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...

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...