The 2019 Sitecore Symposium conference was a great event. Each year is a surprise in what the future brings. I'm very excited about the future of Sitecore.
Here are my personal Top 10 Highlights:
- Sitecore Software as a Service SAAS - Sitecore is launching a SAAS product in the summer of 2020. It will bring Sitecore to more customers and allow quicker time to market for customers. It will bring a new development model with Headless, but it will continue to be industry leading in content editing, experience, and personalization.
- .Net Core - With Sitecore SAAS and vNext of Sitecore we are able to build websites leveraging .NET Core. This is one of the biggest thing I have been waiting for. It allows us as developer to leverage more modern patterns and tools to rapidly build websites and applications without having to learn legacy software.
- SXA 9.3 - Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) 9.3 is the next version that will launch with Sitecore 9.3 by the end of the year. This is a major release that in my opinion makes SXA finally ready for almost all projects on Sitecore.
- SXA Scriban - SXA 9.3 introduces the templating language Scriban. This provides a greater flexibility in SXA and allows developers to control markup as code instead of items in Sitecore. This is a huge advancement in performance as well as a great developer experience.
- New SXA CLI Themes - Themes and supporting code files are now created from a command line interface (CLI) and managed in source control instead of stuffed in the media library. Another monumental improvement in developer experience.
- Sitecore Forms - Many improvements here, my favorite is bot detection. Hopefully no more reCAPTCHA!
- Sitecore AI - Auto personalization with Sitecore AI is here with 9.3. This is a game changer. So many companies never get to personalization because it takes time to plan and configure. This does the hard parts for you.
- Sitecore Developer Tools - After the hedgehog acquisition, Sitecore is now offering new developer tools, including updated Sitecore TDS, Sitecore RAZL and Sitecore FEYDRA.
- Content Hub 3.3 - Everyone is buzzing about Content Hub. It is a very nice product that is now fully integrated with Sitecore and provides a great depth of functionality and customization capabilities to manage content and assets. It is also connected to Salesforce Marketing Cloud to deliver content in your marketing campaigns and channels.
- Sitecore Horizon - Sitecore's new Horizon editing UI to be released in 9.3.