The new products announced at Sitecore Symposium
This year’s Sitecore Symposium, the annual conference for the global professional Sitecore community, has provided the usual mixture of strategic announcements, product updates, case studies and informational sessions.
Sitecore has been on quite a journey over the past two years, completing four acquisitions, systematically making the platform available on a SaaS basis to support a composable DXP, increasing its marketing activities and making several senior appointments. Change with Sitecore is a constant so we weren’t surprised that there were a few announcements, including some new partnerships and the launch of new offerings.
Three new additions to the Sitecore platform
The major announcement at the 2022 Symposium is the release of three new Sitecore products and services that are all cloud-based:
- Sitecore Search, a new AI-powered search tool
- Content Hub One – a headless CMS “system”
- Sitecore Connect, a low code solution with connectors and recipes to connect Sitecore products.
Additionally, they have also announced some significant enhancements to the recently launched Sitecore XM Cloud, the new SaaS version of Sitecore’s CMS.
Sitecore Search
Search is an element that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves in customer experience and often the findability of web sites can leave a lot to be desired. Sitecore Search is a new search tool that uses AI to help deliver faster and more relevant results, taking into account various different rules to “match, sort and promote” different results; for example, it can also be used to promote specific products. It also includes specific capabilities such as type-ahead capabilities, that make a significant difference to the search experience, and also covers multi-language, which is often critical for e-commerce when there is an international audience.
Sitecore themselves point out that Sitecore Search is “plug-and-play” and can be added to a website in a few hours and is already in use on the Sitecore.com website. Product APIs also means it is easy to embed content searches and other related search elements into a site.
Content Hub One
Content Hub One is an evolution of the existing Sitecore Content Hub offering that was largely a rebranding of the existing Stylelabs Content Hub platform, gained through the 2018 acquisition of Stylelabs. Content Hub One is a new headless CMS for the creation of content that can then be delivered through multiple channels. It appears to be more of entry-level offering into the wider Content Hub, and is specifically described as an “entry point” that enables marketing teams to upgrade to the “full capabilities” of Content Hub when they are ready.
It comes with interfaces for content modelling, an authoring interface, and APIs and SDKs to help teams connect content to independent front-end experiences. The solution leverages some of the existing CMS capabilities that were part of the Content Marketing Platform (CMP), already a module within Content Hub.
On paper, the introduction of a new lightweight headless CMS that integrates more readily with Content Hub may seem there is some overlap with Sitecore XM Cloud, another headless CMS solution, but the latter is positioned as being able to deliver more sophisticated web experiences. It also appears that XM Cloud can work alongside Content Hub One. However, we can see this may cause a little confusion in the marketplace, as the distinction between the two is not completely clear.
Sitecore Connect
While Content Hub One and Search are already being advertised as offerings on the Sitecore website, Sitecore Connect is still to launch. This is a low code solution that is designed to support Sitecore’s “composable DXP” proposition, by offering a library of connectors that will link Sitecore products to other customer experience technology solutions. Marketers can then build “recipes” that use the connectors in different combinations to link different solutions together. This is expected to grow to a library of over 1,000 connectors as well as up to 400k “recipes” from the global Sitecore community.
Sitecore Connect looks like it will be an essential piece of the composable DXP jigsaw and better enable integrations across different parts of the Sitecore ecosystem, and to other popular non-Sitecore solutions. An easy-to-use UI aimed at non-IT folks may also help to demystify the use of composable architecture.
Updates to Sitecore XM Cloud
In addition, there are some updates coming to the next release of Sitecore XM Cloud that will make it more feasible as an independent solution, for example with some native personalisation and testing, as well as additional editing features.
Sitecore continues to move forward
Sitecore continues to evolve and expand with a current focus on cloud native solutions that can be deployed seamlessly with other parts of the platform that are also delivered on a SaaS basis. The new products that have been announced move Sitecore forwards in terms of being able to deliver a composable DXP with a wide set of different features, particularly with Sitecore Connect providing an easier way to join everything together.
If you’d like to discuss these new additions to the Sitecore family and how they might help you then get in touch.
