Sitecore 9 has arrived!
Magnify Your Marketing....
On the morning of Tuesday 17th October 2017, the arrival of Sitecore 9 was announced!
The unveiling took place during a presentation at the 2017 Sitecore Symposium (Las Vegas), a Biennial event where marketers, developers, partners, analysts, and customers come together from around the world to gain insight into all things Sitecore.
Since its inception, Sitecore has led the website tech scene, and in recent years their platform has been officially recognised as both a “Leader” and “Visionary” by independent technology research firm, Gartner (www.gartner.com). As such, attendees at this year’s Symposium expected big things, and it’s safe to say that Sitecore delivered.
New features of Sitecore 9...
Sitecore Experience Cloud
Sitecore have assigned a new title to its suite of offerings “Sitecore Experience Cloud”. The new title is used to describe the overall set of Sitecore solutions and capabilities for content management, commerce, digital marketing tools, omnichannel delivery with unmatched ability to leverage rich data and machine learning-generated insights.
Improved UI – Forms and Engagement Plans
Web Forms for Marketers will soon be a thing of the past. Sitecore Forms replaces it and it comes with a vastly improved UI, featuring drag and drop fields. Sitecore forms now support the creation of surveys, and you’ll also be able to create multi-page forms to help make lengthy forms feel more manageable. What’s more, they're reusable and re-skinnable, reducing your time to market when delivering content across other sites. Here’s a quick look at how to build forms in Sitecore 9…
So you might be asking yourself “What's going to happen to WFFM?”, well, it’s still going to be available via xConnect for version 9, with a view to deprecation in 9.1”
You’ll find the same drag and drop functionality when creating Engagement Plans within the Marketing Automation functionally too. The new module features a vastly improved UI which makes emailing at scale much more intuitive and user friendly. Here’s a short video on how to use the new Marketing Automation functionality…
Sitecore xConnect
xConnect gives you the ability to collect, connect and store data in Sitecore’s Experience Database from campaigns and 3rd party data, continuously and in real-time, meaning that marketers have a more constant, rich, and comprehensive view of customer actions/behaviors than any other system on the market.
Cloud First
Sitecore XM and XP provide customers with the widest array of deployment options including on-premise, hybrid cloud and managed cloud hosting. It means that IT teams can enjoy the speed and scale of cloud, while marketers benefit from faster time to market and assurance that their marketing campaigns will scale even at peak times.
Sitecore Machine Learning
With “Sitecore Cortex” machine-learning applied throughout the platform’s native analytics, testing and optimization, marketers can discover critical insights in real-time, transforming how they reach customers.
Federated Authentication - SSO Login & PII Support
From a Marketer's perspective, Single Sign-on (SSO) may not be a familiar term, but if you’ve ever signed into a website using your Facebook, Google, and Twitter account, you’ve used SSO technology. The good news is, SSO is available in Sitecore 9, meaning your website visitors can login to your website using their social profiles (should you wish for them to be able to do so!).
With GDPR on the horizon, any features that assist with compliance are welcomed with open arms by most organisations. Sitecore 9 offers encryption at rest and in motion and it also offers features that help to handle Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
Easiest Upgrade Ever.
Sitecore have developed a tool to make upgrading to the latest version of Sitecore much less intensive and therefore, less capital intensive for our clients! It means that marketing departments have more budget to improve their websites rather than spending such as large amount on the lift and shift process (i.e. migrating from an earlier version).
Competitive Pricing Packages
Version 9 offers the Sitecore opportunity to a wider range of businesses, catering for those who receive web traffic ranging from 50k to 2m visits per month. Please get in touch for pricing.
Sitecore Documentation
The quality of the documentation has been improved for Sitecore 9. That means lower training costs, a lower barriers to entry for those migrating to Sitecore from a competing platform.
Sitecore 6 & 7 Support Discontinued!
Yes, that’s right - Sitecore 6 and Sitecore 7 support is being discontinued with the introduction of Sitecore 9. As a result, organisations who are still using those earlier versions of Sitecore are encouraged to make the move towards Sitecore 8 as a minimum.
Interested in learning more?
A Demo is the best way to learn about Sitecore and its new features. Use the form below to register for free one-to-one Sitecore 9 Demo.
