Digital Learnings in Sitecore & Cloud

In my last couple of posts I've talked about when to choose a multi-site versus a multi-instance pattern for deploying Sitecore, and how we approach delivering Sitecore platforms using feature based modular development . In this post I'm going to take a look at the sorts of issues that arise when large global organisations start to look at rolling out digital platforms, and how some we can leverage some of the points that we've covered in the last couple of posts as a part of our approach to designing a Sitecore based digital platform architecture that addresses them. Tyrannies of global size Large organisations hosting a number of different websites are often confronted by some competing forces which lead them to ask about whether they should have multiple sites in a single or multiple Sitecore instances.  These are usually related to the following requirements which address different types of web presence for different parts of a business: We have different site

Deloitte Digital have been delivering enterprise digital platforms with Sitecore for over 6 years, and I think it is fair to say that we've learnt a lot during the dozens of projects we've delivered in that time. Yesterday we announced the open source release of our Deloitte Digital Atlas framework for Sitecore. Atlas is the underlying framework we use to deliver all our Sitecore implementations, providing a consistent set of tools and practices for accelerating high quality multi-site ready Sitecore platforms based on what we have learned across many years of enterprise Sitecore project delivery. Some of the features included are: "ORM" Sitecore fields mapper (including support for Experience Editor and also mapping non-Sitecore items) Extensible caching and logging frameworks integrated with Sitecore events Dynamic placeholder support Multi-site workflow and data source management We hope you find it useful, and even choose to contribute back to make i

A modern digital platform doesn't just get built and then sit serving content pages for years without any changes or updates. Any system where you aren't continuously updating it to meet the needs of the business quickly becomes a legacy system, and other uncontrolled "micro-sites" will start popping up in other places (and all the FXM in the world can't make up for that!). The counterpoint to this however is that constant uncontrolled change to any system can result in a big ball of mud .  When your digital platform is a key organisational asset this might get even worse when you have multiple development teams on multiple releases or across multiple vendors all working on the system at once.  Even when delivering in a single stream using Agile principles your solution can get messy without a clear underlying architecture "skeleton" to which you can add meat. Sitecore's support for modular page composition through placeholders and modules pro