3 Reasons to attend the upcoming Sitecore Symposium

The Sitecore Symposium in Las Vegas will be held September 8th – 10th at the Aria Resort. Sitecore refers to its product as the leading customer experience software. I would say after attending a number of content management related conferences this year that 2014 is the year of the customer. 2013 ended with ‘Content’ as the keyword, but soon the buzz word became the ‘Customer’, with ‘content’ still close behind.

Sitecore has a very good reason to refer to their product as customer experience software as it is much more than a content management system. Sitecore has made quite an effort over the past 12-24 months in adding a wealth of digital marketing features within its product to make it quite powerful for a marketing team or CMO to learn how their potential market is using their site and serve up the most pertinent content in a custom manner for each site visitor.

The Symposium will have three tracks. Each is reason enough to attend. The tracks are:

• Business: This track will address how to generate business from using Sitecore with its many capabilities: from integrating social media into your digital marketing, experience marketing to gain lifetime customers, use of analytics, how the new commerce features can drive customers to buy, how to personalize the customer experience, among other topics to drive business growth.
• Product: This track will focus on the Sitecore® Experience Platform™. Learn what features will be in the next release of Sitecore; learn how an end-to-end system for content, digital marketing and commerce can provide your customers an experience that will stand out from your competitors; an introduction to Experience Analytics within Sitecore; learn about the Commerce roadmap within Sitecore; create personalized search experiences for your customers; and case studies will be provided of leading companies using Sitecore and its newest digital marketing features today.
• Development: This track is intended for developers. Learn new tips and tricks; how to address new trends; basics to understanding Sitecore; getting the most out of the features; what is project Skynet and why you may want to know; case study from Comcast from a development perspective; and many more topics to be sure you can be on your way to being a Sitecore MVP.

Globalization Partners International (GPI) is a leading translation/localization company who is a partner to Sitecore. We have developed a no-cost connector for the Sitecore system that makes the export/import process a matter of a few mouse clicks for a very simple process within a localization workflow.

Sitecore is excellent in supporting multilingual websites for companies of all sizes and can scale for the amount of languages you require.

I did not see within the agenda in either of the tracks any session that will address globalization/localization, but I imagine within the case study sessions this will be discussed. In virtually all of the content management related conferences I have attended, this is not usually a stand-alone topic, but is a need for many of the customers.

As such, please feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss your Sitecore globalization requirements and how they can be best addressed.

The Symposium has a very full agenda because the Sitecore developers have been busy coming out with such powerful new features. I am excited to learn what it can do and what it will be doing next.

I hope to see you at the Sitecore Symposium!