On Sunday FuseIT released an S4S upgrade for Sitecore 9.1 and 9.2 (Release 2.911.19253.1). This release has impressive new features and enhancements.

Companies that have voice conversations with their prospects and customers can leverage the S4S Now functionality to greatly assist the sales and support process. The following is a review of the key enhancements, features, and fixes. 

S4S Now Packages

The new S4S Now Salesforce package lets sales operators identify and seize Sitecore web sessions during sales or support calls. An associated Sitecore package installs a control that shows each visitor a unique session number link, usually made visible in the page footer. During sales conversations, the visitor tells the sales operator the unique number which allows the web session to be identified in Salesforce.

Operators in Salesforce can personalize the live session or redirect the visitors to any URL if the visitor clicks on the unique identifier link. A new S4SInfo facet field is used to store the redirect URL. 

Form Mapping Wizard Failure Support

Sitecore forms can be mapped to Salesforce using the S4S Mapping Wizard. If Salesforce goes offline or becomes unavailable for any reason, important web form submissions could be lost. To mitigate this, the new S4S release can capture form submission errors and, with the form field values, send an email to a nominated email recipient.

Sitecore Analytics Bulk Updater Changes

The bulk updater now only updates the last sync date if there was no error during the update. Only Sitecore analytic records updated since the last successful run will be synced. This makes it no longer necessary to manually reset the last sync date to before an error occurred to retry the record sync.

The ability to specify which Salesforce Org is updated by the bulk updater has been added. The Orgs that need to be updated can be specified in the new S4S.Analytics.BulkUpdateConnectionStrings configuration setting in S4SAnalytics.config with multiple connections being separated by a vertical bar or pipe ( | ).

S4S Web Service Security

Web service security has been improved to include API keys. The new release requires an API key to be stored on the Sitecore web server, for each web service, and in the corresponding S4S Salesforce packages. A GUID needs to be generated and set in the ‘Web Service API Key’ field of the Salesforce package custom setting and also saved into the appropriate configuration in Sitecore. For the S4S analytics web service, this is the S4S.Analytics.ApiKey configuration setting in S4SAnalytics.config and for the S4S personalization web service, this is the S4S.Personalization.ApiKey configuration setting in S4SFacets.config. The web services can be configured to use different keys or the same key can be used for both. By default, the web services require the API key to be configured for them to work.

Web service security has been improved to include the optional use of client-side certificates. A certificate can now be generated in Salesforce and imported into the Sitecore web server. The Salesforce packages can then be configured to use the certificate in the call to the web services. 

S4S Personalization Salesforce Package

The new S4S Personalization Salesforce package includes a bug fix. When trying to create a new profile and changing the profile before saving, the corresponding pattern cards and profile keys were not being displayed correctly. Now when creating a new profile the pattern cards and profile keys displayed on the screen match the currently select profile. Note this package should be compatible with previous versions of S4S from 2.900.18222.3 and above. For these versions, a GUID needs to be added to the new ‘Web Service API Key’ field of the Salesforce package to enable the callout to the web service.

Other Information

See more on our release notes page. Note the release 2.911.19253.1 upgrades work for Sitecore 9.1 and 9.2.

Please contact us to download this release.