Well, suffice it to say that my week in Orlando at this year’s Sitecore Symposium and MVP Summit was both educational and exhausting! With over 1,000 brands and nearly 3,000 attendees, this year’s event was jam packed with knowledge sharing, case studies, and a lot of great announcements and updates for us Sitecore fanatics.
Missed out on Sitecore Symposium 2018? Don’t fret! I’ve put together a roundup of some of the key highlights that came out of Orlando.
- Stylelabs Acquisition: At this year’s event, Sitecore announced the acquisition of Stylelabs, which offers a DAM and PIM that will be integrated
into the Sitecore platform. This integration of platforms gives marketers and content teams the ability to own the entire content lifecycle. They can create and optimize the volume of content they need to have personalized engagements with customers. - JSS: Man, was Javascript Services (JSS) the talk of the town at Sitecore Symposium or what? Sitecore announced the general availability of JSS 1.0, which will be released as part of Sitecore 9.1 later this year. The availability of JSS 1.0 indicates a shift in the way websites will be developed, allowing Javascript developers to use popular JSS frameworks to build a Sitecore solution using nothing but JSS.
- Sitecore’s Horizon Initiative: At last year’s event, Sitecore announced their Horizon initiative that aimed to update the UI of Sitecore and its launchpad
to enable marketers in the system. This year, we got a preview of theprogress that has been made and it is quite impressive. The new UI will offer unique dashboards based on roles, emphasizing analytics and features that help marketers personalize more quickly based off of system suggestions – this is something to definitely keep an eye out for in future Sitecore versions. - Case Work: What would this blog post be if I didn’t plug my own session? At this year’s event, there were a lot of great case studies presented from organizations like Atlantis – The Palm in Dubai, Toyota, Citadel Federal Credit Union and more. I also had the honor of presenting some case work with Ecolab’s Craig Burkhart, Senior Manager, Interactive Marketing. We presented work we’ve done together on how to build a roadmap to using xDB and more of Sitecore’s features. Sitecore is a pretty powerful tool, and if you don’t have a roadmap and plan in place to use things like personalization, testing, marketing automation, etc. then it can be a bit overwhelming. Together, we built a roadmap that is moving Ecolab through digital maturity phases to achieve success in the Sitecore platform.
As you can gather, there was a lot of really great information shared and a lot of inspiring ideas for how organizations can continue to mature with the platform. If you want to take a peek at the presentation I gave with Ecolab or just discuss Symposium in general, shoot me a note through the contact form or HMU on twitter @Jgrozalsky.
Stay thirsty, friends!
