Recently (3 – 5 of April) there were two Sitecore events I had a chance to attend: Sitecore Experience & SUGCON Europe. Both of them took place in London, actually at a very lovely place just next to the Liverpool street (link to the map). Under the umbrella of all these famous London’s skyscrapers a lot of important information has been released. Let’s dive in…

Sitecore Experience 2019

The first ever European marketing event organized by Sitecore had a quite huge audience. 800 attendees – that was a nice opportunity to share experience and get some new inputs. But next to this valuable peer-to-peer communication, I was wondering what is so important that Sitecore wants to say.

The afternoon sessions were divided into three main streams: Personalization, Commerce and Content Crisis. Even the morning common part with very interesting sessions focused mainly at these areas. The only one exception was a lunch-time A Seat at the Table discussion How Including Women Fuels innovation and Drives Business Results. Probably, due to the time 🙂 the audience was not so big but I think that listening to personal experiences of all actors was ispirative. Personally, I believe that such diversity (they have spoken about) can bring benefits to any team / organization.

Speaking about the main messages I heard from Sitecore that day I could summarize it like this:

Personalization

Sitecore says: We can personalize, we are good at it and we know how to do it. Use all the capabilities we offer to engage your customers and profit from your investment.

Oriflame action: We should revise again what we can get from current solution or consider the upgrade again.

Commerce

Sitecore says: We offer the eCommerce solution as well.

Oriflame action: Not applicable.

Content Crisis (Stylelabs integration)

Sitecore says: We know how to overcome the content crisis that is coming, and we are making the tool better for this challenge.

Oriflame action: It’s a very interesting solution and especially in context of our next generation application it’s really important.

SUGCON Europe 2019

For those who are not familiar with the concept of Sitecore user groups, this is a event organized by the community for the community of Sitecore specialists. In comparison to local ones, this is one of the biggest (there is also a regular one in India and newly this year in Australia as well).

It takes two days and there are a lot of different sessions that one person can’t simply absorb. Anyway, if I should mention at least the main notes (more details can be found in the attached presentation below), it would be:

• The opening keynote by Donovan Brown from Microsoft was real #1. After his presentation I’m pretty sure that Azure DevOps is a correct tool for making all these DevOps activities 🙂
• Decoupling of monolith application was a big theme there. And these activities are running in parallel on both sides: the platform itself (Sitecore Host, messaging, …) + the solution created by the platform (Helix).
• All three approaches how to create a solution in Sitecore platform (MVC, JSS, SXA) are valid and evolving massively.
• Very interesting point is the future of the Stylelabs integration that is closely connected with the whole DX strategy.
• All these activities connected with enablement of Marketing capabilities in Sitecore solutions.

These and many other observations can be found in the following presentation: