Sunday, October 22, 2017

What I learned in Sitecore Symposium 2017

Sitecore Symposium in Las Vegas was my first event I attended for Sitecore it was a huge event with about 3000 attendance between partners, customers, MVPs and developers.






As expected, the Sitecore Symposium 2017 in Las Vegas was full of exciting announcements around Sitecore 9. We also found out a lot about Sitecore’s wider news features and their plans for the future.







Here’s what I learned about Sitecore9 new features:



·         Sitecore  XConnect

xConnect is a framework of rich APIs and services that allows users to integrate customer interaction data collected by Sitecore with customer data from nearly any third-party CRM system or channel. xConnect allows marketers to understand exactly what the customer or prospect has been doing. Golden information that supports marketer to tailor comes to delight targets.

A lot of work has also gone into PII and GDPR compliance, also known as, “the right to be forgotten”. Using xConnect, it will be possible to create various modules to comply with the legislation which will come into force in 2018. 


·         Sitecore JavaScript Services (JSS for short) 

JSS is a complete SDK for JavaScript developers allowing to build full-fledged modern solutions using Sitecore and JavaScript and being completely disconnected during development and deploy to any platform in a headless configuration with full Experience Platform capability preserved.


·         New Sitecore Forms Engine

Sitecore Forms (a new product to replace basic web forms) has been completely redesigned for today’s marketers with a drag and drop UI to create forms and new features to ensure that more quality customer data can be captured and acted upon with ease. The analytics and reporting capabilities of the Sitecore Forms application enable marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of their forms instantly.

On the Performance Tab, you can see an overview of the performance of your form and make quick decisions where necessary. For example, marketers can now identify points of user friction instantly by viewing form abandonment instances. This is incredibly useful during A/B testing and provides quantitative data to impact CRO.
·         The Sitecore Experience Cloud on Azure

With the latest  release of Sitecore there is a stated commitment to be cloud-first. This means that when adopting the Sitecore Experience Cloud, particularly when running as platform-as-a-service on Azure, they're promising feature parity with on-premise solutions.

It's great to hear about Sitecore's focus on the future and their strong alignment with future-facing, forward thinking deployments.


Sitecore Experience Cloud allowing businesses to execute and scale their digital strategies, the Sitecore Experience Cloud consists of:

·         Sitecore Experience Manager (Content Management System)

·         Sitecore Experience Platform (Sitecore 9)

·         Sitecore Experience Commerce (end-to-end e-commerce across all channels)  


Through a combined offering of in-depth customer data, machine learning-insights and digital marketing tools, Sitecore Experience Cloud is the complete digital marketing experience.

·        Marketing Automation
Another new tool in Version 9 is an incredibly slick and easy to use drag and drop user interface to create automated marketing campaigns. This is a replacement for Engagement Automation plans.

Marketing Automation allow to set up some complex campaigns, enabling marketers to set up triggers to enter a contact into the plan and effectively track them throughout their journey. The drag and drop functionality makes it simple to set up conditions and rules allowing marketers to validate campaign decisions on numerous data points gleaning demographic data, device detection, list membership, personas, campaign and goal triggers, allowing marketers to deliver a deeply personalized online experience.
·         Sitecore commerce is an outstanding tool for retailers!

The newly-unveiled Sitecore Experience Commerce has the potential for brands to deliver an ultra-personalised end-to-end shopping experience by combing content and commerce.

This was a huge announcement, and will benefit ecommerce retailers. Carrying on Sitecore’s theme of centralising and unifying processes, Sitecore Experience Commerce will be music to the ears of online merchants. Testing, optimisation and industry price checks can be run alongside catalogue and content management. This creates an all-in-one environment and will cut down on time – a fantastic announcement.


·         Dynamic placeholders

Finally dynamic placeholders come out of the box with Sitecore 9. This has probably been one of the most asked for features in Sitecore for a long time. Fortunately there have been a few community modules that have helped in the past. One of the most popular was the Fortis Dynamic Placeholders which used the rendering item’s unique Id to generate the placeholder key.


·         Sitecore installation framework (SIF)

One of the major change to the platform is the way you install Sitecore on a server or local machine. The standard .exe installer has been replaced with a Windows PowerShell module which is called Sitecore Installation Framework (SIF). The SIF comes with Sitecore related pre-built tasks and configuration files to facilitate installation of Sitecore.




No comments:

Post a Comment

Sitecore : Rendering Exception Handling

To prevent showing yellow crash page if an error raised in one of Sitecore controls  and keep handle errors for developers without showing ...