I just returned home from a great Sitecore Symposium and an MVP summit. I had the honors to present the Overview of 9.1 together with Mark Groves, Senior Director Product Management. During the days that followed I received a lot of requests to share the deck and the details. To address these questions I started a blog series on our 9.1 release.
So, version 9.1 has a lot of exciting innovation and value that will help our customers get to market faster, and also ongoing refinements and enhancements to existing functionality.
Enhancements
Our work on enhancing the platform is guided by the feedback we get from our customers, partners, analysts and the community. As you know our ecosystem and community are not shy about telling us what is missing and what we can improve. We’re listening, and we’re taking on board what we hear and using it to make Sitecore an even better platform.
Time to Market
When we talk about time-to-market, we’re talking about the entire lifecycle of the solutions. Installing Sitecore, upgrading Sitecore, configuring Sitecore, developing new sites, deploying changes, scaling up, scaling down – it all needs to be fast, easy and reliable.
Innovation
There are a lot of content management systems and application platforms and customer data platforms and commerce systems out there. For Sitecore it’s things like Cortex and our JSS that differentiates us, but more on that in the upcoming blog posts.
Overview of the Sitecore Experience Cloud in 9.1
Sitecore is becoming more and more service oriented and provides you with more ways to track interactions and create relevant personal experiences on different channels. You can have web presence build with .NET, SxA or JSS, you can have a native mobile APP build with the Sitecore Mobile SDK or build a Progressive Web App (PWA) with JSS.
How do all these new features and enhancements relate to the Sitecore Experience platform. At a high level we can identify different layers; Integration, Experience Storage, Management and Delivery. Next to the layers we have Sitecore Cortex providing AI features and enhancements in Sitecore across layers.
Data Storage
The Sitecore xDB stores all the Analytics data from our prospects and customers; all interactions, conversions, campaigns and any other Analytics data.
Integrations
Next to all the experience data in xDB, Sitecore provides you with connectors for Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce, but more importantly Sitecore provides you with the tools to enrich the xDB data by integrating with 3rd parties, using Data Exchange Framework or xConnect.
xDB provides you with a true 360 view of the individual.
Management
The business users create content for their channels in the management layer using the Experience Editor, manage their digital assets and their product catalogue. This is also where the marketeer defines the Customer Experiences by setting-up personalization, MV tests and get business insights by analytics.
Delivery
Delivery is where you publish your content and experiences to the different channels. The opportunities and options for delivery are endless with the power Of Sitecore OMNI you can now track and create relevant personal experiences on any device and channel, both online and offline.
Sitecore Cortex
With Sitecore Cortex you can harness your Experience Data with the power of Machine Learning. Helping the author and the marketeer during their day-to-day job, with features like content tagging and suggested personalization. Sitecore Cortex will also provide you, as a developer, with a Scalable Data-Processing platform designed to work with the xDB and leverage that rich integrated dataset.
Sitecore 9.1 is the next step to provide you, as a developer, with the freedom of choice for technology and empower you with accessible Machine Learning in combination with the xDB to create experiences that make the difference for our shared customers.
Learn more about Sitecore 9.1
In the following blog posts we will look at what’s new in Sitecore 9.1 for both Content Management and the Experience Platform.
The full slide deck is available for you to view on SlideShare.