Sitecore’s New Mobile Apps Focus on Analytics Dashboards, Media Uploads
Number three on Darren Guaranccia’s list of things Sitecore will work on to support the connected customer is improved analytics and reporting. This week, to help organizations do just that, Sitecore has released a new mobile application, built on its own Mobile SDK called the .
Sitecore Executive Insight Dashboard
What does this dashboard app do for organizations? It helps with monitoring and measuring what’s happening on their digital properties. Optimized for the tablet, the Executive Dashboard runs on the iPad/iPhone and Windows 8.1 (the Android may come at a later date, but Sitecore has focused on the two OSs its clients use primarily).
Sitecore Executive Dashboard Mobile App
In a conversation with Mark Floisand, Sitecore’s new VP of product marketing, these mobile apps come as a response to several market trends:
- Helping customers take advantage of the BYOD
- Marketing technology integration – providing full visibility to the full experience management platform
- A way to surface all the insights that come with big data
The app is compatible with Sitecore 6.6 and up, and is free. With the app you can filter reports by time, website, language and campaign. Some of the charts available include Value, Visits, Value per visit, Search keywords, Goal conversions. You can order results by value, visit, value per visit and potential. It’s also good that all charts are stored on the device so you can look through them while offline.
A couple of points I noted:
- How do you notify/alert someone if you see something you want acted upon immediately? Floisand said that there is an Email function that will take a snapshot of the chart you are looking at and place it in an email where you can put notes. This feature is only available in the iOS app, but will come to the Windows mobile app at some point.
- What about adding custom dashboards? Could an organization’s developer create some custom dashboards and add them to the app? Unfortunately, but also not surprisingly, no. We can assume that Sitecore has considered what the most important reports/charts are and these are in the Executive Insight Dashboard. Anything else required, Sitecore expects users to use a BI tool or another tool to analyze and create their own custom dashboard. I expect that if/when this degree of customization is required, it’s not likely meant for a mobile app anyway.
Sitecore Executive Insights Dashboard
Sitecore iOS Media Uploader
Also new is the . This little tool allows users to upload media files into Sitecore to use within their digital properties. When you are at a tradeshow, conference, or on a customer visit and you take some pictures or a video with your iPhone or iPad, this app provides an easy way to get those images/video into the Sitecore experience platform.
Sitecore’s Mobile Strategy
One thing you should notice about Sitecore’s mobile strategy, is that they don’t have mobile apps for creating and managing content. Sitecore has a great integrated mobile experience for viewing digital properties, and now they have an analytics/reporting app, but there are no plans to give organizations a way to manage content.
Of course, you can still create and manage content on mobile apps using the browser, so it’s not like you can’t do it at all. But look at what some other customer experience management vendors are doing with mobile apps for managing content.
It’s also worth pointing out that with Sitecore’s strong Microsoft developer community (Sitecore itself is Microsoft based), the primary focus for mobile app development has been on Windows mobile and iOS. Android does not play a big role. This Floisand told me, is due to the Microsoft focus and needs of Sitecore customers.
We can’t always expect every vendor to build their mobile apps for every device. What we can expect is that they are listening to their customers and the marketplace they are selling to and building solutions that suit the needs of these two groups. I’m curious to know if you think Sitecore’s mobile strategy is on target, or if they are missing out on big opportunities by not developing for Android and building content management mobile apps? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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