Digital Learnings in Sitecore & Cloud

In a project where we're implementing Content Hub, there in a PIM system which is used to manage products that feed into various downstream systems. Content Hub is to be the new source of truth for Digital Assets, and this will include all product images. We already have various entities mastered in other systems including PIM such as products and categories bing syncrhonised into Content Hub as taxonomies that will enable tagging of Digital Assets to assist in organising them. This integration is done via Mulesoft with the PIM system raising an event when an individual product/category is changed, with a Mulesfot subscriber responding to the event and pushing the change to Content Hub via it's REST interface . In our case we want the association of product images with products in Content Hub to control what images are shown for products in downsteram systems. This means that data will flow from Content Hub back through Mulesoft and into PIM. PIM then manages the flow of ...

The Sitecore product family now provides two key platforms where you can manage content (and technically this is now expanding as you can manage content in Sitecore Send and Sitecore CDP as well -- the future for these is unclear however I'd expect the patterns below may well expend to those other delivery channels in a similar way).  When you have platforms with overlapping capabilities, I believe it's always important to have some clear principles as to what the role of each system is in the overall architecture - so you know what you should and should not do in each place.  I guess it's kind of like putting together a recipe to follow when you are making decisions to ensure that everything works together and you don't end up with a failed cake. Below I outline one way that I feel makes sense to align the responsibilities between Sitecore XP/XM and Content Hub in an enterprise digital architecture. The moving parts The Sitecore tools that we're considering are ...

In a Content Hub implementation you might often need to produce multiple different size of an image that you can link to from external locations. One way to do think in Content Hub would be to create multiple renditions and create public links to them, however there might be cases where you want a bit more control over which assets you create these links to and when in the lifecycle of your content you do this. In this case another useful functionality of Content Hub is the ability to apply conversions directly on public links. Within the UI you see that there a number of options for controlling the public link output: However if you want to control this programatically you will need to interact with the underlying entity record. Looking at the entity record for a public link, you see that this information is captured in a Property called ConversionConfiguration . However the content of this property is a JSON string -- so how do you interact with it from code? ...

So has been a long time between drinks for my blogging activities! I thought I'd try to get back in the swing by capturing some of the learnings from our current roll-out of Sitecore's Content Hub platform. Content Hub is a pretty neat product, providing really good Digital Asset Management (DAM) capabilities along with MRM and what is called Product Content Management (PCM) which provides a light PIM capability. I think where it really shines however is in it's Content Marketing Platform (CMP) module. Perhaps more about that a little later. If you are used to deploying a platform like Sitecore XP where you have access to the product binaries to dotPeek at, and get really detailed logs, debugging issues within Content Hub can be a bit of a laborious exercise. As a SaaS platform you only get the documentation (which although decent is never as detailed as you need it to be) and some fairly high level error logging. The system is very configurable too, which gives you p...