SUGCON EU 2023 - Key Takeaways
I had the opportunity to attend the SUGCON EU 2023 held in Malaga, Spain. In this article, I share my experiences and the key takeaways from the event.
The event happened for 2 days, March 23rd and 24th, 2023. We started with the registration process. During the event, I got to meet some fantastic people and had some great conversations.
Keynote - By Steve Tzikakis and Dave O'Flanagan
Sitecore will be focusing on Innovation.
Possible integration with ChatGPT.
Public cloud with SaaS.
Headless commerce.
More than 50 clients on XM Cloud already.
Leading by Innovation.
XP is here to stay! 10.4 is already in the works.
Unified Platform for Identity.
Content Hub One - Integration with XM Cloud.
Content Hub Ops 4.3 will be completely SaaS - expected to smooth upgrades.
Sitecore Search - to be made instantly providable.
Composable DXP
I attended 2 sessions in the Composable track at the conference. These are the key takeaways from the presentations.
Upgrade path for a Monolithic Developer to a Composable Developer by Kiran Patil, and Sheetal Jain.
The development team for the Modern composable stack should now comprise Sitecore engineers, Front-end engineers, and Full Stack engineers.
The key technologies to learn for a Sitecore developer will be XM Cloud, Content Hub One, Content Hub Ops, Sitecore CDP, and Personalize.
There could also be a choice to train on Next.js and start on a front-end path.
There is an open repository for discussions, and questions about upgrading yourself to a Composable developer: https://github.com/klpatil/schumanupgrade/discussions/1
Accelerating Sitecore JSS Applications with Predictive Caching and AI by Ehsan Aslani
Ehsan is a firm believer that AI will soon take over humanity and our jobs. :P
In his talk, he provided an example of using Open AI APIs to train an AI Engine to predict the next page the user will visit based on his current page. And then, cache the next page to be accessed faster.
This will enrich the User Experience to a great extent.
The most innovative concept at the whole conference.
XM Cloud
Innovations in Deploy by Andy Cohen
New Swagger docs have been added for the REST APIs reference.
Automatic Updates are now fully automatic.
The Vercel Integration is now live - https://vercel.com/integrations/sitecore-xmcloud
More Post Actions are to be released.
Environment Details - To give an overview of the current environment.
Target for Environment Variables - To define if the environment variable is for the CM or the Rendering host. Currently, a part of the REST API, and will soon be added to the GUI.
Environment Logs - To browse through the log files directly from the deploy portal.
Environment Health and Organization Health - New API endpoints to monitor the health of the environment and organization.
Edge CLI - CLI tools for accessing, and managing the Edge.
New UX - An upgrade to the deploy portal will be rolled out soon.
Azure DevOps connection - Currently, we can only use GitHub to connect with XM Cloud. We will soon have an Azure DevOps connection as well.
Build time to be reduced from 4 to 8 minutes currently to 1 to 2 minutes.
However, there will be an increase in the Provisioning step.
Deploy to CM and the Rendering Host separately.
SXA MVC & Headless SXA - a MOVING tale... by Jason Wilkerson
Rendering Variants are present but are built differently.
Fewer OOTB components.
No SXA Theming.
Building components is best done by cloning Promo/PageContext components.
Keep the door open when transforming from Sitecore XM to composable DXP using XM Cloud! by Bart Plasmeijer.
Bart suggested using a reverse proxy to route to pages based on the URL to your legacy Sitecore instance/XM Cloud instance.
The migration can be done page by page, and the routing can be changed as per the page.
He suggested using Yarp as the Reverse proxy. It is built on .NET Core and is programmable with C# code as well. I found it really interesting.
Talking to a typical customer about the road to composable by Gert Gullentops
Do not scare your customer. That was the most important lesson by Gert.
Do not use words like Rebuild.
Firstly, move your content part. The other parts, such as the personalization and search can be discussed later.
Leveraging XM Cloud APIs and Webhooks to powerup integrations by Ramkumar Dhinakaran and Elakkuvan Rajamani.
This was a power-packed session with a live demo.
The different kinds of available webhooks with XM Cloud and their uses were explained.
They demonstrated a Vercel Integration they built, to run Lighthouse audits using Webhooks and monitor the same on a dashboard.
The tool could be connected to multiple XM Cloud instances.
You could also set a Baseline to compare your Audit runs to.
Hopefully, we can have this integration published to Vercel Integrations soon.
Marketing
Sitecore components explained for your marketers by Ugo Quaisse
Components is a No-code/low-code tool.
Visual component builder with a WYSIWYG editor.
Can use data from a JSON/API.
The components build can be used with XM Cloud and Pages tool.
FEaaS components that can be used anywhere.
Available to all XM Cloud users.
It is a great collaboration tool.
LAB Profile® In an Online world by Masoud Ahmadi
Masoud had examples of how personalization can be used with proper user profiling.
He had a demo of how LAB profiling can be utilized to perform personalization out of the user behavior. The demo was built with Sitecore CDP/Web Experiences.
Happy Sitecoring!