In this series of blog posts, we will revisit the recently concluded Sitecore Symposium 2020 where I will examine my key takeaways from the event.

This year saw the biggest Symposium ever with more than 5,500 people registering across more than 70 countries. I somehow managed to get myself an All-Access ticket, which I got as reward for being a speaker during the event.

Having an All-Access ticket meant you had access to all Live, Featured and On-Demand sessions. As of the time of going to press, you can still access the Video On-demand which is very cool in case you need to re-play any of the sessions you might have missed.

In this blog, I will start with revisiting the sessions presented by the Avanade teams.

Highlights from Sessions by Avanade

At Avanade, we are a Sitecore Platinum partner and this year we proudly sponsored the Symposium 2020 event as Connector Sponsors.

Our teams were available round the clock in the Partner Pavilion where we engaged attendees in the Virtual Chats covering the following areas:

• Avanade Industry Sales Accelerators
• Headless Digital Experience Accelerator
• Accelerate Business with Avanade – Here’s How

Attendees had a chance to also watch our webinars below:

• Webinar on how to address customer experience in utilities
• Webinar on how to adjust your customer experience for the new normal
• Avanade x Volvo cars, Upshifted

On the other hand, we had our speakers running the following sessions during the Symposium:

Bringing life-changing hearing health to a global audience with Demant

This Digital & Business Transformation session saw Christian Bennich our Digital Marketing Lead in Avanade Nordic interviewing Troels Kjær Rasmussen the Head of Customer Facing Applications, Demant Group.

I really enjoyed this session as it captures what we do best at Avanade, your digital transformation partner. In the session, Troels describes how 5 years ago, Dermant Group had a challenging Business landscape with aggressive acquisitions, branding equity and other technology challenges. This impacted their Total Cost of Ownership too. Fast forward to today, the Avanade partnership has helped “Establish one strategic platform that could cater for the combined needs of the entire group”. Worth mentioning that at the core of this transformation journey is the Microsoft Azure cloud and Sitecore Experience platform.

The key takeaways from Troels includes to always aim for long term success through a repetitive model of: Realize, Learn, Scale.

I would highly recommend watching this session on-demand for the full interview.

Defining new ways to transact with Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 and Azure IoT

This Experience-focused Commerce on-demand session was presented by Benjamin Adamski, Solution Architect, Avanade and Boris Brodsky, Director of Architecture, Avanade.

During the session, Boris and Benjamin outlined the case for IoT as there is marketplace expectations for seamless and automated commerce to extend into the physical world.

Armed with staggering statistics, the Avanade duo put forward a compelling case for taking IoT seriously:

• it is estimated that there will be 1.9 Billion 5G Cellular subscription by 2024
• it is estimated that more than 75 Billion IoT devices will be connected to the web by 2025

Some of the key takeaways include driving the business outcomes with IoT and Connected Commerce leveraging:

• Automated checkouts
• Personalised discounts
• Smart Shelves/Inventory Management
• Automatic Supply Chain Management

This is one of those session you will want to replay and replay again, as Boris and Benjamin go on and on How to implement IoT with Sitecore leveraging Headless Sitecore Experience Commerce.

Even the losing experience is a win!

This Featured Sitecore Fundamentals session was presented by Andy Leonetti, Digital Strategist, Avanade and Leah Feldman, MarTech Strategist, Avanade.

Tapping into Andy’s 10+ years with Customer Engagement and plenty of Digital Marketing experience from Leah, the Avanade duo put together “Your guide to experimentation” with Sitecore experiences.

This session tells the story behind the framework for testing and optimising the Microsoft Partner Network that will inspire you to get testing if you are not already!

Key takeaway for me is how easy it is to leverage out-of-the-box Sitecore Experience Optimization capabilities to test and learn.

Andy and Leah summarised their session with the pointers below:

• Make it valuable – align experiments to organisational business outcomes
• Define & measure – define your experimentation inputs
• Set up & run – set up your test using your measurement inputs
• Share results – determine the experiment winner and communicate results
• Take it to next level – Utilize Engagement value scale and generate impactful experiment ideas
• Make it repeatable – Create a process for your team to follow and optimise

Use Sitecore Host plugin architecture to transition on-prem Active Directory workloads onto Azure

I have previously blogged about my session and how I prepared for it. You can revisit the post here.

My session was themed Problem Solving Through Technology, and I discussed how you can leverage the Sitecore Host architecture to resolve the issue of deprecated Sitecore AD module as you transition into the cloud.

Key takeaways from my session is how easy and quick to leverage Sitecore Host architecture to create custom Sitecore Identity host plugins, including free sample code samples

Conclusion and Next Steps

This concludes part one of this series of blog posts revisiting the recently concluded Sitecore Symposium 2020. Until next time, keep watching!