The Future of Sitecore: Content Is at the Core of the DXP
This is the third post in a series on the future of Sitecore, with a focus on a new content offerings from Sitecore: XM Cloud, Content Hub One, and Search.
The Content Experience is the Customer Experience
Sitecore announced new content capability offerings at Sitecore Symposium 2022 under the principle that the digital experience is driven by content at its core. Since content runs deep within Sitecore’s history, this is a revolutionary pivot as we move into a composable world. Let’s dig into the three new offerings.
Related Post: What is Sitecore?
XM Cloud is the New Enterprise Hybrid Headless CMS
XM Cloud was initially announced summer of 2022 in private beta with a general release at Sitecore Symposium 2022. XM Cloud is a fully cloud-native SaaS enterprise CMS offering. It stands out from the competition for many reasons:
It adopts a new architecture that embraces headless content delivery on a decoupled architecture. The CMS is hosted directly by Sitecore as SaaS and content is delivered via a CDN-backed GraphQL API to power blazing fast and performant headless experiences.
It provides a complete set of low code/no code authoring tools to enable marketers to own the experience in a headless world, from multi-site management and site templates, to page layout and composition, down to atomic JavaScript-based web components. It can even consume and orchestrate content from other CMS products that offer GraphQL APIs.
It provides embedded personalization, content testing, and real-time analytics like its predecessor Experience Platform (XP) did. This means it’s a fully baked CMS that will cover over 80% of customer use cases in the enterprise CMS market.
XM Cloud is a gamer changer due to its balance between adopting MACH standards and providing open APIs for headless development, while also delighting and empowering marketers through new authoring tools and built-in personalization and testing.
Content Hub One is Sitecore’s Pure Play Headless CMS
Content Hub One is Sitecore’s simple pureplay headless CMS that offers capabilities to quickly model and manage content, and then deliver it via headless APIs at the edge. Content Hub One is derived from the other Content Hub product, so it’s proven, scalable, and performant.
Content Hub One fits the typical use cases for a pureplay headless CMS:
Small microsites or campaigns with existing visual templates that need to get built and deployed quickly.
Omnichannel content strategy needs such as a native mobile app that needs a solution to power content.
Larger composable stacks that require a business unit or department-specific focused CMS to manage and deliver content to upstream systems such as orchestration tools such as Digital Experience Composition (DXC) tools or front-end “visual builders” (FEaaS).
Related Post: How to Build a Content Hub
Uncover Relevant and Personalized Content with Sitecore Search
Sitecore Search is the third new offering announced with a focus on content. Search is an AI-powered intelligent search API and set of components.
Search provides fast, predictive content search using AI to anticipate search intent to provide tailored results. Search also provides analytics capabilities to empower marketers with search performance metrics.
Search plays nice in the composable world and can plug into any stack by indexing content from any CMS, not just Sitecore. This forms a unified search index of content from many different sources. To see Search in action, visit sitecore.com and leverage the global site search.
The Future is Composable
As you can see, all the new content offerings from Sitecore provide specific solutions to use cases in a composable tech stack. Since every business is unique, their tech stack should be equally unique and composable of the right tools they need. Sitecore offers a full set of tools, however, provides the flexibility and choice to allow business to select products from other vendors and integrate them with Sitecore’s tools. In the next post, we’ll get into integration in the composable DXP.