7 Days until Sitecore Symposium 2019

This year’s Sitecore Symposium Conference will be in Orlando, Florida again. With less than one week from the conference, I’m getting excited since I missed it last year. Every time I go, I come back highly impressed with the platform and people…my guess is that this year will be no different.  The number of professional presentations is vast this year…it’ll take several minds with me to make sense of it all.    With several team members from Layer One Media attending across disciplines from sales to development, we got together to talk about what we’re all interested in. I am going to highlight a few key interesting topics that came up:

JSS – Sitecore’s Headless JavaScript Services

Coming fresh off a Milwaukee area Sitecore Meetup where we spoke about the Sitecore’s new modern UI framework, JSS is a natural fit to tune into. It’s time to see what others are saying using a healthy dose of questioning. With all the headless CMS rage, it’s our job to curb the new cool technology factor and make sure it makes good business sense for our clients. We’ve seen this pendulum swing back and forth with the amount of control that goes into the hands of the developer versus the marketer. We want to compare notes at Symposium and see how this is working in real life application beyond our four walls. There are several tracks that look interesting from serving microservice applications with JSS and working within existing react design systems, to enabling Microsoft’s Blazor framework to build rich client-side web UIs in C# instead of javascript. Understanding how Sitecore can fit snuggly into the existing technology stack is something everybody using Sitecore (or those considering it) need to understand.   

Content Hub (aka Style Labs)

We haven’t implemented Sitecore’s DAM solution yet, as they recently acquired (StyleLabs), but it’s a front and center tool that could be an important part of our future offerings in 2020. 

Beyond technical integration sessions around Content Hub, we are also interested in how Sitecore Content Hub compares to other competitive DAM (Digital Asset Management) and Content solutions. The modern DAM space has evolved in the last 20 years, and Sitecore Content Hub seems to have a unique perspective combining a few different genres of software - PIM and DAM. Personalization with these tools to organize content could be extremely helpful. We will continue to educate ourselves on Content Hub.

Commerce

Layer One was one of the early partners with Sitecore to build out working concepts of how Commerce could be applied to B2B sellers where more complex selling rules are very often the case.  The reason Sitecore Commerce is so perfectly suited for a complex transaction is because of its ability to be customized for customers in almost every element - including UX front end but also the admin console side. Most tools take a more out of the box approach compared to Sitecore. We will be attended several of the Experience Commerce sessions. We highly recommend clients should check out the current iteration of Commerce. It’s come a long way in the short 2.5 years since inception.  

There is also a track discussing how to track activity across platforms with Google Tag Manager and PowerBI. Since we’ve recently worked on a project with Sitecore and PowerBI, we see how powerful layer data can become and can’t wait to see what others are doing.   By 2020, there will be an average of six internet-connected devices per person.  The view across platforms is a must to improve performance metrics. 

We are really interested in attending the track around how Commerce will work with the coming wave of next generation smart speakers with integrated screens, aka Smart Displays, such as the Amazon Echo Show and Google Home Hub. The future shopping experience with the Amazon Echo Show will likely have a much larger impact on the eCommerce landscape than smart speakers did.  

Analytics and Personalization

Sitecore has religiously staked their worth as the Go-To CMS to deliver content to the right people, at the right time. And if done correctly, we all agree it greatly improves the customer experience. Only now are most clients more effectively executing on these types of personalization tactics. To that end, being the one that implements these solutions, we always seek to understand how analytics can shine a spotlight on behavioral patterns to understand how people are using the website or pages, uncover previously buried information that drives our personalization strategy or further uses AI to interpret the data and make personalization decisions in real time.  These will surely be ongoing conversations that happen first at conferences like Sitecore Symposium and then eventually start making their way to clients. Sitecore doubles down on the concept already with Cortex, and we continue to see the momentum building for using these AI tools in day- to-day marketing activities. 

Finally, we are enthusiastically wanting to talk to others that are using Sitecore as their centralized customer data platform.  For all the hype Salesforce has had over the last 5 years for centralizing customer data and extending from CRM to marketing to commerce...we believe Sitecore is a top contender in this space.