Multivariate Testing for Sublayouts in Sitecore - asp.net

Having toyed with the concept in the past, I am interested in using multivariate testing on my companies Sitecore website. There are a number of places where I feel we can definitely improve sales through the use of A/B testing in:
Running two entirely different templates to see what layouts work better for users
Running a number of different Sublayouts (forms) on the site to see which ones people are more likely to fill out
Trialling different content - Running two different sets of copy to see if users are more likely to stay on the page
I want to use the Marketing Suite within Sitecore, and I want to be able to measure who visits pages more and count, out of two or more sublayout forms, which form is used the most. Sadly, I have no experience with the OMS and am struggling to see how one actually implements these things.
Let's say I have a content item, with a bunch of sublayouts attached to it within its template. Can someone help guide me towards a way of achiving the three things I want to run multivariate testing on?
EDIT: On the subject of the two sublayouts I want to test on a template; I have two sublayouts, which are both simple ASP.NET email forms. Once a user fills in the form the contents of the form are written to a database and an email (using Sitecore.Context.Item to get an "Email From" field from the content item that runs the form).
This is where I get stuck. A number of the sublayouts I have don't seem to have any "content" that needs pulling from a data source. The only content I can see in the case of the two forms I want to test is the "Email To" fields. So, if I were to abstract those away into their own data templates, and then added those as data sources I assume that I would then have to change my code for these to stop using Sitecore.Context.Item?
The point where I get stuck is with the data sources for the Multivariate Test Variables and the data sources for the Sublayouts. If I have two data templates containing the Email fields for each, two sublayouts that contain the forms that need testing and two multivariate variables, what goes where?

I believe you can read about it in the Analytics Configuration Reference (PDF link) under section 2.2.
You essentially create a MV test that wraps over potential data sources of a sublayout. The test then randomly assigns a DataSource, so your sublayouts need to be written to work with a DataSource.

With Sitecore 8 released Multivariate Testing is now supported out of the box as well as AB Testing.
You can run two entirely different templates to see which Layout works best for the user by Page Test in Sitecore's Optimization Tool on the Launch Pad. Creating a Page Test you can select the current version of the Item then create a new Version of the Item with the different Layout. This can also be done for Content on the Page
After that you need to decide how a winner can be chosen e.g. most goals completed by users, registrations etc then Sitecore will automatically run the test for you showing A and B to various users and ultimately choose a winner based on the Test Objective. You can choose a winner mannually or let Sitecore automatically choose after a set Duration.
Creating a Mulitvariate Test on number of different Sublayouts as well as imagery, personalisation, content etc is a little more interesting. To create a Multivariate Test is done via Workflow Actions, I've posted a blog recently how to add Maultivariate Testing to workflow.
Approving with a Test will prompt Sitecore to create a Multivariate Test for all variables (Sublayouts, Content, Personalization etc). It creates an 'Experience' for every possible combination of these variables and tests them against each other.
For a more in-depth explination and guide I have recently posted a tutorial to create a Multivariate Test in Sitecore.

There are two trainings that you (and a developer on your team) should really consider attending: OMS Certified Marketer and OMS .NET Developer.
Working with a Sitecore Certified OMS .NET Developer, you will be able to accomplish your marketing objectives. This is what Sitecore Training is for!
Please see the following and regsiter for the next available trainings:
http://www.sitecore.net/Training/Course-Overview/OMS-11-Certified-Marketer.aspx
http://www.sitecore.net/Training/Course-Overview/OMS-11-NET-Developer.aspx

Related

How to I separate a Web+App into separate web and app projects

I've created a web+app project on Google analytics and it has a lot of data on it I don't want to lose. But... App+Web is not good and makes it ridiculously difficult to see important pieces of data.
How can I separate them into either two separate properties or views?
You cannot separate data that has already been collected into different properties (and views do not even exist in Apps+Web).
If you want to look at App data and Web data separately, you'd have you use filters/segmentation.
Your best chance is to wait until BigQuery integration becomes available and then export the data and write your own aggregations, although that is probably not easier than working with Apps+Web in the first place.
Also this is still a beta, so with enough user feedback they might improve the UI to make data (including already collected data) more easily accessible. But as for short term fixes, there are none.
You can see Technology report: Cross-platform, Web or App.
You can also use Analysis --> Exploration report and create custom reports.

How to write Custom HTML code for a Rally/CA report

What would be the HTML code to "filter out" a handful of specific user stories?
Your question is highly unspecific. The only way to get stories is to programatically access the API via a language like Javascript, Java, C#, C++, etc., etc.
You can embed javascript into your html page and get the code to fetch stories with a filter passed in on the access. To see how to structure a query, you could turn on the developer tools in your browser and have a look at the network accesses that the browser does when fetching stories into a custom list app on a page. Using the custom list, you could refine your query to what you want first.
You could always build a custom app for a specific use case, but if you're looking for data and having trouble finding it, there are ways to do so with a combination of custom lists, Rally's own query language, and creative use of advanced filters. It's also possible to massage your data in way that makes Rally's native reporting a bit easier to use.
This is just an example but, if I'm looking to get information on the quarterly progress of my team who don't use start/end date or releases/milestones, there's not a lot available from an app/report standpoint that's already built. However, if I coach my team on keeping a few simple data elements neat and tidy, and utilize the custom report views to make that data useful, it can be pretty quick and easy to implement.
I have my teams keep a few basic fields up to date: Title, Owner, Project, Tags, Refined Estimate (all at a feature level), and most importantly - keeping a parent/child relationship between most work.
Now I can build a report that filters by a certain tag, that can also be filtered by team, and also has the ability to show additional valuable data that can be unearthed because your house is tidy. In this case, you can now display a column that will total all child objects under a certain feature, and display that next to 'Planned' estimate, which will give you the ability to also export and show a planned vs. actual to help your teams estimate more accurately.
It's a round-about way of saying there are a lot of possibilities with the tool if you can use your resources. Building custom apps means you also have to maintain them or pay someone with the knowledge to do so.

Managing Plone vocabularies through the web

I am currently working on a Plone project with several custom content types. These content types have several fields that in turn fetch their values from vocabularies. Currently, I've just hard coded my values in a vocabularies.py file as such:
from Products.Archetypes import atapi
CITIES_LIST = atapi.DisplayList((
('nairobi', 'Nairobi'),
('kisumu', 'Kisumu'),
('mombasa', 'Mombasa'),
('eldoret', 'Eldoret'),
('nakuru', 'Nakuru'),
))
This works well and there is no problem with it.
The only drawback is that the vocabulary is etched in code and it will need a programmer/developer to modify the existing vocabulary.
What I need is a way for site administrators and users who are not necessarily programmers to be able to modify the vocabulary in future through the web interface i.e. a client from another country to be able to change the list of available cities.
I've looked at Products.ATVocabularyManager but I don't think it fits the bill. Perhaps if there was an interface with a grid to manage the vocabularies. This I guess I will have to manage them by storing them as ArcheTypes.
Is there a way to handle such a situation in Plone 4? How would one go about it?
Products.ATVocabularyManager should work fine for your use case. I've used it with success many times in the past.
It provides an admin UI to manage your vocabularies.
If the UI to manage to vocabs is not to your liking, perhaps you could contribute to the project to make it better?

Is InfoPath right for this purpose?

I'm currently looking for a way to make a dynamic checklist-type document for my job to be used for software upgrades. Right now, we have a generic Word checklist that has all the steps for upgrading a client's software, but due to its nature, not all steps apply to each client, and to list all possible options would make it difficult to navigate and difficult to use, which goes against its purpose.
What I'm looking for is a way to input information (checkboxes, drop-downs, and text fields), and based on that information, produce a list of tasks in some format that is user-readable. For example, if I check one box to indicate that they have a certain feature installed, then add 3 items to the task list.
Is InfoPath the right tool for the job, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
From what you describe, I'd say InfoPath is a very good choice for your project. My first thought would be to work in two different views. The first view would be for your people to input the information about what features are installed (there can be hidden content that only shows if certain answers are given, making it less unwieldy than your Word form). Then I'd have another view designed for printing out and giving to the client, containing only the task list info derived from the data in the first view. Bark away!

Does anyone use Iron speed designer for rapid asp.net development? [closed]

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Visual studio is pretty good but doesn't create stored procedures automatically. Iron Speed designer does supposedly. But is it any good?
I have used Ironspeed extensively for the past two years for most of our ASP.NET forms over data projects.
It works. Does several things well: stored procs, fast layout of table browse and CRUD screens, fast layout of single record CRUD screens. It manages the round-trip (or half-round trip) process decently, detecting changes in your back end db schema and updating its data access layer, then making the changed columns available for you to alter your UI (in record or table control panels). ISD (as they call it) does an excellent job in making security management for your app pretty painless, even down to the control level (if you use ISD's subclassed versions of asp.net controls). Final plus, not a small one, is the CSS-based theme control (easy to change to a variety of themes, easy to customize a particular theme, and not even too bad to build your own theme variant by forking an existing one you like). Depending upon whether you let ISD create your stored procs in the code base or the database, changing DB's at run time can be a piece of cake.
Fairly active forum with a core group of helpful contributors. You can probably avoid the paid tech support through the forum.
Okay, the down sides. Creates fairly large code conglomerations, being a three tiered architecture. As Galwegian says, like any framework, you've got the velvet handcuffs (get your mind out of the gutter if you are thinking about anything other than code limitations and conventions!). The velvet handcuffs are the page and control model, the data layer, lack of a business object/class capability per se, the postback model, and the temptation to make your user GUI look like THEIR user GUI that comes out of the box because it is so darned easy and convenient.
ISD builds a basic page by combining an HTML template (in to which you place ISD specific code generation tags and any other tags, etc., you which using the ISD GUI or by hand). The page model relies upon a code behind page created from a piece of code template. The base classes are almost completely overridable, so that you can override all of the default functions, regenerate the application and not lose your overrides. The database controls live in the page container, but have their own class definitions (i.e., their code-behind) in specific /app_code files. Again, each control type has its own base class with pretty completely overridable methods. A single record control (showing a single db record) is pretty simple. A table, showing several records, has a table class and a table row class. The ISD website (www.ironspeed.com/support) has good documentation of the ISD model as a whole.
So, where are the problems in this model?
1. Easy and tempting to live with their out of the box GUI. Point ISD at your database, pick the tables you want to have it turn in to pages, tell it the kinds of pages, give it a thematic style and five minutes later you're viewing the application. Cool. But, it is very easy to forget that their user GUI is probably not what your user wants to see. So, be prepared to think for yourself and tinker with the GUI thus created. Not hard to do, and you can use VS 2005 to help you.
Business objects. You could put together your own business objects, but it would be difficult and you would get no help from ISD. ISD does a LOT of building of simple validation and checking (appropriate look up values, ranges, lengths, etc.) ISD lets you build custom queries, but these are read-only. It is smart enough (and you can override the write from a page in any case) to let you take a one to many view and write it back to the database (you'd probably override the default base method, but it isn't that hard to do). However, when you get in to serious dependency checking, ISD is still really about tables and not business objects. So, you're going to write some code.
If you are smart, you'll write it once store it in app_code somewhere and use it by calling it from an overridden method in your table or record controls. If you are like most of us, you'll first spaghetti it in to one of the code-behind classes above, and then forget you did so, or have a copy in each of the 10 pages that manipulates customer data. In my world, that has usually meant 5 identical functions and 5 that are all different (even though they are all supposed to be the same). ISD makes it tempting to order marinara, because the model lends itself to spaghetti code. Of course, you can completely prevent this, but you gotta learn the ISD model to determine the best way to do it on your project.
Page state and postbacks. Although ISD is quite open about this problem and tells users not to just take the defaults of returning the whole asp.net page state in the postback stream (cache on the server instead), the default is to return the whole page. Can make for some BIG pages. Which makes users think S L O W. As I said, you can manipulate this. But, what newbie is going to get this when it is SO tempting to just point, click, and boom - instant application. Your manager is now off your back because her product inventory table is "on the web" with a cool search and edit GUI (of 400kb state pages if you've gone a bit nuts and have just taken the default behaviors of ISD). Great in-house, but the customers in the real world....
Again, knowledge is the key. You can fix this, but you need to know you SHOULD.
Database read/write postbacks. No big problem here, but you also need to know that the model is to fetch only the data used at the moment. If your table shows 1000 records in 50 record increments, when you go from records 1 to 50 to 51 through 100, you will postback and hit the database again. This keeps data current, but increases server traffic.
Overall: Try the demo version. Point it at something simple that you really want to turn in to an asp.net application. Build maybe three tables. Then dissect it using the above as a guide. See what YOU think and post back to this question.
I have used it for convenience for a very small project. It did what I wanted and saved me a couple of days work.
The main problem I found was when it came to customising or extending the generated project. You have to spend quite a bit of time trying to understand Ironspeed's way of doing things which, I'll admit, is not my way.
I'd use it again for a small project if I knew in advance I wouldn't have to customise it much after.
If stored procedure generation is all you are after, CodeSmith is a decent option at a fraction of the cost of IronSpeed. There are several sproc templates available, and you can create your own or tweak an existing if that is what you need. You can also gen .Net code to your hearts content with CodeSmith. Tons of business class templates already exist for this.
IronSpeed's value is not in the sproc generation, but in the RAD features. I agree with #Galwegian... IronSpeed is OK for mock ups or very simple apps, not so good at all if you need to do any customization.
You may want to check out Evolutility CRUD framework. It provides some of the same features (limited to CRUD) and is open source.
IronSpeed has been great (out-of-the-box) at helping me develop data-driven corporate Intranet applications. While the code model takes a little getting used to, it is effective at maintaining a nice three-tier app. While the page templates can appear garish compared to 2010's web-design, it gets the job done, when you need function over form.
Iron Speed Designer is great for simple CRUD type web applications. You can find some useful information on our web site http://www.dotnetarchitect.co.uk/

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