Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Symposium is over for another year. I have mostly recovered from the jet-lag now and I've wrestled my inbox into submission at work. So it's time to write up my thoughts on the conference. I took about 35 pages of notes over the course of the week, plus countless photos of slides. So from all that what stuck out as interesting to me?
Spoiler: quite a bit!
(And this isn't even close to everything discussed - I've skipped a chunk of stuff which wasn't directly related to my current work)
No summary of this event would be complete without some thoughts on the new "Sitecore Stream" brand. This was their big keynote announcement for this year.
They're not describing this as a new product, but as a set of add-ons and orchestrations for their existing product set. AI-enhanced workflows to leverage data you have, copilots to give you advice and assistance as you work and add-ins to wire these features into the products.
Roger Connolly (who's now in the CPO role) talked on the main stage about using it to "Strategise, Brief, Create, Build and Optimise" your work:
For example they have a brand assistant tool for Content Hub which claims to learn your brand assets and documentation. So you can ask it to draft briefs for campaign works that include your brand guideline rules, or ask it to generate UI components which follow your style guides.
They made a big point about how this is all done without training their models on your private data. They use "grounding" for a general model instead. That wasn't a term I'd come across before (and nobody at the conference explained this in any details) but Dan Solovay found a useful link which explains what grounding means in this context. Well worth a read to get an idea of what Sitecore are trying to do here. But broadly their argument is that this is a significant security benefit - their model physically cannot leak your private data to other customers, because your data isn't in the model.
And this will be integrated into XP too - it's not just an XM Cloud or Content Hub feature.
Sitecore continue to pivot hard away from the "end of the line for XP" message from recently, and there was a lot being discussed in the future roadmap. They put up a slide with a commitment to support into 2032 and beyond:
They want XP to be the #1 single-tenant product for the market, with easy integration into their cloud services.
So what's coming up? Lots... (With the usual caveat that roadmaps can change - don't buy the product based on potential future features, because they might not all end up being built)
Upcoming updates:
They think the 10.2 and 10.1 updates here will be the last for those versions, but this does give some positive news to people who've not been able to move to the most recent releases yet.
We'll get v2 of the cloud migration tooling for people looking to move off on-prem systems towards the cloud. And later on there will be tooling to help migrating your MVC UI towards modern headless patterns too. It will be interesting to see what that achieves - as it seems like it could be a tricky problem, given the level of custom code MVC solutions can contain.
The commitment to have Stream integrated with XP will bring:
Connect will get endpoints for Sitecore Forms, to allow simpler integrations of that into a wide variety of systems - especially useful for integrations where the receiving system can't handle webhook calls directly.
In the future we'll also see integration of Sitecore Search and the SaaS Portal into the XP - to make it easier to leverage those features.
And (likely key for most people's planning) we'll see the release of v10.5 around October next year. That will include:
Liz Nelson is rapidly becoming a key person for me to watch at these events - she keeps bringing new ways of looking at stuff and really interesting new ideas. And she definitely managed that with her talks on DevEx and XM Cloud.
As mentioned briefly in Dublin earlier this year, they've got internal focus on simplifing the JSS experience. There will be a version specifically for XM Cloud which will be smaller (removing all the XP-only bits), framework agnostic (so they're factoring out the React-specific bits) and will have semantic versioning finally. And alongside this there will be simpler, leaner starter kits for different frameworks. And App Router support for the Next.js users out there.
They've done a lot of work to simplify the code required for how Pages interacts with your site - which reduces the code and complexity for our solutions too.
.Net Runtime will get support in the XM Cloud Deploy App, so alongside the new (open source) version of the .Net head starter kit anyone who wants to stick with ASP.Net (Core) MVC in their head apps will get a better experience.
And Pages (and the portal more generally) are getting a proper extensibility model. It will allow plugging in at the Site Tree, Field, Property and UI-Panel levels, so there will be customisation options here which will broadly mimic what we could do in the Platform DXP. This is being used as the basis for a lot of their coming UI improvement - but will also be the base for their new "Marketplace" offering.
That will provide a central portal for finding, obtaining and managing extensions to your Sitecore cloud products:
These will follow a model a bit like other headless CMS apps - where the add-on sits on a separate web server and has a defined API surface to connect it into the portal's UI (via iFrame-like behaviour I expect - though I don't think that was explicitly mentioned). That means any extension you pick from the marketplace will need hosting somewhere. The suggestion is this can be done by Sitecore or by another host (yourself, or a Sitecore partner?) but there wasn't any talk of what cost implications this might include. They'll also ship an SDK to allow us to more easily build matching UIs and follow Sitecore's interface patterns. Initially the suggestion is they'll launch with some extensions made by invited partners, but eventually it will open out to the community generally.
There's also a big project to rework documentation generally. They're moving towards more modern patterns - like having "try this out" UI for calling their REST APIs from the browser as you experiment with them:
Plus other docs improvements like filling in missing bits and communicating practices and processes more clearly.
They're now touting 200+ customers live on XM Cloud and 1.3Bn requests per week to Experience Edge. And they quoted "20 base image updates, 83 changelog entries and 100+ features" released in 2024 so far. There was a comment about "watch the change logs carefully, this moves fast" made in one of these sessions... Rings true.
And these weren't trivia changes either. The list included:
Outside the changes I've mentioned already in the DevEx section which overlap with XM Cloud they had a collection of updates on their roadmap here too.
They're working to improve the experience for designers and marketers when working with UI components. The new "Design Library" feature will provide a single place to manage, test and visualise all your UI components:
That includes those built by devs, by the low-code builder tool, and by the AI in future. It will allow you to manage your partials, your style systems and share these things out across sites. Eventually (some way down the road) this will be a key to finally removing Content Editor from XM Cloud - by becoming the new UI for the component registration stuff we currently have to do in the content tree. As well as (eventually) having a workflow builder too.
But the most significant future change discussed here was what they're calling "Content Service". In the past I've pointed out that XM Cloud won't be pure SaaS as long as we're still running XM to get the Master database and its associated services. That needs replacing with an API surface that can run as pure SaaS to complete Sitecore's move to cloud-first here. And it sounds like Content Service will be this thing. A set of data APIs to manage content, integrate AI tooling and revamp publishing for the future:
That service didn't get any real detail put on it, but the future roadmap talk did mention the idea that it will move us towards "instant publishing" by replacing the old "publish is actually a database copy" process with a newer "there's only one data service for content and a publish is a bit-flip on the 'is this item live' field in that data". While this is probably far away, it will be dramatic change for us - but enable a lot of interesting new things. They talked about "federating external content" instead of "copy it into your database" and the disappearance of the need for serialisation as two examples.
This team made a big thing about not having a long roadmap, because they try to be very reactive to customer needs. But they still have a pile of stuff in the process of releasing. They break it up into four pillars. These are:
Core commerce:
Composability:
Reliability:
Dev tools:
Despite only focusing on some of the conference's content, that was a bit of an epic post..
But other products had updates discussed too - so you might want to look at some other people's write-ups as well, to get a view on those.
But generally this was a really exciting set of announcements to me. As Dave O'Flanagan put it at one point, they've spent a bit of time getting themselves into a position to deliver more effectively - and now we're seeing to the start of doing that.
Its interesting times to be a Sitecore user or developer. We've got a lot of fun new stuff coming to wrap our heads around.
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