What’s new in Sitecore 10?

What’s new in Sitecore 10.0?

Hey all! I hope everybody is ready for a quick tour around Sitecore 10 and the new stuff in the release. There are a lot of new features and changes that were targeted at helping Marketing and IT teams work together more efficiently, continuously deliver.

My name’s Jason, I work at Sitecore leading the Technical Evangelist team. Our group tries to advocate for our community needs, and also try to help out where we can! I was honoured to be able to join your inaugural virtual SUG tonight. The virtual aspect this year is really making it much easier for me to connect with so many of our communities. Although, I hope one day I actually get to go to Switzerland!

Today, I want to take a quick highlight tour of some of these changes, show some quick developer demos, and then get into the part that is interesting to me: the discussions! I want to know what you’ve seen, what interested you, what questions you have.

Sitecore 10 helps align for CX success

So to help with this alignment between Marketing and IT, the focus needed to be on things like time to market, usability, performance… things that will help both teams work together more seamlessly and quickly.

Drive successful engagements more efficiently

Customers are expecting not just personalized experiences, but new experiences as their own needs change or there are shifts in the market. Teams need to be able to deliver and update quickly, both new content and new experiences, so they can keep up with the demans from their customers.

With Sitecore XP 10, I feel like efficiency is really at the heart of a lot of the changes. IT and Marketing trying to line up their timelines and move faster, using everything from container infrastructure orchestration to integrated data and marketing functionality.

Developers, DevOps, and IT

In this release, technology teams are really going to see enormous changes in options that they now have to deliver solutions more rapidly.

Faster time to market

Sitecore already offers a lot of delivery flexibility, but some of the areas where we have really been hearing a lot of feedback are in the topics of container infrastructures, headless development for .NET developers, ASP.NET Core support, and better serialization tooling.

With the addition of support for Docker, Kubernetes, and new Sitecore-provided image repositories, delivery teams now have a way to move to a continuous delivery model even more easily with infrastructure-as-code deployments and more efficient solution and team onboarding. All as additional choices to our existing deployment options.

The addition of the ASP.NET Core SDK and headless rendering host architecture, developers have a new way of building their solutions. Working heedlessly, similar to JSS, this new development option allows faster development iterations and also lets developers work with the latest and greatest .NET technology.

Also, new tools have been introduced for technical teams to automate content sharing and deployment using the new Sitecore CLI and Sitecore for Visual Studio tools. These additions allow you to work better as a team on the content that drives your development.

Continuous delivery with Sitecore Containers

SCRIPT: Why are containers important? In general, if you’ve been doing your development with virtual machines or local installations, moving to a Docker-driven development and infrastructure flow will be a huge benefits for you. In general, you can address four major areas:

1. Drive down your TCO by reducing costs and onboarding more quickly
2. Faster delivery by leveraging local development efficiencies of Docker
3. Make it easier for developers so they don’t have to plan for system requirements of specific versions, or how to get Sitecore installed
4. Improved operational capabilities with new monitoring and security support based on industry standard technology used for containers.

By moving to a containerized approach, you can better support a continuous delivery model. Implementing DevOps is a culture change and technology doesn’t solve that, but adopting Docker and Kubernetes into your workflow will give your team the industry standard tooling they need to work on those changes.

How can containers help you?

So how will the different parts of the team benefit?For developers, they’ll see the biggest changes in their flow in the way they can spin up and tear down local environments in a scripted manner. By using shared Docker images, a team of developers can bring on new members to the team much more quickly, and also help each other out by enhancing the image definitions as they determine new needs for all members of the development team. This includes the dependencies like Solr, Redis, SQL Server, .NET versions, without having to replicate the entire operating system as would be done with a virtual machine.

The team supporting the live production environments and other infrastructure can also choose whether they want to leverage container infrastructure for how they deploy their environments. Kubernetes is the industry standard for container orchestration and allows you to deploy to any cloud provider you want. Additionally, each cloud provider provides a managed Kubernetes service (like Microsoft’s AKS) to make it easier to manage your containers. For organizations running traditional IaaS with VMs, this can be a huge reduction in costs by sharing the operating system and hardware amongst multiple isolated containers.

Reduce risk with a scaled developer setup

If you combine both the new Docker developer setup and the new ASP.NET Rendering host options, you can quickly setup and tear down production-like local development environments.

Your developer environment now can be easily set up with containers to have a scaled out installation of Sitecore on your local system.

With the new .NET Core headless rendering engine, the Content Delivery container is purely there to provide layout and content information to the rendering host. So you can do your presentation layer development in your ASP.NET Core rendering host with rapid recycles and no need to make code pushes to the content delivery instance.

The new Traefik reverse proxy role allows you to run all of these instances easily and work on multiple projects at once, allowing the reverse proxy to handle the complexity of finding the correct container instance to return to the browser.

Flexibility with new headless ASP.NET core option

Containers are not the only new option for how to deliver Sitecore solutions though. There is a new headless developer option that allows your team to start building your sites in ASP.NET Core. This ASP.NET Rendering SDK allows your team to implement a headless architecture where a remote rendering host runs the website using ASP.NET Core, similar to our existing JSS headless developer option for front-end teams. This allows for rapid local development with a much lighter-weight front-end, allowing you to change things and debug issues faster.

You can also attract and retain talent that want to be working the latest .NET technology, which keeps your team happy and excited about what they’re working on.

There are fewer pains when doing native integration with your existing ASP.NET Core applications. Bring Sitecore in where you need it by using this headless developer option.

Rapid iteration for Sitecore developers

If you are a .NET developer working with the new ASP.NET Core headless option, you’ll be seeing a lot of changes you’ve been waiting for. All the benefits of JSS but with the ASP.NET Core you want to work with. Using feedback from customers, partners, and developers who have been excited about headless delivery options with JSS, this new headless offering leverages that community feedback to deliver a better development experience. Using the same headless services that power JSS, you get to deliver experiences that work for the marketer in Experience Editor, track and provide marketing capabilities, and work faster.

With routing support, you can make sure to only connect to Sitecore when you need to. And, by using a remote rendering host, developers can build straight from Visual Studio into the rendering host and test changes without needing to recycle all of Sitecore every time. Make quick changes to the presentation layer, push those changes, and debug in a fraction of the time. 

Work more efficiently with content automation

Another big change to the developer experience is the new content serialization tooling. This combines the best of both TDS & Unicorn, making it much easier for you to script your content changes and move them between your different environments as part of your deployment process. To make use of this new Serialization approach you have two different tools to help you.

The first is the Sitecore CLI: a command line interface to interact with your Sitecore instance

The second is Sitecore for Visual Studio - a graphical tool to interact with your Sitecore instance from within Visual Studio.

The crucial thing to note here though is that the feature set between the two will be the same. You can choose your preferred way of working, either on the command line or through a GUI!

Content and marketing

While a lot of the big changes in the release address technology delivery, there are several new enhancements that allow marketing teams to quickly evolve experiences and have a better flow with their existing tools.

Drive successful engagements

Sitecore’s existing marketing and content authoring capabilities are still there, but new changes have been introduced to make it even easier. Horizon was the new editing interface introduced in the Sitecore 9 series, but its capabilities have been expanded to allow you to work with more of your existing sites, especially larger solutions that have multiple languages and multiple sites.

The digital marketing capabilities have been improved to deliver new ways for marketing teams to get started faster, get deeper insights, and also integrate with Salesforce Marketing Cloud in realtime.

For organizations on their data privacy compliance journey, there are now easier ways to enforce and manage consent choices, as well as new support for anonymization of personal information submitted via Sitecore Forms.

Personalize on CMS-only installations

A big bonus to the digital marketing team in this release is the ability to roll out basic session and device personalization even with CMS-only installations. No need to install the full Experience Platform to take advantage of this type of personalization. This allows you to start your personalization journey with a lighter-weight infrastructure cost.

Do more with expanded Horizon editing features

The Horizon editing interface has expanded to cover more user scenarios. With the addition of the ability to swap between sites and languages, larger solutions with multisite and multilingual can make more use of the Horizon interface. This includes being able to switch to your SXA sites!

A new dedicated field editor experience allows you to edit page metadata that is not directly editable on the page. This allows you to edit other types of fields without the WYSIWYG interface. This is also useful for editing ‘headless’ content that is not intended for a page. Using the new Content view allows you to see all the content items, not just the pages, and edit your data in the Horizon field editor.

Speaking of SXA sites, the integration to SXA has been improved to support editing directly on the page for all supported field types and also do site-specific images and datasources. A tighter integration between SXA and Horizon editing will be coming over the course of the Sitecore 10 series.

Also, if you happen to be developing your assets in Sitecore Content Hub DAM, you can now leverage that rich media in the Horizon editor instead of only using the native Sitecore Experience Platform media library. This allows your marketing team to have a better flow from Content Hub to your web channel.

Make it easier to connect with customers

Easier email creation HTML creation for email marketing is a complex and niche skill. Additional out-of-the-box templates have been added to the current library to help marketers get started faster.

• Left Image Block
• Right Image Block
• Image Focus

Templates can also now be fully customized to your needs using Scriban, just like editing rendering variants in SXA.

Connect to customers with automated birthday campaigns There are now new ways to leverage marketing automation to engage with contacts around their birth date. You can now do things like:

• Send offers some number of days in advance of their birthday
• Send greetings on their birthday
• Send reminders and follow-up with your customer some number of days after their birthday

Deeper analytics insights into your audiences Filter any analytics report by a marketing segment

• Target segments of contacts via predefined rules and then report based on the segment.
• Push an email to a segmented list and then see the impact across the site.
• Report on the performance of key audience groups.

Model more of your content in Content Hub

For some teams, Sitecore Content Hub is now the central hub for all media content in their DAM, but also content models defined in CMP. Their web channel is only one channel consuming this content. This release expands how much content can be managed in CMP and then integrated to the Sitecore Experience Platform. With support for additional field types, this allows marketing teams to centralized more of their content creation into Content Hub and still leverage this with their web teams. With the addition of a taxonomy import, marketing teams can also make sure that the taxonomy associations they make in Content Hub will persist into the content items in the Sitecore Experience Platform.

Support your data privacy compliance journey

Right to be forgotten A major need for marketing teams on a journey to meet data privacy regulations, like GDPR, is to support the need for visitors to have their personal data anonymized. With this release, Sitecore Forms makes it easier for you to support erasing this personal identifiable data that is saved via the out-of-the-box Save data submit action. This includes redacting submission values, removing any associations to xDB Contacts, and deleting any files uploaded by the visitor.

This approach allows for marketing teams to still see reporting data, even when anonymized.

Right to object A second change in this release regards making it easier to enforce and manage consent choices. Visitors need to be able to consent to being tracked and marketing teams need to store these choices and make decisions on them. The new consent management tools available in the platform allow for implementation teams to configure sites to require explicit consent before the Sitecore tracking will begin. The tracker is now able to be disabled based on the consent settings stored for the user, and xDB supports the ability to store these consent settings and persist it across visits for the contact.

This allows marketing teams to have some sites operate as they currently do, but add additional consent requirements for specific sites that need to meet stricter privacy guidelines.

Drive real-time Salesforce marketing automation

While Sitecore does offer marketing automation capabilities, we also understand that teams may already have their own tools in place that are handling this aspect of their marketing tool stack. Sitecore Connect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows teams to work in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and leverage the rich visitor analytics data stored in xDB.

Now, with the latest release, you can make use of this connection in real-time, no need to wait for a nightly batch. A new Sitecore Marketing automation activity, specifically for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, allows marketers to configure a realtime event to integrate with SFMC.

By connecting directly to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketing teams can respond to events in Sitecore and immediately send information about the current visitor over to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and place visitors into Journey Builder marketing automation plans.

This means that you can respond across all your channels to events, in real-time, in the marketing automation tool that you use.

THANK YOU!

Be excellent to each other! Jason St-Cyr @StCyrThoughts Photo by Charles Strebor (https://www.flickr.com/photos/rantz/)