What did I learn from Sitecore Symposium 2019?
Here are the highlights for what I learned during this year’s event and what will be navigating through in 2020.
New Releases
Sitecore will continue to adhere to a 6-month release cycle. We’re coming off the Summer 2019 release, which brought a new Content Marketing Platform, performance and scalability enhancements to Sitecore Commerce, an Experience Platform and Content Hub integration, and headless Forms.
The following new releases were announced at Symposium 2019 and should be expected within the Winter 2019 and Summer 2020 releases.
Content Hub 9.3
An enhanced Content Hub and Content Marketing Platform including Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration should hit the shelves during the Winter 2019 release. Presumably, there will be tighter and more natural integration with XP, although Content Hub will remain a stand-alone suite with a separate license structure.
Also, Content Hub will feature Content Engagement Value, DAM Video AI, and Open API specification in the Summer 2020 release.
Some great news was just announced by Forrester: “New Report Names Sitecore a Strong Performer in Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience“.
Sitecore AI (Auto-Personalization)
There’s a lot of excitement around this announcement for good reason.
The Microsoft Commercial Partner team announced their partnership and co-built pilot solution with Sitecore (obviously running on Azure artificial intelligence) to be the first customer utilizing Sitecore AI with auto-personalization and segmentation analysis capabilities. Microsoft reported a ~16% lift in average engagement value (EVPs) and a ~30% increase in operational efficiency due to simplifying and speeding up the process of manually designing and configuring rules-based personalization.
There will be three major phases of this release over the next year and beyond.
- First Phase
- Auto-personalization (by end of 2019)
- Segmentation analysis
- Second Phase
- Content AI (first steps coming early next year, 2020)
- Third Phase
- Journey AI
Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) 9.3
There are a lot of updates in the next version of Sitecore, version 9.3, which will have general availability in Dec. 2019.
Sitecore Horizon
A brand new authoring user-interface with a much more ‘content-forward’ drag-and-drop design.
Coveo AI-powered Search
Announced as the default, out-of-the-box, search provider for ‘starter’ solutions. Lucene is officially on the way out.
Sitecore Helix 2.0
A new version of Helix documentation, examples, certification, updated repository, and overall guidance. Habitat is also going away.
Other notable enhancements coming…
- Sitecore/Salesforce Marketing Cloud Connector (SFMC)
- Sitecore Forms
- Docker container support – coming in Summer 2020
- SXA improvements
- JSS improvements
- Install SOLR with the Sitecore Install Assistant (SIA)
A Whole New World
Sitecore SaaS
Sitecore will be transitioning to a fully SaaS model over a 5-year period starting Summer 2020. This is huge.
“We are reinventing the standard with a modern SaaS platform where brands can realize time-to-value much faster and easily drive the digital transformations needed to stay relevant through an easy to use, configurable, and extensible platform.”
Mark Frost, CEO, Sitecore
There has been a lot of discussion regarding the direction with SaaS for Sitecore. Sitecore has put together an FAQ for those interested in learning more.
Experience Awards
A big congratulations to all the 2019 Sitecore Experience Award winners announced here: https://www.sitecore.com/customers/experience-awards.
And for the grand prize, congratulations to Subway, and their agency Avanade, for winning the 2019 Sitecore Ultimate Experience Award.
Learn More
I will be covering these announcements and more in the next St. Louis Sitecore User Group Meetup on Nov. 21, 2019 at the Microsoft Technology Center in downtown St. Louis.
If you would like to learn more about what these mean to your organization, feel free to send me a message: