For the last couple of years, Sitecore XM Cloud has been looming over the horizon with the promise of faster deployments, better security, interoperability, scalability… but until Sitecore Symposium earlier this month, there was little to no information about what it actually offered marketers and strategists. Whether this was the result of poor messaging or this was actually new information, it was one of the moments that made strategists like myself do a double take because this could potentially change the trajectory for a lot of our clients.
So what does XM Cloud offer your marketing and strategy teams?
- SXA: Almost every website I’ve worked on in the last five years has leveraged SXA (Sitecore Experience Accelerator) so for clients going to XM Cloud, that continuity is going to be great. Read more about what Headless SXA is here: https://doc.sitecore.com/xp/en/developers/sxa/102/sitecore-experience-accelerator/headless.html
- Pages: Not to be confused with “Symphony” or “Horizon”, this is a WYSIWYG page editor that gives you drag and drop page building and editing capabilities that should make it easier for content authors to manage page builds. Coupled with SXA, it should be easy to keep your look and feel consistent with brand standards and make governing layouts manageable. https://doc.sitecore.com/xmc/en/users/xm-cloud/create-webpages-with-xm-cloud-pages.html
- Faster Page Load Speed: When personalizing on XM and XP, we had to be careful about running too many personalization rules on one page or it would load too slowly. Now because XM Cloud runs personalization using Edge Middleware, that’s no longer a concern and you can personalize to your heart’s content. (Don’t confuse this with “Sitecore Experience Edge.” Totally different thing.) https://doc.sitecore.com/xp/en/developers/101/developer-tools/sitecore-experience-edge-for-xm.html
- Search: An easy-to-implement, integrated internal search engine with multilingual management and analytics that let you get insights around keywords and content engagement? Yes. Please. https://www.sitecore.com/products/search
- PERSONALIZATION AND CONTENT TESTING. Insert some sort of Excited Oprah Gif Here! This was the moment during Dave O’Flanagan’s keynote when I literally turned to the person sitting beside me and said, “Did he just say what I thought he said??? There’s personalization embedded in XM Cloud???” For the last year or so, we were led to believe that after XP, CDP + Personalize was going to be the only feasible path forward for our clients to do personalization. And, frankly, it’s not going to be a great solution for a lot of companies. It’s complex, it’s a heavy lift, and it is going to take a devoted team. My fear was that it might cause some mid-size companies to abandon the Sitecore platform altogether. So hearing that XM Cloud will offer a reasonably robust alternative for rules-based personalization, it was a revelation and a relief. (Forgive the unintentional alliteration.) Information is still fairly sparse and we don’t have access to a sandbox quite yet, but it sounds like there will be around 20 out of the box rules to choose from, the interface for configuration will be quite similar to XP (hallelujah for consistency!), and it will retain 30 days of user history. Of course it will be a step down from the sophistication of the capabilities of XP and CDP + Personalize, but for a lot of companies, this is a GREAT place to start. And paired with the other great marketing capabilities XM Cloud offers in addition to the architectural and development advantages, I’m more excited about the potential of this product than ever. https://doc.sitecore.com/xmc/en/users/xm-cloud/create-targeted-digital-experiences-with-xm-cloud-pages-personalize.htmlRead more about XM Cloud from Sitecore here: https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud
