Sunday, November 15th 2020

Sitecore Symposium 2019 Top 10 Highlights

Summary image for post about: Sitecore Symposium 2019 Top 10 Highlights

The 2019 Sitecore Symposium conference was a great event. Each year is a surprise in what the future brings. I'm very excited about the future of Sitecore.

Here are my personal Top 10 Highlights:

  1. Sitecore Software as a Service SAAS - Sitecore is launching a SAAS product in the summer of 2020. It will bring Sitecore to more customers and allow quicker time to market for customers. It will bring a new development model with Headless, but it will continue to be industry leading in content editing, experience, and personalization.
  2. .Net Core - With Sitecore SAAS and vNext of Sitecore we are able to build websites leveraging .NET Core. This is one of the biggest thing I have been waiting for. It allows us as developer to leverage more modern patterns and tools to rapidly build websites and applications without having to learn legacy software.
  3. SXA 9.3 - Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) 9.3 is the next version that will launch with Sitecore 9.3 by the end of the year. This is a major release that in my opinion makes SXA finally ready for almost all projects on Sitecore.
  4. SXA Scriban - SXA 9.3 introduces the templating language Scriban. This provides a greater flexibility in SXA and allows developers to control markup as code instead of items in Sitecore. This is a huge advancement in performance as well as a great developer experience.
  5. New SXA CLI Themes - Themes and supporting code files are now created from a command line interface (CLI) and managed in source control instead of stuffed in the media library. Another monumental improvement in developer experience.
  6. Sitecore Forms - Many improvements here, my favorite is bot detection. Hopefully no more reCAPTCHA!
  7. Sitecore AI - Auto personalization with Sitecore AI is here with 9.3. This is a game changer. So many companies never get to personalization because it takes time to plan and configure. This does the hard parts for you.
  8. Sitecore Developer Tools - After the hedgehog acquisition, Sitecore is now offering new developer tools, including updated Sitecore TDS, Sitecore RAZL and Sitecore FEYDRA.
  9. Content Hub 3.3 - Everyone is buzzing about Content Hub. It is a very nice product that is now fully integrated with Sitecore and provides a great depth of functionality and customization capabilities to manage content and assets. It is also connected to Salesforce Marketing Cloud to deliver content in your marketing campaigns and channels.
  10. Sitecore Horizon - Sitecore's new Horizon editing UI to be released in 9.3.