A Deep Dive Into Sitecore’s Offerings

The Sitecore Symposium 2022 was an annual event that brought together hundreds of business leaders, developers, marketers, and content strategists to explore the latest innovations and technologies for digital transformation. The return of Sitecore’s flagship community conference to a physical space  was a big package that unwrapped new announcements, deep changes and transformation in their product roadmap from monolithic DXP to a composable suite of products. The event had fantastic lined up keynotes, breakout sessions, and shorter lightning talks, from a mix of Sitecore employees, partners and customers.

Here are some key takeaways from the conference reflecting where Sitecore is heading and help you plan your own roadmap.

Sitecore’s SaaS Products Reorganized into Content Cloud, Engagement Cloud, and Commerce Cloud

Sitecore has announced a new product portfolio strategy. The company divided its product portfolio into three separate areas with different focus: Content Cloud, Engagement Cloud and Commerce Cloud, each of them grouping relevant products together.

Content Cloud

Sitecore's Content Cloud family is expanding with the addition of Sitecore Search, which uses artificial intelligence to help you find the right content. In addition, two new products are being added: Sitecore Content Hub One, which is designed for users with simple content repository use cases, and Content Hub Operations, a content strategy, creation, and analytics solution.

Engagement Cloud

Additionally, Sitecore has announced the launch of Engagement Cloud, which is an important marketing platform, includes tools like Personalize (personalization), Send (Email-marketing and marketing automation), CDP (customer data platform), and the latest additions Connect, a Workato based low-code/ no code software and Worflow tool. These products will make your job easier by simplifying the sharing of data between all Sitecore products as well as a large number of external tools.

Commerce Cloud

Commerce Cloud combines Sitecore's commerce-focused products with the power of OrderCloud, a powerful and fully headless commerce solution, suited for B2B, B2C and marketplace use cases. OrderCloud is joined by Discover, which is a product-focused, personalized, AI-supported search- and recommendation engine powering the product management experience of Commerce Cloud's new management interface.

Might Useful: Symposium Day 1 Highlights  

Three New Product Offerings Released- Sitecore Search, Content Hub One, and Sitecore Connect

The Sitecore Public Cloud platform released three new products and services that improve customer engagement and eliminate CX barriers.

A range of product offerings were showcased at Sitecore Symposium 2022 – from Sitecore Search powered by AI that enables smarter content discovery to Content Hub One, a headless, innovative content management system that can deliver seamless experiences across multiple digital touchpoints, and more.

The new product offerings include:

Sitecore Search, Content Search Powered by Reflektion Technology

With the acquistion of Reflektion, the AI-powered search technology behind Sitecore Discover, Sitecore has built a transformative content search tool that uplifts content search experiences.

This technology helps marketers to deliver hyper-relevant content to their customers through a unified delivery system that uses artificial intelligence. Sitecore Search is a transformative content discovery solution that customizes the way content is matched, sorted, and promoted to mirror the specific needs of a consumer's search experience through predictive, type-ahead capabilities that help users find results faster and an AI engine that amplifies specific content based on business objectives or customer feedback. Using this plug-and-play solution, you can upgrade an existing website in a matter of hours. In the near future, all brands will be able to use Sitecore Search to power their search experiences on Sitecore.com.

Content Hub One, a Basic Headless CMS

This headless CMS allows brands to launch and manage experiences across multiple digital channels, including web, mobile, smart displays, voice assistants, and marketplaces. It combines content modeling, authoring, and consumption into one seamless platform that gives developers the freedom to use any framework for building frontends for data-driven content experiences, while allowing marketers to work in parallel to author content. Sitecore Content Hub is an entry point to the Sitecore content portfolio, which allows customers - when ready - to upgrade to the full functionality. This could be an alternative to XM Cloud that is more in line with competitive headless offerings available in the market today.

Sitecore Connect

Sitecore Connect extends Workato, a leader in the integration space, to make workflow integration seamless. By using a simple drag-and-drop interface, Sitecore Connect will allow brands to easily connect Sitecore products to existing technology stacks. In addition to more than 1,000 connectors, Sitecore Connect is expected to offer a low-code/no-code interface that brands can use to build their own recipes or use more than 400K community recipes. Connect allows brands to simply select a target system, set the flow, and publish.

New Cloud Portal to Access Everything in One Place

In a world where information is abundant and more people are connecting in different channels, it can be difficult to manage large amounts of content and customers. Sitecore recently responded to this need with the announcement of a new cloud-enabled portal that will deliver everything as one place.

SXA is Heading to Headless

The Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) is coming to headless architectures including automation, page designs, partials, XML Sitemaps, and more. You can even do rendering variants—though your component implementation needs to handle the markup for each variant. And keep in mind that SXA is currently being built for Next.JS and not the other headless frameworks Sitecore supports.

SXA also has better support for Sitecore Pages (formerly known as Editor Experience), which is XM Cloud’s new page editing experience. It will support SXA’s grid and styles—as well as other authoring features—to make it easier to use with SXA sites. In addition to supporting Site Specific Default Values, SXA will also support headless mode. This feature allows developers to run SXA without the need for a browser or HTTP server.

Related: Symposium Day 2 Highlights

Make Transition to SaaS Easy with Sitecore 10.3 Upgrade

Sitecore announced  the latest 10.3 version of its Customer Experience Platform, which is built with a focus on making it easier to integrate Sitecore SaaS solutions using webhooks. Sitecore executives emphasized that the release will offer clear guidance on when it makes sense to stay on XM Cloud, when it makes sense to supplement it with other SaaS products, and when it makes sense to replace XM Cloud entirely.

Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud with New Capabilities

With Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud, brands can create, manage, and deliver content faster than ever before. A number of new editing interfaces, native personalization capabilities, and testing capabilities are included in this upcoming release of XM Cloud. XM Cloud components were introduced as a frontend-as-a-service to introduce web components into a website. And these components can be integrated to any data source such as XM cloud, Content Hub One, or any other headless CMS. 

In addition to building out a comprehensive ecosystem, Sitecore continues to innovate its product portfolio and offer customers a variety of cloud-native, SaaS-based tools and services built on a composable architecture, enabling widespread integration and scalability. Sitecore leverages its 1,200+ partner ecosystem and deep-rooted expertise in helping enterprise businesses manage and enhance customer experiences across industries and geographies with these enhanced tools and services.

Related: Symposium Day 3 Highlights

Final Thoughts

The digital world is a growing one, and brands are continually looking for new and exciting ways to reach out to their audience. And, who better to create experiences than the technology that enables it all—the modern CMS? Icreon takes traditional marketing methods and makes them more effective with Sitecore, tools that can help you reclaim your time and succeed in the long run.

As a platinum Sitecore partner, we are always looking forward to new releases from Sitecore as they help us develop better solutions for our clients. Icreon offers a deep understanding of content management systems (CMS) and their surrounding ecosystems. Icreon works with Sitecore as an expert in standard solutions, web development, branding, and infrastructure.

As part of our commitment to providing world-class service to all customers, we are constantly investing in our own development and training. We have invested heavily in both Sitecore product certifications and internal training programs, so that we can support our customers in the best possible way. Explore Icreon’s Sitecore Services.

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