Sitecore Symposium 2024 was held in Nashville, Tennessee, turning the city into a hub for digital experience. For an entire week, Sitecore experts from around the globe gathered to exchange knowledge, share experiences, and hear the latest Sitecore announcements. In this blog post, I'll be sharing my top takeaways from this year’s Symposium – from the main keynotes to product roadmaps, lively party on Broadway Street, and more. Keep reading!
To hear more about the event straight from Americaneagle.com’s Sitecore MVPs, check out the following episode of the Sitecore Water Cooler podcast: “Post-Sitecore Symposium 2024 Roundtable.”
Takeaways from Sitecore Symposium
On Wednesday, October 14th, Sitecore Symposium kicked off with an inspiring keynote from Sitecore CEO Dave O’Flanagan. He began by thanking this year’s sponsors, particularly Diamond Sponsor Americaneagle.com for our support and dedication to making the event successful. As Sitecore’s new CEO, Dave emphasized his commitment to listening to customers, understanding what Sitecore excels at, and identifying areas for improvement.
Dave outlined his priorities for the near future: Sitecore aims to be a trusted partner, providing the technology, people, and partner ecosystem necessary to help customers achieve their goals. Customers will have the choice to stay on premises, move to the cloud with SaaS products, or transition from XP to composable solutions when ready. Sitecore is also dedicated to innovation and staying ahead of the market, ensuring its products deliver leading digital solutions that help customers stand out.
Sitecore Stream, an Intelligent DXP
Dave also showed how Sitecore wants to help marketers to achieve more, through integrating AI into the composable tech stack, to create the first truly intelligent digital experience platform (DXP). He then announced Sitecore Stream, which represents a market leading innovation for the intelligent first DXP. Achieving an intelligent DXP is not just about artificial intelligence (AI). It’s about using AI to understand how marketers work and creating intelligence, brand intelligence, campaign intelligence, experience intelligence and market intelligence to increase productivity.
Sitecore Stream is not a new product. It’s an add-on for all current Sitecore products and consists of three core capabilities: brand aware AI, which make sure actions are aligned with the brand, operative Copilot, and AI enhanced workflow.
Learn more about Sitecore Stream.
Dave closed out his main stage presentation by announcing that all Sitecore’s content and experience solutions – Content Hub, XM Cloud, and CDP + Personalize – have been independently audited and are officially HIPPA compliant. This is huge news for Sitecore’s healthcare clients as well as opens the door for more opportunities in the future!
Enhanced Customization with Sitecore Marketplace
One of the most intriguing roadmap sessions I attended focused on Sitecore Marketplace – a solution designed to help users discover, enable, and manage apps, plugins, and extensions that bring enhanced customization and extensibility to Sitecore products.
The Marketplace will feature a dedicated site where users can explore a wide range of apps and plugins, with filtering options for standalone apps, Sitecore-developed plugins, partner-supported tools, free resources, and even those already installed.
Sitecore Marketplace will bring faster time to value through the ability to find and install applications out-of-the-box (OOTB) to solve an enterprise system need. It will also bring flexibility and extensibility by adopting a SaaS-based approach with easy extension of your enterprise solution without custom code. Additionally, the platform will bring growth and enablement by gaining access to a portfolio of cutting-edge solutions developed by Sitecore and its trusted partners.
Type of applications that will be available in the Marketplace:
- Apps (standalone or integrated): DAM integrations, new Sitecore applications, ecommerce catalog sync, hosting integration for logs and monitoring, and release management tool integrations.
- Plugins: media library integration with pages, page speed performance, and translator options.
- Accelerators: site templates for specific industries, and OOTB components for various industries and products.
Applications to be Available in Sitecore Marketplace
AI Component Generator for XM Cloud
This app will instantly generate any page component by the user simply describing what they need in neutral language. It automatically takes into consideration best practices and design patterns and enables users to change the theme and styles and iterate for creative inspiration.
Content Transfer Application
This app enables users to easily move content across environments. It supports various content sync strategies like merge overwrite and keep existing and provides a user-friendly experience for both developers and content editors.
AI-Driven Digital Experiences with Sitecore XM Cloud
Another great session was around the XM Cloud roadmap. The vision for XM Cloud is to be the leader in AI-driven modern digital experience. The goal is to provide marketers with the power to build, optimize, and monitor their digital experiences by enabling technologies to innovate and deliver faster.
With 200+ customers, 1.3 billion weekly edge traffic, and 19,000 deployments in Q1, XM Cloud is quickly growing!
Here is a list of the recently shipped features for Sitecore XM Cloud:
- HIPAA compliance: XM Cloud gains HIPAA compliance attestation
- Publishing performance: significantly improved day-to-day publishing experience
- Media library WebP support to use modern web images formats
- Pages AB testing by adding testing variants to component
- Pages performance improvement: better performance overall
- Sites portfolio and management by managing sites without involving IT and developers
- Forms media library integration by leveraging your XM cloud media library assets directly in forms.
- Forms interactions analytics, achieve better understanding of user behavior
- Personalization enhancements: new date-time and country region conditions
- Pages developer experience, greatly improved local developer experience
- Enhance .NET Core rendering SDK and starter kit, offering additional choice in framework for XM Cloud
- Developer documentation with getting started tutorial and information architecture improvements
In addition to the above, roadmap features coming soon were announced:
- Improved visual editing
- Design library
- Marketer dashboard
- Next-gen publishing
- Site foundry and management
- Enhanced developer experience
Key Product Improvements to Sitecore XM and Sitecore XP
Lastly, we can’t forget about Sitecore XM and Sitecore XP. The product team presented a great roadmap session explaining that Sitecore is committed to continuously modernizing XM (Experience Manager) and XP (Experience Platform) and its ability to orchestrate and connect digital experience ecosystems with a proven industry platform.
Sitecore will continue to innovate and enhance Sitecore XP and its managed cloud services to ensure it provides a secure, reliable, scalable, and highly available platform that empowers business to achieve their digital goals with speed and precision. The company is committed to supporting platform DXP with support into 2032 and beyond, as well as committed to providing customers with alternative hosting solutions via managed cloud.
New features are coming to the XM/XP core product, including AI content generation with “bring your own key” support and future Sitecore AI services, powered by Sitecore Stream’s AI capabilities. A refreshed editor user interface will introduce ongoing usability improvements, along with native user support to seamlessly switch between XM/XP and SaaS functionalities. Additionally, new tools will assist with codebase modernization.
In upcoming releases, Sitecore version 10.4.1 is next, followed by 10.5, which will introduce features such as Sitecore AI integration into DXP, Windows Server 2025 support, enhanced compatibility for Solr 9/10, improved cold start times, and simplified upgrades.
For modules, updates include XM to XM Cloud Migration Tools v2 and new Connect endpoints for marketing automation. Upcoming enhancements will include a code-less schema extension v2, Connect endpoints for forms, and improvements to Edge publishing. Following these, tools for MVC-to-headless migration, Sitecore Search integration with DXP, and SaaS portal integration into the platform DXP are also planned.
Americaneagle.com’s Sitecore website development team: Mohammed Syam, Gaurav Agarwal, Alex Lentz, Ahmed Okour, Jared Arnofsky, and Tim Shanahan.
We’re Proud to be a Sitecore Partner Agency
Overall, Sitecore Symposium 2024 was a fantastic success! It was a great opportunity to learn more about the Sitecore products we use every day as well as learn more about what’s going to be available in the coming year. Additionally, getting together with the Sitecore community is always a wonderful experience. Together, we discussed our favorite moments from each presentation and what we’re looking forward to in 2025.
Americaneagle.com is proud to be a Sitecore development agency, working with clients across industries to deliver exceptional digital experiences. If you’re looking for a dedicated Sitecore implementation partner, look no further. For more information on previous and upcoming Sitecore conferences, continue to check back on our Sitecore Conference Updates page.
