The last month has been a little crazy as for new Sitecore knowledge, and especially around Sitecore 7. Over the last month, I’ve done two presentations of the new platform, one for internal usage, where my colleges attended, and one for some of our customers, who wanted to get inspired. I’ll use this blog post to share some of the key aspects that I focused the two presentations on.  

General for the presentations 

The next big thing to teach people is the searching in Sitecore 7. This is the major feature of Sitecore 7, and the one thing that has gotten 90% of the focus in the release.  

Internal presentation

~25 minutes - 15 people, 50% developers 50% other (marketers, CEO, sales representatives).

This was done in the start of May, so the release of Sitecore 7 was the MVP release. The focus was on getting the developers to see the power of search in Sitecore 7. We have done many Sitecore 6 solutions over the last few years, where we utilized the search index more and more to gain some speed that the native Sitecore API couldn’t. The new search API really simplifies the implementations we made earlier, and everyone will now be able to do searching on indexes.

Focus was also the upgrade of all third party components and a general update to .NET 4.5.

As it was an internal presentation, I also used some focus on telling people that Sitecore 7, is a lot like Sitecore 6.6, and that the upgrade path is very easy for solutions that hasn’t been customized too much.

Presentation for our customers

~25 minutes - 20 people, mainly communications-related people

This was done in the end of May, which gave me the opportunity to demo on the real release of Sitecore 7. This was cool, as the MVP edition had some minor bugs, which was fixed for this release.

I started by gooing through the history of upgrading Sitecore, and showed that Sitecore 7 looks a lot like Sitecore 6.

Focus was once again the searching aspect of Sitecore 7. For the demo, I had made a site, where one of the customers presents products had been imported along with their images. This was 7000 products and 7000 images, so the demo was very impressing. I focused on the ease of searching the items, and tagging them.

I also stumbled upon the Autohaus demo on Github, installed this into another Sitecore 7 instance, and showed it off.

I ended the presentation telling about the easy upgrade, and comparing it to an upgrade earliere, i.e. Sitecore 5-> Sitecore 6

The feedback on both presentations was very good, and people was exited to get started on the new platform.

This presentation was on a day called "Digital Inspiration", and focused on inspiring our existing customers, for what to come, it was followed by a presentation of Sitecore Intranet Portal 4

Demos in the cloud

The demos that I made were all hosted on Azure Virtual Machines. This was very cool, as the scaling of a Virtual Machine in the cloud is so ease. When I was putting the demo sites together, I just ran with a normal small instance, but then an hour before the presentation, Id crank it up to a large instance, and performance was no problem at all. I love this, and would definitely recommend this approach to others.

The presentations

Ill attach the presentations to this pose, they are in Danish, but you should get the main content of them by opening them. Feel free to use them if you want

Sitecore 7 - Oxygen Academy.pptx (647.82 kb) - Internal presentation

Sitecore 7 - Digital Inspiration.pptx (2.65 mb) - For customers