Sitecore Symposium 2019 – Important Developer Takeaways

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Every year there are some exciting announcements which are made at Sitecore Symposium and this year was no exception. Theme for this year was “Human Connections In A Digital World” and to cover this topic, Sitecore had lined up number of experts who presented the importance of personalization, emotional intelligence, predictive experience in customer journey and data processing that would help to understand customer in a more personal level. Sitecore also had some key announcements about its new products which made the developer community thrilled.

This year, the three day symposium was packed with a lot of sessions. A big thanks to all presenters who made this symposium really special with their announcements for Sitecore Community.

In-Short these are the important takeaways for this year.

  1. Sitecore AI :  As the symposium itself themed as “Human Connections In A Digital World” there is no doubt that this the important of all announcements from Sitecore. I am eager to try it out and let’s see how it differs from Sitecore Cortex. 
  2. Sitecore SaaS Strategy : Sitecore switching its focus towards SaaS and planning to release a SaaS version of Sitecore Experience Platform. 
  3. SxA Improvements : Sitecore Experience Accelerator is becoming popular as it has significantly improved the time-to-market by reducing the development time needed to design and deploy a component. Front End developers should be happy with the recent changes announced for this year. 
  4.  Sitecore Horizon : New UI which was announced by Sitecore in it’s Las Vegas Symposium in 2017 is finally going to be integrated. 
  5. JSSBlazor : Sitecore Javascript Services which can be used along with client side frameworks like Angular / Vue and React is now functional with Microsoft’s open-source web framework Blazor.

Sitecore AI – Automated Personalization

I see this to be an interesting topic as Sitecore is synonymous with Personalization and I find ‘Automated Personalization’ to be a breakthrough as it would revolutionize personalization. It can automatically identify customer segments, analyze their behavior through their journey and deliver best suited content for each customer !

Sitecore AI can also provide instant insights, through which marketers can take full control to align customer experience with business goals. It can also understand customer behavior by learning them in their journey and it can automatically deliver the best content to enhance their experience. This framework is powered by Microsoft Azure !

Developers can try configuring and playing with Sitecore AI as it is planned to be released on December 2019.

Sitecore SaaS Strategy

Finally, we have the announcement for Sitecore Experience platform 9.3 as a SaaS solution, it is targeted to be released in summer 2020. Sitecore’s SaaS offering is designed in a way to build digital experience in easier but at a much faster phase. It is also said that users will have an advantage of having the most current version of the product using automatic upgrades. Sitecore Content Hub 3.3, which integrates Digital Asset Management (DAM), Content Marketing Platform (CMP) and Marketing Resource Management (MRM) into a single, SaaS-based platform should fully integrated with Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3 in SaaS. The SaaS solution is also expected to provide a “New Developer Experience” as developers can now use Asp.Net Core and Javascript to develop new features. Developers can work using VSCode and CLI or Visual Studio. As it features automatic upgrades, there is no more necessity for developers to plan their Sitecore upgrades !

SxA integration with Scriban and JSS

The SxA is integrated with Scriban making it really easier for front end developers to do the templating. It is lightweight and can be integrated with existing workflow to import it along with their theme. You can make use of this Visual Studio Code extension which provides intellisense for Scriban.

It is also fully integrated with Sitecore JSS and offers JSS-like CLI for an improved workflow. With these key improvements, SXA out-of-the-box should be much more easier to use especially for Front end developers.

 

Sitecore Horizon – New Editing Interface

The new editing interface which provides a combined experience of both Content editor and Experience editor is in preview mode since it was announced in Sitecore Symposium couple of years back. It provides a huge advantage for Sitecore Marketers as they can play with Marketing Toolbox which boasts a lot of features. Sitecore developers might have to improve components in a way that it can be edited using Sitecore Horizon editor. This feature should be integrated with Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3 and expected to be released during this winter.

 

JSSBlazor

Sitecore’s JavaScript Services (JSS) is a complete SDK for JavaScript developers which can be used along with Javascript Frameworks like AngularJS / Vue.Js / ReactJs can now be used with Microsoft’s open source client side framework – Blazor. This is currently in a proof of concept version but really interesting for Developers who would like to stick with Microsoft tech stack !

 

This post is part of a Sitecore dedicated series written by Versusmind experts. Interested in our Sitecore Offer ? Visit versusxperience.com and get in touch !

 

References :

Sitecore AI :
https://www.sitecore.com/products/sitecore-experience-platform/sitecore-ai

Sitecore SaaS :
https://www.sitecore.com/company/news-events/press-releases/2019/11/sitecore-saas-strategy

https://www.sitecore.com/company/news-events/press-releases/2019/11/sitecore-saas-strategy/saas-faq

Sitecore SxA :
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=xoofx.scriban

https://blogs.perficientdigital.com/2019/11/08/sitecore-symposium-2019-key-improvements-made-to-sxa/

Sitecore Horizon :
https://blogs.perficientdigital.com/2019/11/06/sitecore-symposium-2019-new-editing-experience-in-sitecore/

JSSBlazor :

https://github.com/jss-blazor/jss-blazor

Ramkumar Nambhi Krishnan Dhinakaran

Sitecore MVP and a Sitecore Certified professional with o ver 8 years of exp in Web Cms like Sitecore, Ektron, Umbraco and Episerver.

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