fix.

Few tips from one of the Permanent and Veteran Member

1. Keep on the right side of Carla
2. Don't try to out-drink Nuno 
3. Don't expect to go home thinner
4. If you at all musical (even slightly), we will expect you to enztertain us, and yourself. Even long-buried musical talents have been unearthed at the retreat. But there are no rules. And of course, bring your instrument(s).
5. Expect the unexpected from your fellow-MVPs and yourself

My Biggest worry:

"What kind of Veggy food, No eggs" will be served to me in. *T*: Veggy food in Portugal?

Few Testimonials 

Carla:

"Well I'm actually thinking of doing all vegetarian meals FOR EVERYBODY and alcohol free retreats from now on"

Curlette:

"Great to have you back and finally someone more picky than me with food :) Already making me look better Haha ;)"

But to my surprise food was really good this time with few exceptions. My biggest helper was Garlic butter their which provided taste to food.

Day 1:

People gathers at Airport to meet and greet, then drivers drove to the Hotel Pousada de Ourem in beautiful city of Ourem. People drinks, eats and sleep to get early for the big day.

Day 2:

MVPs gathers at conference room for connect on upcoming changes in SDL product and road-map. Nuno and other Sdl teams showcase ongoing work. Some goodies to collect on EOD.

Day 3 & 4

Time to code and shocase next day. I teamed up with The Nuno and Sayantan to develop "Poor Man's AWS Cloudwatch Monitor" We successfully created & scheduled it on  Windows Scheduler to send queue status every 2-3 minutes to cloud watch. Night is full of fun, drinks and special musical performances by Quirijn, Raimond on Piano, Guitar..  give them any Instrument, these guys are exceptionally good. Rick and Johnathan also surprised with their Piano and singing skills respectively. Dominic also tried something with his mouth instruments before sleeping. 

also we saw some nazare @  Nazaré

Day 5

Time to say Good Bye & promises to meet again.

Publishing queue status on AWS Cloud-watch

In this years MVP retreat we did small Proof of concept to show the Publishing queue status on AWS cloud-watch in nice format. There are various ways to accomplish it.

- Using CoreService API to access the Queue.
- Directly querying the DB (not very recommended)
- PowerShell to read the queue (Yes its possible)

We choose last option as some Tridion Powershell Module created by SDL MVP Pkjaer makes it very easy.

Steps:

- Install Tridion Powershell module, details in above link.
- Install AWS Powershell module(s) on machine to work.
- Here is code snippet which do following

• Import AWS Powershell 
• Create Cloudwatch matrices based on two states "Waiting for Publish" and Waiting for Deployment"
• fill the matrices with count of above two states
• Write the data to cloudwatch

 Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\AWS Tools\PowerShell\AWSPowerShell\AWSPowerShell.psd1"  
 $dat = New-Object Amazon.CloudWatch.Model.MetricDatum  
 $dat.Timestamp = (Get-Date).ToUniversalTime()  
 $dat.MetricName = "Waiting For Publish"  
 $dat.Unit = "Count"  
 $dat.Value = (Get-TridionPublishTransaction | Where-Object {$_.State -eq "WaitingForPublish"}).Count  
 $dat1 = New-Object Amazon.CloudWatch.Model.MetricDatum  
 $dat1.Timestamp = (Get-Date).ToUniversalTime()  
 $dat1.MetricName = "Waiting For Deployment"  
 $dat1.Unit = "Count"  
 $dat1.Value = (Get-TridionPublishTransaction | Where-Object {$_.State -eq "WaitingForDeployment"}).Count  
 set-AWSCredentials -AccessKey -SecretKey FT1nwN74NHkGtlJ -StoreAs "MVP17"  
 Set-AWSCredentials -ProfileName "MVP17"  
 Write-CWMetricData -Namespace "Usage Metrics" -MetricData $dat  
 Write-CWMetricData -Namespace "Usage Metrics" -MetricData $dat1  

Auto-scaling:

One of the purpose to push the queue data to AWS Cloudwatch is to configure the auto-scaling of instances.

if there are lots of items in queue, auto-scaling of publishing system can be configured on AWS infrastructure.