Sitecore acquired Stylelabs

The Big surprise of the Symposium – Sitecore acquired  Innovative Content Marketing Software Vendor Stylelabs. The new platform centralizes the ability to define content strategy and easily create, manage, and publish marketing content across channels. Adding Stylelabs’ platform to Sitecore allows marketing teams to own the entire content lifecycle and understand the impact of specific content assets on individual customers’ behavior, empowering them to deliver transformative experiences throughout the customer journey.

NET Core based Service Architecture

Sitecore in on a journey from Monolith to NET Core based Service Architecture. They want to leave the safety of the monolith but because of tight coupling we have to live with large instances, slow start up and all or nothing upgrades. This old approach is hard to scale, bug in one feature can affect the whole platform. It always slowed down the adoption of new technologies.  Now, Sitecore is going into direction where they creating  a new building blocks on the same Sitecore Host (hOS+). First blocks: Sitecore Identity, Universal Tracker and soon Horizon.

Sitecore Identity

Support for Federated Authentication- – maybe some people who worked with Commerce already know a little about it. Based on Identity Server 4 default login mechanism across the platform (Experience Manager, Experience Platform, Experience Commerce) Provides Single Sign On using standard authentication protocols combine with external AIM systems, but still compatible with old Membership

Universal Tracker

Headless API for xDB collection. You asking your self isn’t that xConnect? It is not. xConnect only accepts immutable history and it designed for trusted service communication – Authentication only, no authorization. We need Universal Tracker to not expose xConnect. I has been told that in the future, Sitecore will use Universal Tracker instead of Sitecore.Analytics.Tracker. BTW, with Sitecore 9.1 Xamarin API has been updated. Link to my post about Universal Tracker

Horizon

Next generation experience manager. it will reduce time to value significantly with focus on the need of tomorrow user profiles. Out of the box features for easy adoption and utilization of the full Sitecore potential. Providing a user interface that is just as powerful and innovative as the engine behind.

Sitecore Headless

• Sitecore SSC Web API
• Sitecore Experience Accelerator Data Modelling and JSON Rendering
• Sitecore JavaScript Services
• Commerce services are supported through an API and accessed through JSS

Sitecore Headless for Agencies and JavaScript Developers

Sitecore Cortex machine learning

Content tagging, automated personalization recommendation and flexible integration with other ML engines and algorithms.

Sitecore Cortex automates the task of content tagging for bout internal and external search and creates information taxonomies used to provide better SEO rankings, content experience and search results on your website. Sitecore Cortex uses a configurable provider framework for content tagging which allows to bring your own Natural Language Provider.

Sitecore Experience Accelerator

New wire-framing for rapid page design and layout

• Creation of WCAG 2.0 compatible websites
• Wireframe and graysacle Modes
• Cross-site linking
• Per-site views
• Rendering variant component embedding

I remember Adam Najmanowicz commitment to fix existing bugs submitted by Sitecore user over new features. A lot of people confirmed that SXA team responsiveness is impressive.

Sitecore Forms

Forms has some existing new features such as conditional and pre-filling of fields. Pre-filling allows to set a data-provider for a field and pre-fill that field with data. Conditions allows to build forms that respond to user input and only show relevant questions.

EXM and Marketing Automation

Commerce focused email improvements

Simplified Deployment

XM Only Web Deploy Packages (WDPs) and a single machine setup template

SIF 2.0

Driven by requirement of 9.0 multi-role capable/ scaled deployment. On premises equivalent to cloud standardized on WebDeploy. What is new in 9.1? You need new Sitecore Installation Framework 2.0 to install 9.1. You have to keep the old module version to be able to install previous Sitecore version. At top of that here are few new features:

• Developer workstation templates
• Prerequisites install templates
• Uninstall Support
• Remote distributed deployment

XP Single Topology: Identity Server, xConnect, Sitecore

XM Scaled Topology: Identity Server, Content Management, Content Delivery

XP Scaled Topology: Content Management, Content Delivery, Processing, Reporting, Collection, Search, RefData, Automation, Automation Reporting, Cortex Processing, Cortex Reporting

Few of you will notice more server compared to 9.0. My suggestion. Start it like this, then delete what you don’t need or combine.

Enhancing the existing- Core platform

Expanded Global Cloud Support

Azure Data Center support in US Gov, Korea, France and Germany