As you probably know Sitecore has made a few acquisitions in the last year that promise to alter the Sitecore platform significantly. Customer Data Platform called Boxever was one of the first two companies that got acquired by Sitecore. The first glimpse at the platform created a lot of buzz in Sitecore community which is not surprising. The platform provides capabilities that Sitecore xDB doesn’t, and in my humble opinion, it will replace Sitecore xDB in the future.
Why is Boxever worth looking into?
Client-Side Execution
First and foremost, Boxever CDP tracking and personalization
is happening on the front-end. It means that as a developer you need to include
the JavaScript reference to the Boxever library, and you are ready to roll. The
way you include the reference to the library It is very similar to Google
Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and many other services. If you are thinking of
implementing a Jamstack solution, Boxever is a perfect solution for analytics
and personalization.
Connections to any system over REST API
If you need to retrieve the list of products from a separate
commerce system and display different collection of products based on the
audience or other criteria, you can do that with Boxever. It provides the Data
sources feature that allows you to create connections to various systems of
your choosing.
Personalization
You can personalize areas of the page based on the user data
and the rules that you define in Boxever admin. Under the hood, all Boxever
JavaScript does is it injects the html that you defined in the admin into a
specific area of your page. Based on the rules you define; it can inject
different html. The only challenge is the delay. Since the personalization is
running on the front end and there is a call made to Boxever service to
validate the rules and provide corresponding html, it takes a little bit of
time to render the Web Experience. Rendering personalized main navigation with
Boxever might not be the best solution because of that, but if you alter areas
of the page that are below the page fold, for example, it works perfectly.
APIs
Boxever CDP comes with a number of API endpoints that allows
you alter user data that gets tracked by the system, retrieve the user data in
various ways, manipulate connections, etc. Overall, it is a pretty long list of
APIs that you can use in various cases.
Learning Boxever
Sitecore provided a Boxever course on the Learning Portal
that would give you a basic understanding of the platform. Don’t expect it to
go into developer implementation details. There is a separate documentation
website for that, which is pretty useful.
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