mmmake on Sitecore Tour
Reading time: 6 min
2 Makies, 3 Sitecore events in 3 countries. Our two Sitecore experts, Dirk Schäfauer, mmmake Sitecore Senior Solution Architect and Sitecore MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and Andreas Kölle, Unit Lead DXP (Digital Experience Platform) Development and partner manager, went on a Sitecore tour around the world: from Germany to Chicago and back, remote to Hungary and then to Cologne. What the two experienced and what news they brought back from their travels, Andreas tells in his guest article.
First stop: Sitecore Symposium in Chicago
As a Sitecore Enterprise Solution Partner at Platinum Level, the Sitecore Symposium is of course a must-attend event. And guess what: The event was held on-site in a city none other than Chicago – wohooo. We were super exited!
We, Dirk Schäfauer and myself, Andreas Kölle, were allowed to go to the event – what an honor! That meant packing our bags, heading to Frankfurt airport and from there to Chicago. The event started with some training courses for Sitecore CDP (Customer Data Platform) and Sitecore Content Hub, a digital asset management platform (DAM) – you never stop learning, especially for our dearly loved customers. We also had the chance to listen to important keynotes where the first novelties were revealed – 3 new Sitecore products which were completely in-house developments:
- Sitecore Content Hub One
- Sitecore Search
- Sitecore Connect
Sitecore Content Hub One
Sitecore Content Hub One is a headless content management system that is:
- fully SaaS with
- simple interface and APIs
- designed for both marketers and developers
It is a pureplay agile customer management system (CMS) that is an easy-to-use standalone solution purpose built for agility. Sitecore Content Hub One is cloud native and optimized for speed powered by Content Hub and geo-distributed at the edge. Content and media can be used standalone or across the Sitecore portfolio in Content Hub and XM Cloud. It has a simplified UI and simplified APIs and has also a completely rebuilt API and UI from the ground up to provide a clean and modern experience for business users and developers. You have very flexible content modelling. This means you can model content of any type for any channel with ease and agility. It is built for simple and intuitive content authoring for marketers and other content creators. While Content Hub One is headless you have completely reusable omnichannel content, you can serve content anywhere – web, app, kiosk, voice assistant – the possibilities are endless.
Sitecore Search
The main purpose of Sitecore Search is to elevate your content. Understand the intentions of individual visitors through AI and content-based rules in real time and act accordingly. It is all about deep insights to go beyond URLs and clicks to measure engagement with themes and keywords across your content. Sitecore Search in general is a very fast and predictive search. It suggests relevant content as they type, anticipating the visitor journey within milliseconds. Through rich APIs and components, it seamlessly embeds content search, guided navigation, and promotion into any site (for an example visit: https://www.sitecore.com/ to see it live). The search incorporates multiple languages at once into your search to simplify management and global relevance.
Sitecore Connect
To start with: Composability is driving the need for connectivity ever higher. Current connectivity is (mostly) based on point-to-point connections.
With Sitecore Connect you are able to connect your Sitecore products to rest of your stack with ease. Sitecore Connect is an IPaaS tool, this shortcut stands for Integration Platform as a Service. It is a lowcode/nocode tool to solve integrations and processes via drag and drop UI. Basically it uses triggers to start a series of actions. Sitecore-provided recipes for top MarTech platforms (just bring your own credentials), this means that you can build your own recipes with 1000+ connectors.
Sitecore XM Cloud
Of course, that was by far not all there is to report in terms of the Sitecore innovations. At the top of the list of exciting things is an introduction to Sitecore XM Cloud.
Sitecore XM Cloud is one of the CMS of the composable stack, the SaaS implementation of Sitecore XP. XM Cloud has the same core as Sitecore XP from version 10.x. It is an enterprise CMS/DXP built on a MACH (Microservices, API first, Cloud native, Headless) architecture like all of the composable products. Edge, a GraphQL interface is included by default, as well as basic personalization and basic analytics. This basic personalization and analytics can be easily expanded at the push of a button with Sitecore CDP (Customer Data Platform) and Sitecore Personalize for advanced analytics and personalization. The components are also a new feature. It is a frontend-as-a-service where you can create new or use existing components with an WYSIWYG editor in a standalone SaaS application. These components can be linked to any data source simply by configuration (no programming required) like JSON, GraphQL an URL or any other connector. Also new are the templated sites which are ready-made page templates that can be used for e.g. landing pages or that can be used to create new templates.
The deploy features are exciting for the developers among us because it is possible to roll them out in all environments easily (development, test and productive) via the backend, as well as the “frontend development options” feature, with which simple changes can be adapted and published very quickly and directly in the backend without re-publishing the whole system.
Important note: Anyone who is already using Sitecore XP can usually migrate their content by serializing the content items.
Sitecore Cloud Portal
The Sitecore Cloud Portal is the portal for Sitecore customers and partners to manage their Sitecore products. A single portal for easily managing solutions across the composable DXP landscape. The interesting thing is that it can also be used to manage third-party products such as Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, etc.
But that’s not all
A small insight into the Sitecore product world. Of course, that was by far not all, there were many, many more tracks with interesting and exciting topics that we were able to listen to in order to take away the most exciting information for our customers. Among all the keynotes and presentations, we had of course some free time as well: We went to the Sitecore Symposium Party at the National Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and attended many more impressive events. We were very happy to see more of the city of Chicago and connect with our Sitecore colleagues.
Another highlight was the MVP summit, an event only for Sitecore MVPs. And since Dirk is our Sitecore MVP (for two years in a row!) he was allowed to attend at this exclusive summit. In this inner circle, Sitecore product managers answers the MVPs questions, best practices were discussed and the exchange between the MVPs is also encouraged too.
Second stop: SUGHU – Sitecore User Group Hungary
Packed with the latest news and important insights we went back to Germany after one week in Chicago. But that was not the end of our Sitecore tour. Only two days after we landed in Germany, we went to the next Sitecore event, the Sitecore User Group Hungary, where we had the chance to present our trip to Chicago to the audience as guest speakers. Unfortunately, only remotely but we hope to be there in person for the next time.
Last stop: SUGDE – Sitecore User Group Germany
In our last tour week, we went to Cologne to the Sitecore User Group Germany – a complete contrast to the Sitecore User Group Hungary, because unlike the SUGHU, the event took place on site. Here we were able to share our newly gained knowledge with everyone in the form of a presentation. It was a pleasure for us to speak to the two user groups and we are always happy to be able to contribute to this great community.
After this long tour we are very happy to be home again, but at the same time, we are very excited about what comes next.
Would you like to learn more about the new Sitecore products or need support with your Sitecore project? Our experts look forward to your request.
