What’s New With Sitecore For 2017
The Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) is one of the leading enterprise-level web content management and multichannel marketing automation systems built on Microsoft ASP.NET. XP empowers web content editors and marketers to take full control over all aspects of their website from social integration and blog posts to advanced personalization, ecommerce and more. XP’s ability to combine web content management along with customer intelligence, allows content authors to better engage with their customers.
XP gives marketers the tools for marketing in context of the customer’s full history of interaction. These tools are built on the following three key technology pillars:
Web Content Management
- Personalization: Deliver targeted and relevant content to your audience.
- Mobile First: Detect and optimize content for different devices.
- Multilingual: Engage with audiences in their native language.
- Time to market: reduce implementation times using proven best practices.
Customer Intelligence
- Insights: Learn about your customers’ habits and preferences.
- Customer Lifetime Value: Measure all customer interactions and engagements.
- Customer Journeys: Track and visualize how customers interact with your brand.
- Big Data: Gain intelligence from high volumes of data and complex record structures.
Cross-Channel Delivery
- Email: Leverage customer insights within your email campaigns.
- Mobile: Engage with audiences regardless of their chosen device.
- Social: Share content across social networks and measure their success.
- Commerce: Deliver connected and personalized shopping.
What’s happening in 2017?
Sitecore on Microsoft Azure
With the release of Sitecore 8.2 update 1, the XP platform is now based on Azure Web Apps. This allows for easy scalability, maintainability, and monitoring using Azure Services (e.g. Application Insights, Redis Cache and Azure Search). Deployment into Azure Web Apps is supported using the new pre-built Web Deploy packages and ARM templates.
In use cases requiring no technical skills for deployment, Sitecore is also available from the Azure Marketplace. This approach offers a WYSIWYG user experience but without the full customization options available with ARM templates.
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (XA)
The XA is a new package fully integrated into the Sitecore editing experience, which helps reduce your web development time by allowing content teams to design, assemble and deploy web content across channels using drag-and-drop templates for commonly used page components.
Key features and benefits include:
- The XA toolbox is equipped with 100+ pre-built components you can drag-and-drop to create well-crafted microsites, landing pages, etc.
- XA provides a wire-framing tool allowing you to begin your design and content entry all within Sitecore. Wireframes can be exported into static HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
- The mobile first mantra is preserved as XA provides out-of-the-box responsive page layouts to make all pages friendly for a broad range of devices.
- All page code generated by XA adheres to Sitecore’s Helix best practices around page.
Sitecore 8.3
Sitecore 8.3 should be available summer 2017. Here is a list of features we expect to see rolled-out:
- Federated Authentication: A single-sign functionality provided out-of-the-box.
- Silverlight Removal: This will be a welcome change for Sitecore users, as browser support for Silverlight has been irregular. Especially in recent browser updates.
- Sitecore Forms: Web forms for marketers will be replaced with a new form interface supporting drag-and-drop for adding and customizing fields.