Stepping up your Sitecore game

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 Stepping up your Sitecore game

 

The whole Sitecore ecosystem is changing. Sitecore is looking into more and more acquisitions following its large capital injection of last year. And it is not only changing on a level of acquisitions and platform capabilities. The platform is moving forward at cruising speed, with a solid release cadence moving the platform onward. Over the last years we have seen the technology change, noticed remarkable architectural shifts back and forth. All these changes obviously make an impact on several levels; how should you host this application, what about integrations, what about containers, what about platform functionalities. And even though the above questions feel pretty redundant, a lot of customers are still on older versions of Sitecore, and Sitecore 10 is still a distant dream.

Which is why this article aims to provide a mix of where the platform is, where it is headed, and what would be a good approach and timing to get back on track.

Evolution of Sitecore

Looking at the evolution of the various Sitecore versions, we can see that the major versions and platform releases are clearly speeding up.



Sitecore 6 was an obvious good start, especially from an IT point of view. It was easy to install, introduced little to no complexity and allowed for good integration capabilities. However, it lacked those more sophisticated and integrated marketing functionalities and just scratched at the surface of what content marketers were looking for.

Sitecore 7 really kicked off Sitecore’s omnichannel journey helping organizations cover multiple channels and devices while tracking these interactions in the interaction databases and allowing for larger datasets and search capabilities.

With Sitecore 8 a lot of new concepts were introduced, especially around the collected experience interactions to account for user tracking, optimization as well as new features to help you set up and manage new sites faster.

Sitecore 9 was the first version to really become fully mature on personalization, the full introduction of Machine Learning to assist on tagging, improving on ROI from digital marketing.

 

Sitecore 10.x in a nutshell

 


 

What we see with the release of Sitecore 10, as opposed to the versions described above, is that it really aims at putting the power of experience management into the hands of those responsible for managing the actual customer experience based on your own brand, your very own marketing team.

This is done by allowing for ease of editing, changing, testing, optimizing as well as personalizing those experiences, at least for omnichannel capabilities, through a uniform and enhanced UI.

Among the newer platform capabilities, we can see features such as automated personalization, specific marketing insight tools as well as strong features such as mailing capabilities, marketing automation features and forms capabilities that were reworked and that are on an ongoing product roadmap.

I've gone ahead and listed some of the platform capabilities below:



How, and why to consider an upgrade.

As we can see the platform evolve continuously, there are a few key elements to keep in check:

  •       Sitecore support policy:
    •  2020 was the final year of Sustaining Support for 6.x, the product has reached its end of life and no further support services will be offered or are available.
    • Versions 7 and 7.1 entered Sustaining Support at the end of 2019, while versions 7.2 and 7.5 entered Sustaining Support at the end of 2020.
    • Mainstream support for 8.2 ended at the end of 2019 and mainstream support for 9.0 expired at the end of 2020.
    • Note that, once support has ended, you lose access to security and bug fixes, assistance with unexpected behavior during installation, and development and compatibility fixes — even if you’re willing to pay for those services.

  •          More than just a technical decision:
    • Note that an upgrade provides opportunity!
    • Revisit your content and marketing strategy.
    • Rethink your customers, including their journeys, what content resonates, and when.
    • Evaluate customer data-collection strategies and personalization plans.
    • Clean out the content in your WCM that is outdated or ineffective.
    • Purge any technical debt that is weighing down your solution and acceleration.
    • Re-evaluate your marketing strategy.
    • Develop new plans and processes that enable efficient content and marketing creation.
    • Deliver a more unified and contextual customer experience to all your customers

  • Features and capabilities:
    • Looking back at the Sitecore 10 features, the platform is changing drastically.
    • Performance is continuously increasing.
    • Integration and implementation possibilities have evolved and matured.
    • Modern hosting and delivery options to allow for smooth deployments, failovers, redundancy setups and headless capabilities.

  • Minimize Risk
    • Get the most out of your Sitecore license by using the latest version, allowing you to use all platform capabilities.
    • Lower the risk of security issues; as with any security concern, prevent rather than recover!
    • Stay under 1 major version difference; lower your costs in the long run from having to recover from a huge delta upgrade!
    • Adopt new tools as they become available; making sure you marketing department always has the latest tools on hand rather than having to work with an older toolset.
    • Consider modern architectures and Sitecore implementation approaches in order to meet the rising digital demands and face these head-on.

Conclusion

An evolving platform is a synonym for a healthy and active platform. And as we see a lot of evolutions to the Sitecore platform where Sitecore 10 has now created the basis. I would very much encourage you to look deeper into what an upgrade into the latest Sitecore versions could mean for you. Since version 9.x, Sitecore has committed to releasing high quality and tested platform versions. This means that the fear of an early adapter has changed into an opportunity to reap the benefits of the new capabilities that get introduced with every new version.

Feel free to contact me directly or post comments below if you would have any open questions or concerns!

 

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