Sitecore Symposium 2022

After having worked with Sitecore for almost 7 years, I'm finally able to attend the symposium, and I couldn't be more happy with the timing.

Sitecore is at a crucial point as MarTech moves rapidly toward personalized / composable / cloud / headless architecture. This is made obvious by the fact that Vercel is making such a big appearance at the event. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I'd see the CEO of Vercel share a stage with the Chief Product Officer of Sitecore.

I do a lot of tinkering in my free time, mostly with Cloudflare, React, and NextJS. Vercel has been a dream to work with. It's simple, fast, powerful, and free. In fact, this blog is built with NextJS + Vercel (see my stack here).

Something else that's becoming obvious: we're finally seeing mainstream adoption of personalization -- something that Sitecore has always been a pioneer in. MarTech is finally catching up. Okay, I'm jumping the gun a bit. It will still be years before personalization truly becomes a technological imperative, but it's becoming more accessible than ever before.

There's also a big buzz about Sitecore's new XM Cloud offering which is crucial to Sitecore's continued evolution. There's stiff competition in the DXP space these days, and many of the companies and services are new enough that they have been SaaS and composable since day 1, whereas Sitecore has and is going through a long evolution from on-prem monolithic to composable cloud. Sitecore is a big company that has been around since 2001, so I have to give them credit for developing a clear vision for the future and working vigorously to make it a reality.

Here are the sessions I'm most interested in:

Presenting company: Sitecore

Every company in the world is in search of the ideal tech stack to meet their goals, grow their pipelines, and provide an engaging digital experience. At Sitecore, we're taking similar steps to ensure long-term success by building a tech stack that improves our customers' digital experience. Bringing together voices from across our business, we'll discuss the strategic growth of our evolving technology stack and the actionable steps we're taking to continue to develop and optimize our solutions.

Presenting company: Sitecore

Our community has been developing Sitecore MVC solutions for over a decade, and now thanks to headless and composable DXP architectures, we are transitioning those skills to take advantage of the performance, scalability, and agility these JavaScript frameworks offer. This session acts as a primer to React and Next.js from the viewpoint of an MVC backend developer. You'll leave this session with a better understanding of component-based development using React and Next.js that will help kickstart your journey towards modern, composable Sitecore architectures.

Presenting company: Sitecore

With Sitecore's move to composable solutions, a lot of our previous DevOps work is no longer applicable. With the release of XM Cloud, most of the server instances we previously had to provision and scale are now managed for us. However, there is still DevOps work to be completed: XM Cloud can be customized, you're still responsible for hosting the different heads used to deliver unique experiences, and you still need to define the flow your development teams will be following.

Presenting company: Velir

You have just successfully launched a modern Sitecore-powered customer experience on a composable platform; now, how do you get a good night's sleep knowing your website relies on a dozen systems working in harmony? Come learn about Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and how to evolve your production support from a reactive break/fix approach to a model that continuously improves reliability and performance and provides confidence that your new experience meets customer needs and expectations.

Presenting company: Altudo

Sitecore CDP & Personalize represent a big shift in the way that customer experiences are conceived and executed. Due to the differences, the learning curve can become a problem for those who are familiar with the classic XP. If you want to quickly learn the new CDP & Personalize tools and already know XP, this session is for you. Working with comparisons and concepts from the monolithic world, developers and marketers will be exposed to new practices and encouraged to embrace the changes.

Presenting companies: United Airlines, American Eagle

Brands are increasingly choosing plug-and-play capabilities over all-in-one platforms. United Airlines, which currently uses Sitecore for its global intranet and other internal-facing portals on Sitecore XP, is one of those brands. Gain insight into United's journey on evaluating its Sitecore upgrade and the thought process and decision points behind migrating to Sitecore's composable platform in an effort to future-proof further development.

Presenting companies: Sitecore, Vercel

Sitecore Chief Product Officer Dave O'Flanagan teams up with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch to explore the Sitecore and Vercel partnership. Hear how the collaboration brings together leading-edge technology for frontend teams - giving them the agility and innovation they need to deliver lightning-fast content and commerce experiences.

Presenting company: Sitecore

Get to know the industry's first cloud-native SaaS content management system from Sitecore! XM Cloud is a game changer for business and digital leaders, developers, marketers, and technicians. This presentation will cover how XM Cloud helps you to deliver stunning experiences for your customers. This session will be available on Wednesday and Thursday.

Presenting companies: Sitecore, GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare is currently running version 9.3 of Sitecore but the overall strategy is to move to the public cloud to save on infrastructure costs and free up technical teams for higher value work. As part of their composable strategy, GE Healthcare was a lighthouse customer for XM Cloud and learned a great deal about what it looks like to fully move to a Composable DXP. Listen to GE Healthcare's Jon Fairchild and Sitecore's Richard Seal in a panel discussion on early learnings and quick wins including: what it looks like to migrate content, expected savings in time and money from not managing an Azure infrastructure, and looking at a new CI/CD process.

Presenting company: Sitecore

Want to up your personalization game while also making it easier for your digital marketers to get their work done? If you haven't already, come meet Sitecore Personalize! This product is your cloud-native solution for delivering tailored experiences to every customer, on any channel, and at scale. This session will introduce you to the product's capabilities, how it fits into Sitecore's composable strategy, and how the new testing and optimization workflow promises to be a huge win for your marketers.

Presenting company: Sitecore

A walk through of deploying and developing on XM Cloud. Sitecore XM Cloud is a modern SaaS application in the Sitecore Cloud built upon all the familiarity of XM and JSS. It will help you deliver headless apps to the Edge quickly. Let's take 30 minutes together to explore this product and field your questions.

Presenting companies: Xcentium, Vercel

An overview of tools and infrastructure options for Sitecore headless application development. How to make sure that personalization and authentication works the best in your Jamstack application, and is performing at its best.

Presenting company: Sitecore Deutschland GmbH

IT has always been a changing field. As headless technologies are disrupting the market, Sitecore is adding a new product range to the portfolio. SaaS, headless, composable - what is the path for a C# .NET developer among all these? I'll share my journey as a C#.Net developer entering the headless world and implementing a live website with Sitecore's new DXP solutions.

Presenting company: Sitecore

Our commitment and vision for the Platform DXP and the roadmap Experience Platform and Experience Manager. We'll cover how these capabilities are evolving in place with tooling for modernized extension, improved security, and marketer features; along with the diversity of hosting options that Sitecore supports for customers and partners to continue to enhance this ecosystem.

Presenting companies: Vercel, Bottle Rocket (Ogilvy Experience)

Edge infrastructure is rapidly gaining adoption because it improves the experience for both developers and the customers they serve. In this talk, we'll discuss where the edge ecosystem is today and how companies can leverage it. We'll cover lessons learned from helping implement some of the most performant sites on the web and you'll be able to conceptualize why developing for the edge matters, what tools are available to you, and when more traditional infrastructure makes sense.

Presenting companies: UNRVLD, ManpowerGroup Global Inc

UNRVLD has been guiding clients towards composable approaches for some time. In this session, we'll explain why a composable program is a worthwhile investment for the whole enterprise. We'll highlight how Sitecore is an enabler for this evolutionary change; offering businesses the flexibility to build an architecture that best suits their project needs. Half presentation, half panel discussion with ManpowerGroup Global, a Fortune 500 corporation, we'll show the benefits of a composable approach.

Presenting company: Sitecore

What if you could create a module that would run across all future versions of Sitecore? What if your Sitecore XM updates were transparent, involving just the press of a button? Sitecore XM is modernizing to enable you to integrate decoupled systems and interfaces, in a SaaS way. During this talk, you will learn how to integrate your system with XM, without the need for in-process code or creating interfaces that talk to XM GraphQL services. Build scalable code for unattended Sitecore updates.

See you there,

Marcel