Life With Sitecore

Recap As you may recall from the previous post - we enabled the OData Item Service in Sitecore and ran some test queries. Now, it's time to create the "brains" behind the Alexa skill that will make use of the OData Item Service to allow the user to ask Alexa about dogs. In other words - we will give our content a voice :). Note: we will not delve too deeply into hows and why's of Alexa development as there are many ways of doing it in different languages and environments. Alexa 101 Hopefully by now you the reader know what Amazon's Alexa is. If not - welcome to Planet Earth! 1. Alexa is a voice activated device that you can talk to to achieve a (hopefully) useful set of actions (called a Skill). You can activate a specific skill by saying a magic word that is called an invocation. You can think of a skill as an app that is invoked via a HTTP endpoint. 2. Once a skill is invoked - you can say specific phrases or utterances to carry out intents. Inten

The Story So Far In the previous posts I've described how to enable and use the OData Item Service in Sitecore and also how to set up a Alexa skill. In this final part of the series on Alexa and Sitecore integration - we finally come to the point where we plug in the newest part of Sitecore 9 - namely XConnect. This will allow us to collect data about what is being searched for via our Alexa Skill. Therefore, we are able to glean useful insights into user behavior and use the collected data to personalise content. Connecting the X's If you've read enough about XConnect, you will know that when we collect data, we  associate that data with a contact. Ideally we also try to identify the contact. So far ,we have not really discussed how we know who the user is. This is not really obvious for voice driven experiences as it is for web driven interfaces. For example, to identify a web user - a developer can force them to register or login and identify them with cookies.

Introduction In this series of blog posts - we will take a whirlwind tour of how to create an Alexa skill to integrate with Sitecore. The skill will connect with Sitecore's OData Item Service to query content. In later posts we will also be recording Contacts and Events with XConnect. In this post - we will start with the basics. The Proof of Concept In true Blue Peter style - here's one I made earlier. I have created items representing dogs based on the Dog template in Sitecore. The Dog template has fields for description, celebrity (famous example) and personality. I will be querying by these fields. Template Fields Now - querying content via Alexa (sorry about the shaky video!) Enabling the OData Item Service With the release of Sitecore 9 - there is now a new OData Item Service (OIS) that allows us to query and retrieve content using the OData protocol. The OData Item Service is part of the Sitecore.Services.Client framework that enables developers

This post serves to get you up and running quickly on a local instance of the newly released Sitecore 9. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing - use the links below to jump to the section that interests you. Prerequistes SQL Database Configuration SOLR Setup Install SIF and Sitecore Fundamentals Install XConnect and Sitecore Post-Install Steps Conclusion As Sitecore enthusiasts will no doubt be aware, Sitecore 9 was released recently and comes with a host of new features. I could probably go into some depth about these but will leave it to you to read the lowdown from the one-and-only JammyKam . The biggest change is XConnect which separates out Xdb related functions into a separate layer  enabling collection of analytics data from a wider variety of sources such as mobile apps, IOT sensors, third party apps etc. More information on XConnect can be found here . Another big change (no doubt influenced by XConnect) that you will face when downloading Sitecore