What looks good on the Symposium agenda?

Having sorted out my travel plans for this October's Symposium and MVP Summit in Nashville, I've been having a think about what sessions I'd like to go and see. Here's a summary of my thoughts so far...

My focus is on developer / architect content that will help with my upcoming projects. I'm finally getting to the point where I have some proper composable work kicking off, so experience and advice around that topic is key for me. Plus I'm interested in keynotes too, as it's always interesting to see what this year's sales mantras and product focus are to go alongside my usual technical details.

(But if your focus isn't the technical content then don't fret. There will be plenty of sessions focused on the non-technical subjects too - I'm sure others will be posting about that side of the agenda)

So what has caught my attention so far? As ever too much stuff, as some of these sessions overlap...

Wednesday

• Sitecore OrderCloud's roadmap and the power of flexibility (Miranda Danielson 11:30AM)
  I did the certification for OrderCloud a while back, but I've not had the chance to work on an implementation project since. But there is the potential for one next year. So it's definitely time for me to catch up with what's been changing on that platform, and where it's heading in the near future.

• Is AI bias the new elephant in the room? (Kimberly McCabe, Daniela Militaru, Megan Jensen & Vickie Bertini 13:30)
  I'm not that focused on AI-related stuff, but this session did catch my attention. A lot of my worries with the current AI trend are around its ability to give bad responses. So I'm interested in hearing what people have to say here. What should we be doing to make AI tools "better citizens" and reduce the risks of their use?

• Sitecore XM/XP/MC R&D roadmap (Peter Kapsopoulos 14:15)
  My clients are currently all using the DXP version of Sitecore's products, so having the up-to-date info to take back to them on what's new and changing there is important. This will likely drive choices and timelines for upgrades or migrations. So I know I'll have a lot of meetings in the remainder of the year where this information will be really useful to me.

• Sitecore Search and Discover product roadmap and strategic innovations (Tim Sweezo also 14:15)
  I'm looking at Search documentation right now, with a view to integrating that and Discover into a project. So the changes and improvements coming in this roadmap will be very useful to my ongoing work. That might help me avoid some poor choices now, while the plans are flexible enough that changing approaches is easy.

• Next-gen frontend development with XM Cloud (Liz Nelson 15:00)
  It's been a while since we saw any significant architectural changes with the JSS heads, and the world of JavaScript development moves fast. So while I'm not really a front-end person, I work with a collection of people who'll be really interested to hear what change and improvement Sitecore have planned for them. So this is more good content to present back to internal teams.

• Building future-proof XM Cloud architecture: Strategies and best practices (Bart Plasmeijer 15:45)
  I'm finally starting to get work on moving some clients towards XM Cloud and composable patterns, so I'm interested in what Sitecore have to say about the "right" way to go about this. Things like the head, the user authentication and the APIs for a back-end will be critical to most of the stuff I work on. So this seems targeted right at what I need.

Thursday

• Accelerate your path to XM Cloud with Github Codespaces (Richard Seal 11:30)
  I've heard a lot of good things about tech like Codespaces for making development setup and experience better. So "get started in 10 minutes" seems like just the sort of thing I can learn from, and see if this is something which could help myself and my colleagues.

• How to harness the power of data across OrderCloud, Content Hub, Discover and Microsoft Fabric (Steven Davis & Chris Longo 13:30)
  As I mentioned, I've got the potential of some OrderCloud work in my future, so I'm interested to see what others' approaches to integrating that tool into search and other composable tools is. From the training, it imposes different limitations and patterns than the previous generation commerce tooling, so there could be some useful patterns and learnings here.

• Sitecore XM Cloud R&D roadmap (Liz Nelson 14:15)
  This is another session which I'll be taking furious notes in to make sure I've got the details of the story to play back to colleagues and clients. I expect the roadmap for XM Cloud is going to be a key talking point for me in future meetings, so making sure I have all the public details.

• Introducing Sitecore’s Marketplace (Anastasia Plati & Krassi Eneva 15:45)
  It's been a good while since we have had a marketplace run by Sitecore for finding add-ons for XP. But finally we're getting announcements about having a marketplace for platform extensibility again. This is very interesting both in terms of what sort of features we might get there, and in how extensibility is going to apply to our futrure work.

• The future of Platform DXP: There is something for everyone (Vignesh Vishwanath & Peter Kapsopoulos also 15:45)
  Not all of our clients are focused on moving away from DXP, so I'm expecting to keep having discussions about what's new in this version of the platform. So I expect the talking points here will be useful for future meetings.

• Sitecore CDP: Unlock your data with unified tracking (Derek Fahey 16:30)
  Very early in Sitecore's composable journey, they were talking about unifying the analytics from the collection of products they'd bought. So I'm very interested to see how this is panning out. Using search analytics along with the other products is likely going to be useful to me in the search project I have on the cards, so I need to know what's going on here.

Friday

• 5 myths of hybrid-headless CMS (Chris Purcell 10:30)
  I've done a collection of bits of product comparison and procurement choice work for composable systems in the last couple of years, so I'm interested in what others have thought about here. Are there important things that I've not been thinking about when I've been looking at this work, for example?

• Building resilient integrations with XM Cloud (Rob Habraken also 10:30)
  The traditional integration patterns people have used for years in XP projects aren't the way forward with XM Cloud. So with some integration project work in my future I'm keen to keep up to speed on what the successfull patterns are, what what people have learned from their work.

• Getting started with ASP.NET Core and XM Cloud (Rob Earlam also 10:30)
  For a while the ASP.Net Core head has been the "less loved" route to creating a head for XM Cloud. It's been missing key features and few people have used it. But it seems that internally Sitecore have been doing a chunk of work on fixing these problems and making it a more realistic choice. So I'm keen to see if this is a realistic choice for projects I'm involved with where developer focus has been traditionally back-end, and they're less keen on JavaScript approaches.

• Accelerated success: Lessons learned from 100+ live XM Cloud deployments (Robert Huffstedtler & Dan Vella 11:15)
  There was a fun discussion lead by Dan at the recent London user group, which covered some of this topic. But there wasn't enough time to cover all the material he had. So I'm interested to hear what else the official Sitecore project support people want us to know about this sort of work. With that many projects under their belt I'm pretty sure there will be more useful info here.

So I've got a few tough decisions to make here where stuff overlaps here. Especially Friday morning.

Anyone got a spare cloning machine I can borrow for a few days?