Welcome to my recap of Sitecore Symposium 2024! Day 2 at Symposium offered incredible insights and valuable information. There was no shortage of engaging sessions and thought-provoking discussions and we are so excited to bring these fresh perspectives back. Here are my session notes and takeaways from day two.
Women in Digital Breakfast
What an inspiring way to start the day! Sitecore and Perficient joined to bring the inaugural Women in Digital Breakfast to life. The morning started with a nice breakfast buffet and there was time to hang out and connect with other attendees. Perficient continued our “Skip the Swag” initiative and left notecards on the tables where each attendee could write and share how cancer has impacted their life. For each attendee, Perficient will make a donation on their behalf to the American Cancer Society. The panel discussion was very well done and the speakers had great insight and takeaways.
- How can men help support women in the workplace?
- Create space for women.
- Bring women along on your journey.
- Stand up for your women colleagues.
- Be an ally.
- How can we help to eliminate gender roles in future generations?
- Raise boys and girls with the same standards.
- Do not force kids into certain roles, hobbies, or toys that play to gender stereotypes.
- Many women left the workforce during the pandemic to support kids and families but now…
- They are coming back.
- They are changing careers.
- They need support.
- How can we support women with families (or anyone with a family really)?
- Be understanding.
- Family comes first.
- Work is a part of life, not your whole life.
Opening Keynote
Eric Stine opened the day with the announcement that Content Hub, XM Cloud, and CDP are all HIPPA compliant! This is a big deal since it allows Sitecore to be able to sign BA agreements with healthcare organizations. In today’s modern world, users expect personalized experiences but this is difficult when it comes to PHI. You cannot change your personal information like you can your credit card if you get hacked. Protecting personal information is important to a brand’s trust.
Experience Awards
The morning continued with the announcement of the Experience Award winners for 2024. Perficient was pleased to win the Global Sitecore Practice Excellence Award. You can see a full list of all the winners in Sitecore’s official press release. Congratulations to all the winners!
Sitecore Search at Scale
This project included 6 sources, 7000 PDFs, and 44 languages! How do you scale Sitecore Search to a project that large?
- Identify your data
- What you want to index.
- Analyze the data
- How can you standardize your data?
- Expose your data
- Sitecore Search uses a crawler, so it must be able to access your data in order to index it.
- How will Search help your clients?
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- What are they looking for?
- Is the data useful to your clients?
- “Make it like Google”
- Google has hundreds of developers solely focused on search.
- Your development team is likely much smaller and has many other tasks to accomplish to launch a site.
- Your search experience is only as good as the time and money you can devote to it.
Introducing Sitecore Marketplace
More people are moving to XM Cloud and other SaaS products. 82% of users say that an app marketplace is an important factor in choosing a DXP platform. Sitecore is taking that information to heart and creating a new Sitecore Marketplace. This will be a fully supported solution for discovering, enabling, and managing apps, plugins, and extensions. 
- This gives developers
- The tools and technologies to create add-ons for Sitecore products
- SDKs
- UI libraries
- Support and documentation
- Starter library
- Support for app versions
- App visibility
- Public
- Private (invite only access)
- This gives customers
- The ability to add new features and capabilities to their instance
- The tools and technologies to create add-ons for Sitecore products
Sitecore CDP – Unified Tracking
Sitecore’s composable suite of products are becoming easier to connect together. Unified tracking means that you only must integrate one SDK. It also means that each event triggered will persist across all Sitecore products. The first products to use unified tracking will be XM Cloud, CDP, Personalize, and Search.
- Session Tracking
- A new session end event in CDP that allows you to update the guest profile.
- Profile Sharing
- The guest profile can be shared across products.
- Use the guest ID in CDP to find the same user in Search.
- Audience segments can be shared across products.
- Search results can be tailored to the audience segment.
- Cloud SDK
- One SDK to rule them all.
- The Cloud SDK will reach feature parity with the Engage SDK.
- The Cloud SDK will be the primary and best way to integrate
- One SDK to rule them all.
- The guest profile can be shared across products.
Symposium Party
Sitecore sure knows how to throw a party! We had bus service to downtown Nashville where we had space at four bars on Broadway just for attendees! There was a buffet with all the southern comforts including my favorites: chicken and waffles and shrimp and grits! To top it off, there were three floors of entertainment and a rooftop with a view of downtown. There was live music, line dancing, drinks, and good times with good friends! What a great night and great experience at Sitecore Symposium!
