My Sitecore SUGCON 2023 Takeaways – Day 2

> DAY ONE - If you haven't read about Day One you can read it here.

SUGCON DAY 2

The 2nd Day of SUGCON started bright an early so after a quick breakfast and cup of tea at the hotel I headed down to the first session I’d planned to see.

Rob’s session is one of the key sessions I really didn’t want to miss this year. A few clients I’ve spoken to recently (and other Sitecore Dev’s I’ve chatted to at SUGCON so far) are facing this challenge:

‘How do we move to XM Cloud from XP and what do we need to consider?’

– so I was keen to learn from Rob’s experiences.

Migrating advanced Sitecore implementations to XM Cloud – Rob Habraken

Rob started with telling us the differences with XM Cloud and explaining how publishing works differently (given you publish to the Edge):

Rob then shared a typical XP implementation diagram and showed how XP Differs as integrations and functionality is moved into the head application:

He then discussed what is included and not included in XM Cloud in detail. Martin shared some similar slides the day before, but I think these were a little clearer so I didn’t include them in the previous post:

This was also a pretty cool comparison of XP vs XM Cloud equivalent features:

Rob then discussed the Migration approach to XM Cloud. There was a lot of really useful info here about things to consider and how to get your project prepared for the migration and how to tackle it:

Next up was the the different development approaches and workflow. I’ve talked about these before but I didn’t know much about option 3 at all. I guess most Sitecore developers (especially in a small team) will use option 1, but option 3 is a really good approach for being able to use local content for your development without having to push it to XM Cloud:

Rob then went on to explain in detail about how Content Resolvers don’t work if they are dynamic and only static ones do. It’s possible to use some out of the box ones or implement your own GraphQL Content Resolver:

This is an example of Bread crumbs in XM Cloud and a GraphQL search query:

Rob finished his talk with a summary of the benefits of XM Cloud. The shift in Development domain and thinking is the tricky part for a lot of Sitecore Developers I feel:

Rendering your data in headless – 101 different ways
– Mike Edwards

I’ve known Mike for a number of years now and he’s always an good speaker so I was looking forward to Mike sharing his learnings from his headless journey.

Mike started by lamenting how things used to be easy in the World of MVC and server-side development and then with all the JQuery and JS frameworks things became pretty bloated.

Things have moved on a lot now in FE development though and there are now many different options for building Headless websites in Sitecore, some of these I’m aware of or have experimented with – Others I’ve not heard of, such as ‘Island Architecture’.

SPAs bring their own set of problems in terms of page load times and indexability so Mike went into Hydration and Partial Hydration techniques and approaches that try to solve these issues:

Then Mike explained more about Partial Hydration examples and Island Architecture. Island Architecture lets you create your web app with pure HTML and CSS for all the static content but then add in regions/placeholders of dynamic content to support interactive ‘islands’ of content. Given the rest of the page is static it downloads really quickly and is available to use faster.

Mike then covered Resumability, Edge/Serverless and tools such as Storybook and Hydration Payload.

There are some Challenges and limitations which need to be re-address:

Finally Mike ended with saying that this is the future and we need to embrace the new world.

It was a really interesting talk and gave me a lot to think about and research further. The following talks were 15 minute lightning talks until lunch.

Leverage Sitecore Connect for Sitecore CDP – Sarah O’Reilly

I’d heard a fair bit about Connect but I’ve not really seen much about how it actually works. So I was looking forward to this session

Sarah took us through an example of using Connect to import user segment data from CDP into Google Ads.

Once the export was setup to build from CDP the steps were then configured in Connect to sync to Google Ads:

There are tons of Apps supported and different recipes defined and it was impressive to see the options for building logic such as if statements / for loops data mapping and manipulation all within Connect.

This was an insightful session and really interesting to see how it works. I can see how it could be used to help with migrating to XM Cloud from XP or another CMS platform.

Sitecore components explained for your marketers – Ugo Quaisse

The next session was about the Sitecore Components builder in Pages in XM Cloud. I’ve heard a bit about this but not seen much of it in detail. I was hoping to see a full demo of it. I guess at the session was only 15 minutes there wasn’t time, but I still learned quite a bit about how it works.

The Component Builder can be used without any development or code required at all. First Themes are setup with colours, fonts and breakpoints configured.

Then datasources are setup and mapped from either a url or json or GraphQL.

Then the components ‘look and feel’ – layout, dimensions and sizing can be configured in the Builder. This looks pretty neat. Then versioning and publishing is setup for the Component.

Lastly some details were shared around the benefits for digital creatives, it’s possible to get Sites built very quickly and easily using Components Builder.

Leveraging XM Cloud APIs and Webhooks to powerup integrations – Ramkumar Dhinakaran & Elakkuvan Rajamani

After lunch it was time for another session, this time on Webhooks. The use-case here was the XM Cloud Lighthouse Integration which would do an automated quality check of pages using Webhooks and report on it.

Depending on the integration required it might not be best to use a Webhook:

Quite a lot of detail was shared with how this all works and integrates.

There were some links and takeaways shared at the end.

Sitecore Search: Real case PoC – Sebastian Winslow & Jesper Balle

The 2nd to last session for the day was on the Sitecore search (based on Discover) which I was keen to learn about more as I didn’t know much about how it worked.

CEC looks pretty powerful and can be used to manage search, performance is key and widgets can be configured for search and catalog:

Some dev resources and admin info were shared:

The use case for search was a property Site. There is still some features that need to be built.

Some info was then provided on Triggers to get the content, Request and document extractors to process and manipulate the content.

Search API endpoints, results response, API Explorer and ability to refine the widgets.

It’s early days and the search SDK is still not there yet but it’s coming. Be careful with how much content you try and index when testing but there are some significant benefits to using it.

This was a really informative session and gave me all the info I was looking for about how to go about implementing search.

Experiences with Content Hub One – Journey of relaunching our Usergroup website – Katharina Luger & Christian Hahn

Then it was time for my last session of the day on how the Sitecore User Group Germany rebuilt their site as an SPA using Content Hub One.

The slide below was probably the simplest comparison I saw all SUCON of the differences between XM Cloud and Content Hub One.

There are 7 Steps to component creation:

Lastly there were some challenges faced.

This was a really great session and I’m looking forward to working with Content Hub One in the future.

Virtual Closing Keynote by Scott Hanselman

There was then an really entertaining and insightful talk from Scott Hanselman. He had some great advice, wisdom and stories to tell to us and I think everyone in the room was pretty captivated by his talk.

With that it was the end of SUCON 2023, there was a big round of applause for all the organisers. These events take a hell of a lot of organising and a real commitment from everyone involved.

It was time to go and have a few beers and reflect on what was a another brilliant SUGCON.

Hopefully this is useful info for anyone that couldn’t attend this year or had too many beers and forgot what they learned :-).

My Sitecore SUGCON 2023 Takeaways – Day 1

I’ve just got back from and awesome weekend in Malaga at Sitecore SUGCON 2023. If you are not aware of what it is, it’s the developer conference organised by the Community each year to bring Sitecore Developers together in Europe. I’ve been to quite a few SUGCONs over the years but I think this has been one of the best. The talks were really interesting and it was great to catch-up with everyone in the Sitecore Community.

I arrived late on Wednesday at the rather impressive Melia near Malaga – right next to the beach. I’ve certainly been to worse locations for conferences. More venue’s like this for future SUGCONs please Sitecore :-).

The roof top bar was particularly special – but there was some learning to do before I would be able to enjoy the pool.

> DAY TWO - you can read about Day Two here.

Day 1

I had a fairly clear idea of the talks I wanted to see and I managed to stick to it pretty well.

Opening Keynote – Steve Tzikakis and Dave O’Flanagan

The following day after a late breakfast I went to register and then to see Dave O’Flanagan kick off the conference and introduce Steve.

Steve couldn’t attend so was on Video link and he explained that given the Economy downturn innovations such as ChatGPT would be key for diversifying product offerings, Steve then hinted that something was in the works with an integration of ChatGPT with Sitecore.

Many companies such as SAP and Oracle have slowed down to adapt to SaaS and Headless; while Sitecore have grown a lot over the past few years. He said that Sitecore has outgrown Adobe for the past 6 quarters with around 20% growth, Sitecore are 2nd place in industry rankings and aim to catch Adobe.

There is an healthy 16% R&D investment and Steve set out his ambitious target of going from 40,000 Sitecore developers to 100,000 in the market. He said that he felt the tough part (moving to SaaS and creating/integrating new SaaS platforms) was now over and Sitecore are ready to move forwards. Sitecore intend to lead by innovation and partners and developers need to be onboard to continue investment and growth.

Dave then took back the stage and stated that Sitecore want to lead with Composable DXP and be the best in the market. He also confirmed that DXP is not going anywhere and 10.4 is currently in the works. There are clients who are restricted geographically with what they can do with SaaS or the want full control of their data and platform so there is still a place for self-hosting with DXP.

Then Dave his us with a bit of very welcome honesty. He said that the SaaS products that Sitecore have procured/integrated and built over the past couple of years are now in a good place but he acknowledged that the documentation, marketing, information on migration and features is not great and Sitecore are going to work on this ASAP. This was great to hear as I think that there is some confusion right now for current customers and potential new customers with all of the different SaaS offerings and XP/XM. I feel It’s quite tricky to understand and the messaging from Sitecore needs improving, especially around the migration path to SaaS.

Dave went on to say that there are no new product announcements this SUGCON, instead Sitecore will slow down and help customers understand the new products better and explain how to migrate to them. It was good to hear that Sitecore understand there are many customers heavily invested in XP and that it’s not that easy for them to just jump ship to SaaS and that they want to know more about how they can help customers with this journey.

The discussion then turned to the Content, Engagement and Commerce clouds and the work Sitecore have done here with huge investment, especially in Content Cloud – of which XM Cloud is key part and is getting better by the day.

Content Hub 1 is Sitecore’s answer to a full headless CMS and they will work on integrating it into XM Cloud to allow you to pull content into XM Cloud seamlessly. Content Hub 4.3 is the last version of Content Hub and all customers are now updated.

Search is a new SaaS offering from Sitecore, it is developed on top of Discover (a SaaS platform Sitecore purchased, originally called Reflektion). It has now been developed further and is able to search all content and is powered by AI. I would learn more about this at sessions later in SUGCON.

When looking at the cost of XM Cloud customers need to consider the TCO of their existing XP/XM (or other DXP platform) and not just the licence, hosting and development costs. I think it’s true that many clients probably don’t consider the ongoing maintenance costs of Azure Infrastructure / AKS / Solr / Redis etc and the cost and complexity of Upgrades, Security patches and so forth. Not to mention the cost of DevOps/Build Pipelines and other services. When you add this all up the cost may be around the same or a bit cheaper. One of the challenges here I think is different budgets in organisations that traditionally just pay for the hosting or licence etc so this may be something to navigate when it comes to the new world of SaaS.

Dave then went on to talk about XM Cloud a bit further and that they do know there are challenges without having an CD instance anymore in XM Cloud (these are instead replaced by Edge Servers – experience edge which just returns the items via the layout service or GraphQL). He said that it is something they are trying to resolve and will look to the Community so potential solutions to this. This sounds interesting so I’ll be keen to follow this idea further and see where it goes.

He mentioned the impressive looking Component Builder in Pages (which I also attended a session on later at SUCON). Dave also discussed that Forms in XM Cloud is something they are working on currently; they have recognised it’s very important and are listening. This is a bit of a gap in the XM Cloud offering at the moment and some clients won’t be keen to use a 3rd-party option for this, so it’s good to hear this is in progress.

Another interesting statement Dave made was that the feedback from front-end developers was that JSS is Complex and not something they really want to learn, it has a lot of complexity baked in which some feel is not needed. Therefore, Sitecore are looking at how they can simplify this. I wasn’t exactly sure what was meant by this (I’ll try and find out more) but reducing complexity and barriers to entry is generally a good thing I feel.

Finally Dave discussed Sitecore Connect which is one of Sitecore’s most recent SaaS offerings which allows SaaS products to be integrated via a low code / no code approach.

Dave mentioned connect recipes will be provided to help customers to move to SaaS and these could be taken and customised to fit your requirements. I’d seen a bit on this and how it works from other Sitecore Developers such as this great post by Jeremy Davis. However, I was looking forward to learning more about how it all works later at SUGCON.

Life at the Edge with Vercel and Next.js – Javi Velasco

Next up was a partner talk from Vercel about their platform and different offerings. Javi explained how customers expect a lot more now in 2023 (faster, more dynamic & personalised) and the pandemic effectively jump technology advancements and expectations forward by two years to 2025.

He talked about how computing and innovations in compilers has improved vastly in recent years and how Edge workers can now execute code extremely fast providing similar performance to Static Page Generation as well as Edge Middleware.

I’ve not used Vercel yet but I’ve heard good things about it and Next.js (which they also created) and I know that Sitecore partner with them for XM Cloud so it was interesting to learn more about it all.

Accelerate website builds with Headless SXA and XM Cloud – Martin Miles

We then needed to select our talks for the afternoon. I decided to pick Martin Miles’s talk about XM Cloud and while I’ve learned a fair bit about XM Cloud in the past 4 or 5 months and spoken on it at both the Manchester and Columbus SUGs I still learned a lot from Martin’s talk.

I know Martin plans to share his slides on his blog and the slides are very detailed. So I’ve tried to pick out some key slides which I thought were really useful or had important information that I hadn’t really seen detailed elsewhere.

Auto update and upgrade information & Licensing model:

Some additional limitations I wasn’t aware of:

Further architecture details:

More details about Webhook event handlers:

Some GraphQL details and limitations:

More authentication and authorisation details:

Some more details on Embedded Personalisation & Analytics from CDP:

Docker development details:

Sitecore CLI details:

XM Cloud folder structure, files and folders overview:

I hadn’t really though about how XM Cloud deploys items but it makes sense it uses Items as Resource Files:

SPE usage in XM Cloud:

Some useful developer tips and tricks:

Some really useful migration details for headless solutions:

Two different MVC migration routes:

Lastly some really useful Headless SXA details:

Once Martin share his talk I’ll link it here as there was lots more information that was useful.

SXA MVC & Headless SXA – a MOVING tale… – Jason Wilkerson

I’ve known Jason for quite a while and he’s always an entertaining speaker so I was looking forward to this one. It didn’t disappoint and Jason started with a story about Hipster developers…

Being an predominantly back-end/c#/.Net developer and coming from the Microsoft stack I can really relate to this too. All this new-fangled hipster FE/Headless development is kind of ‘mind boggling’ and a big shift in thinking for those of us who’ve been around since the WebForms (or in my case classic ASP days).

I’ve done some React development with Sitecore and the JSS Training course but I’m still not 100% comfortable with the shift yet.

Jason’s talk was great as he showed us how you would go about building an example ‘Spotlight’ component in Class SXA/MVC and how that differs when building an JSS Headless component in React.

Here are a couple of slides from building the MVC Component, I think this is pretty well understood by most Sitecore Devs:

There were some learnings that Json Shared with us around the differences with doing this for JSS instead:

The rendering variants setup is quite different for MVC:

Then the JSS variant, this looks quite a nice approach:

There are limitations of JSS Renderings which are that the search component of SXA are not available, also if your using SSG then you can’t use forms. There are also personalisation restrictions too:

Lastly Jason also had some training links he shared for those new to this and need to know a good place to start.

XM Cloud and Content Hub ONE Battle Royale – Rick Bauer & Richard Seal

The final session of the day for me was Rick and Richards talk which was positioned as a battle between the two platforms. It made for a pretty fast-paced and entertaining talk.

Pretty much all the info was on the slides so I’m going to just drop them all below:

At the end there was an final summary that confirmed that XM Cloud and Content Hub one are different products and are positioned separately in the market to meet different requirements:

End of Day 1

It was then time for Dinner, catching up with friends from the Sitecore Community and the MVP awards ceremony. Unfortunately the MPV awards had got stuck in Customs again (despite Tamas’s best efforts) but we got a few photos and there was an entertaining performance from Rodrigo and Sebastian and also the quiz; followed by a few well earned beers.

You can read about what I learned on day two here.

SUGCON 2022 Thoughts and Takeaways

It’s been 3 years Since the last ‘In-Person’ SUGCON in London 2019, so I was really looking forward to going to Budapest to learn some new Sitecore things and catch up with Sitecore Developers and friends from across the world. I’ve been to Budapest for a weekend once before and It’s a beautiful city.

After a long flight with a change at Amsterdam I arrived at the Conference centre in Budapest pretty late but immediately bumped into a bunch of people I know from the Sitecore Community. After a drink in the bar it was time to hit the sack ready for the first day of SUGCON.

Day 1.

Steve Tzikakis – Opening Keynote

There was a notable excitement in the room as Tamas opened up SUGCON to much applause welcomed everyone and introduced Steve Tzikakis to the stage.

Steve seemed genuinely happy to be at SUGCON and have the opportunity to talk to the Sitecore Developer Community. He hit us with some Stats about the platform. Apparently there are 2,200 Sitecorians and the last two years have bought about the biggest changes in Sitecore’s 21 year history.

Things have accelerated forwards in Digital during the pandemic and Sitecore has taken advantage of this by investing huge amounts of Money on the platform and employees. The have doubled their spend on R&D and doubled the number of employees across the organisation, 60% of staff have only been at Sitecore a year or less!. Innovation is key for Sitecore to gain an competitive edge and to claim the number 1 spot so they have spent 22% of their revenue on R&D.

Steve shared an impressive Side of well known brands that now user Sitecore and talked about how Sitecore want to grow the platform to 3,000 customers but without increasing their service offering. Instead they want to do this by enabling partners to deliver better and more quickly on a Modern Mar-tech stack that has flexible, headless Commerce, CDP and Content integrated together with the best interface for the task at hand, this all sounds good to me.

Anyone that has not been living in a Jam Jar for the past two years will have noticed that Sitecore spent a whole lot of money procuring a number of platforms over the last 24 months or so. These are: Content Hub (Stylelabs), Boxever, MooSend, Four41 and Reflektion.

These products all bring a number of functions to Sitecore that it is currently missing, whilst also having some overlap with what XP already offers. So I was interested to see what’s happened with these acquisitions and what the plans are for them going forwards. Next up was Dave ‘O Flanagan to talk more in-depth about some of this.

Dave ‘O Flanagan – Re-Imagining the DXP

Dave opened by explaining how his Son caught COVID over lock-down and went from an average FIFA player to an Expert after isolating in his room with his PlayStation for 10 days and playing it non stop. This demonstrates that things have accelerated extremely fast during the pandemic and Sitecore has had to adapt to this change quickly.

Dave discussed how Sitecore are invested in cloud first and that they have shifted their position to not try and sell customers the whole Sitecore stack but just the parts they really need by focusing on speed, flexibility, relevance and agility.

The following slide regarding where Sitecore is today was interesting:

And here is the future Roadmap for Sitecore for 2022:
One element of this is the XM Cloud offering, this will be a headless architecture which is cloud-ready, with site layout and page management, analytics, personalisation and testing, executed at the edge.

Next, Content Hub Headless was introduced, this looks really interesting. Essentially an light-weight headless CMS built on top of Content Hub.

Dave then handed over to Andy Cohen to show us more about XM Cloud.

Andy Cohen – XM Cloud

Andy opened up by Telling us what XM Cloud is:

And also what is isn’t:

Next Andy introduced XM Cloud deploy and attempted an live deployment.

Andy had a few technical issues (as is often the way with complex live demos) but he managed to deploy Sitecore using Cloud deploy in Just over 5 minutes! That’s pretty impressive from an empty environment in the cloud.

Akshay Sura & Kamruz Jaman- What it means to be a Sitecore Architect in the Composable DXP world

Next up for me was fellow Sitecore MVP’s Akshay and Kamrus sharing all the knowledge they have learned on working with Composable DXPs.

These guys have spent a lot of time working with Composable DXPs with Sitecore and other vendors over the past few years and they really have a lot of useful knowledge to share.

One of the key messages was that a different approach is required with Composable.

A lot of Solutions already involve a many integrations, however they are likely not as decoupled as they should be.

A key thing that was mentioned it is not a one-size fits all approach and there are advantages as well as disadvantages.

Here is an overview of a typical Composable DXP Solution.

The approach should be based around the architecture and business strategy and not just the technical solution.

It was also interesting to see the different in development cycle for Typical Sitecover Development vs Composable.

As you can see the phases can be overlapped much more to allow Sites to be delivered much faster and therefore new features to be built sooner.

One thing to get your head around is that a lot of Composable systems don’t have visual editor for the web or any channel so this is one of the trade-offs and things to adjust to.

The session finished with some slides that helped answer some questions that most .Net developers must have asked themselves in the past few years. It’s good to see we are not redundant :-).

This session was very useful for anyone who has not stepped into the Composable world yet, I really appreciated the honestly too.

Thomas Desmond – Flexible Static: Static Site Personalization at the Edge

This session looked interesting and after the previous talk I thought it would be good to learn more about what can be done with Edge Functions and the like.

One of the trade-offs of Static Sites is obviously the loss of Personalisation due to it.. err ..being static. Rehydration allows for personalisation to be done on the edge.

Some examples of data available at the edge:

Sitecore Personalize can be used to get user data and display a personalised version of the page to the user.

The middleware functions do this look pretty powerful. I’m going to add this to my list of things to experiment with over the next few months.

Martin Miles – The mastery of Sitecore Upgrades

I know Martin from the Sitecore Community and when I heard he was doing a talk on upgrades I knew it would be one I’d be attending. Upgrades might not be the most exciting of subjects but if you’ve done a few Sitecore Upgrade like me your always looking for any tips and tools for your arsenal to make them easier.

Martin shared a ton of really useful information in his talk. I’m going to pick out some of the key ones only here as there are far too many useful ones to share and Martin Blogged about it the other day and shared his full slides.

Two different approaches to upgrades:

Stages of an upgrade and estimating it:

The need for being able to roll back attempted upgrade steps bit by bit:

Tip 1:

Tip 2:

This was one of the most time consuming issues I had with my last Sitecore upgrade :-(.

Those DLLs that have been removed changed will need re-writing/updating:

I blogged about Items as resources at the end of last year but if you upgrade to 10.1 or newer then the upgrade is simplified as the default Sitecore databases are empty now.

End Of Day 1

And with that Day One at the conference came to an end. It was time for Dinner, the Awards ceremony, Quiz and Drinks.

Later I went into Budapest with some friends from the Sitecore community to explore and have a few drinks. If you’ve not been to Budapest before the Ruin Bars were pretty cool.

Scooters back from the pub were kind of entertaining.

Day 2

After breakfast I headed down to the first session of the day that I wanted to catch.

Himadri Chakrabarti – Frontend First Architecture for Headless CMS

Himadri’s session was an interesting lightning talk on how to create a decoupled architecture using front-end.

I’d not really thought about IOC from the perspective of front-end so it was cool to see how this works with Next.js and typescript and how TSyringe can be used to integrate with a Headless CMS and switch between them.

Useful links from this session:

Ronald van der Plas – Content Hub Scripting as a Professional

My next Lightning talk was on Content Hub Scripting. I’ve not really done much with Content hub yet so I was interested in finding out more.

We were shown how the built-in C# scripting capability works and it’s limitations but also how to work-around these with the CLI.

The Content Hub CLI support a number of operations and can be run from the command line.

Core Commands

Environment Setup. This allows developers to sync scripts between Content Hub and their local machine and to run unit tests too.

Corey Smith – Stop Worrying and Love the HttpClient

The last lightning Talk was by fellow MVP Corey. He’d hit this issue with the HttpClient causing issues with socket exceptions on nearly every client project he’s worked on and wanted to share his learnings.

If you’ve ever done this on a Sitecore 8.2 – 9u2 project then your basically doing it wrong:

This is how you should be doing it. The important bit is the Connection Lease Timeout.

This is how you would use the Client Accessor:

For Site 9.1 and beyond there is a slightly different approach which you should use.

Rodrigo Peplau – CDP & Personalize for Sitecore XP fanatics

After lunch I decided to go to Rodrigo’s session on CDP & Personalize as I’ve read a lot about Boxever / Sitecore CDP but I’ve not used it yet.

Rodrigo did a great job of drawing comparisons with Site XP during his talk, calling out similar features we are comfortable with.

Concepts such as Personalisation and MV Testing and their counterpart in CDP were explained with examples.

An overview of how to integrate with CDP and Personalise was given.

The Boxever JavaScript looked pretty straight forward to integrate and powerful too.

Sending events to Sitecore CDP using the JavaScript works as follows:

Contacts are Guests in CDP

Decision Models are used to create business logic in the CDP

This was a nice comparison of Variants in CDP vs Variations in XP

Audiences can be targeted with Personalize in a number of different ways

All in all this was a really insightful session and helped me better understand how CDP works and what you can do with it.

Marc Ramer – Sitecore Discover – real-time intelligence for product search and merchandising

After a break I attended a session on Sitecore’s Search Platform acquisition (Reflektion). I’ve heard very little about this since it was purchased so was intrigued to learn more.

We saw a live demo of Sitecore Discover in action on a website selling products.

We were then shown the API details

The Customer Engagement Console also seems to have a lot of powerful options

Here are some analytics showing in the Console.

There are also a lot of Implementation options to pick from.

We were also given some info on the Discover SDK

Jake Hookom and Roger Connolly – Detailed Product Roadmap – Closing keynote

It was now time for the final session where we found out what was on the Roadmap for Sitecore from Jake and Roger.

There was a lot of cool information (and surprises) in this session so I’ll share some of the key slides on XM Cloud, Sitecore Pages, Sitecore Components, Composable from any datasource!, Webhooks and the main Roadmap too.

Sitecore Manager Looks interesting

Sitecore pages will be in XM Cloud and looks impressive.

XM Cloud Personalisation

Personalisation on the Edge in XM Cloud

Sitecore Components in XM Cloud

This slide was a Game changer, Sitecore allowing data sources from Competitor CMS platforms such as Contentful and Kentico. Who’d have though this would every happen a few years ago.

Awesome Roadmap around APIs

Event Webhooks allow extensibility in an Composable world.

Here is the detailed 2022 Roadmap (Borrowed from Twitter as my photo has poor contrast):

Closing

And with that the first In-Person SUGCON in 3 years was over and it was time to head to the airport for my flight home.
It was a very enjoyable SUGCON where I learn a lot and got to catch-up with a lot of friends and people I know in the Sitecore Community. Well done to all the organisers on putting together such a awesome event and to all the speakers for the great talks. There is certainly a lot to digest and mull over here, but the future looks bright and (dare I say) exciting for Sitecore developers in 2022.