Top Insights from 2018 Sitecore Symposium

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I recently had the opportunity to lead one of Productive Edge’s “Lunch and Learns”. These are regularly scheduled development lunches that prioritize a culture of continual learning and growth. In this presentation, I focused on my key takeaways from the 2018 Sitecore Symposium I attended in October. Keep reading to find out my top insights from the event and the exciting new innovations Sitecore has to offer.

Sitecore Symposium 2018

From October 8-11, Sitecore’s annual conference, Sitecore Symposium, brought together over 3,000 attendees from more than 53 countries. The attendees, ranging from Sitecore experts and developers to partners and marketers, came together to network, inspire, learn, and get an early preview of Sitecore’s newest innovations and plans for the future.

Elevate the Experience

The central theme of the 2018 Sitecore Symposium was “Elevate the Experience”, with 100+ sessions revolving around how businesses can enhance the overall journey for customers. Mark Frost, Sitecore CEO, shared the statistic that 80% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience, however, only 1% currently believe they have achieved it.

By switching the focus to the idea that the experience IS the product, Sitecore leaders are confident their latest updates and additions will only further benefit the end results for companies and clients alike.

2018 Sitecore Symposium Product Highlights

There were some big announcements at Sitecore Symposium, the top being the upcoming release of Sitecore 9.1. Sitecore 9.1 offers a wide variety of new capabilities, with more complex dependencies and the integration of the highly anticipated machine learning components.

Functional Highlights

  • JavaScript Services (Headless) improvements
  • Updates to Sitecore Cortex™ (Machine Learning)
  • Enhancements to the Experience Accelerator
  • Data Exchange Framework enhancements
  • Marketing Automation improvements
  • Additional Forms elements
  • Updated Installation Wizard

Architectural Highlights

  • Content Search improvements
  • Core architectural changes (microservices)
  • Performance and Scalability

Sitecore JSS / Headless

Raising the bar on personalization marketing, Sitecore 9.1 will feature JavaScript Services 1.0, one of the largest fundamental shifts in how websites will be developed on the platform going forward. Utilizing the newfound freedom to use the latest JavaScript frameworks and libraries, developers will notice increased speed of development using an “unplugged” mode while end users will see a noticeably faster interactive experience.

Capabilities

  • Separate presentation from Content
  • Personalization and Analytics
  • Multiple JS Framework support: Angular, React or Vue
  • Layout as Data
  • REST and GraphQL

Sitecore Cortex™

Sitecore Cortex brings the next level of machine learning directly to marketers, helping them to automate high value personalization tasks. By collecting and analyzing large volumes of data, the suite of features will enhance the customer experience through the use of automation, segmentation, and personalization tools.

Where intelligence will be applied:

  • Analyze and predict customer journeys and experiences
  • Profile customers based on their content consumption patterns
  • Build smarter attribution models
  • Provide intelligent recommendations through automatic content tagging
  • Provide an engagement scoring system that is self-learning

Salesforce Integration

Although a partnership between Sitecore and Salesforce was initially announced in 2017, a new roadmap was released at Symposium giving details for the connector for Marketing Cloud.

The integration allows users to leverage Sitecore content in emails, with a plan to expand access for all content down the line. The Marketing Cloud Journey Builder provides a solution for marketers to continue to engage users after they have left the website, coordinating interactions on both email and social advertising channels. Synchronizing the data between Salesforce and Sitecore provides a multitude of strategies that are not currently available in the siloed systems, creating new opportunities for the future of marketing.

Stylelabs

Another big announcement at the conference detailed the acquisition of Stylelabs, a market leader in cloud-based digital asset management (DAM), marketing resource management (MRM), and product information management (PIM) solutions. The Marketing Content Hub also features web-to-print services along with Digital Rights Management, offering improvements to Sitecore’s cloud technologies and end-to-end marketing platform.

Looking Ahead

The final day of the conference featured a keynote and panel discussion led by Sitecore’s Chief Revenue Officer, Mark Zablan. The presentation centered around building customer trust, one experience at a time, as well as the future of data and privacy for businesses and consumers.

Sitecore Symposium closed with a final keynote from Ryan Donovan, Sitecore's Chief Technology Officer, with a roadmap for the future of Sitecore and its products, including demonstrations of the planned Sitecore Content Management Hub as well as of the highly anticipated user interface Horizon, a tool that will take experience editing to the next level.

Ready for More?

If you are interested in diving deeper into the Sitecore 9.1 update, I highly recommend downloading Sitecore’s newest whitepaper, Why Upgrade to Sitecore XP 9.1.
Will Rolloff is a technical leader, architect and software development professional with over 15 years of experience. Throughout his career he has held various technical and leadership roles and has built highly successful teams and delivered enterprise technology solutions for many Fortune 500 clients such as AT&T, Wells Fargo, Humana, SunTrust Banks, John Deere, PNC Financial Services and JP Morgan Chase.

He is currently a Delivery Director at Productive Edge, leading a global team of consultants to deliver custom enterprise solutions built on the Microsoft technology stack with a specialization in Sitecore and Azure. Follow him on Twitter at @wrolloff or find him on LinkedIn at williamrolloff.

Disclaimer: Thoughts are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.

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