Exciting times at Sitecore in 2014

Links sparked by this beginning of the year outlook....

Content as a service and the Sitecore Item Web API
A Sitecore 7.2 feature worth the wait: Search-driven controls
Using Sitecore Engagement Plans as an Audience Segmentation Tool

A 2014 Outlook from within Sitecore

It's my turn with the obvious beginning-of-the-year subject matter.  During a blizzard morning in New Hampshire on January 3, it seem like a particularly good time to tweak the blog summary, to better describe the focus, to review past articles and only bring over the relevant ones, and to talk about why it's a particularly exciting time to be a part of the Sitecore team.

My new summary for what you'll be able to find here in 2014:

Dedicated to finding the optimal balance between business strategy and technology in launching digital experiences on Sitecore.

This is something I've always tried to achieve and will focus on more clearly this year.  With the obvious caveat of my being employed by Sitecore (a huge badge of honor and something I highly recommend by the way), I will continue to strive to hit the right level of consultancy as I discuss Sitecore and its core role in virtually any type of digital project.  As I've seen the product expand over the last six years, I know this can be a daunting task--the feature set is so richly vast that it's important to uncover your goals first and piece together the feature set second.

Two things that I'll keep in mind as I rewrite past posts and carve out new ones--"it's the content...stupid", and "it's the people...stupid".  I've been around technology long enough to be absolutely certain that these tenets are as true today as they were yesterday and will be tomorrow.  My employer aside...you can succeed (and fail) with any software platform.  It's those who are clear-headed enough to rally the right people around the right platform with the right goals and messaging that succeed most often.  And even considering my bias, I honestly can't think of a better platform to rally your team around than Sitecore.  I'll use this place to facilitate an ongoing discussion of why I believe that to be the case...

Finding that optimal place between the extremes of business goals and technology is time well spent.  Be wary of anyone that tries to confuse you with the complexity of technology.  (If you can dream it and then describe it, an enterprising technologist can create it....with of course, the right blend of skill, smarts, creativity, time and money).  Be just as wary of the business goals that include near-term requirements for posting company images taken by Amazon drones to Instagram.  Fleeting : Staying Power.  MySpace : Clooney.

My time at Sitecore has represented the same amount of time that 6.x releases have been around (I started before the first implementation of 6.0, as 5.3 was the standard installation in production).  When I started, Sitecore was a Web Content Management System.  Period.  Granted it was, and continues to be, the strongest information architecture-focused content system on the market.  Now, with multi-device, multi-channel, campaign management, analytics, testing and more, the conversation is much more complex.  The great thing about Sitecore is that the architecture, consistency, extensibility and clarity that made 5.x discussions so straightforward now makes 7.x discussions simply an evolution of a timeless initial strategy.

With my framework in place--content, people, business, technology--I'll start the year with some specific areas in Sitecore that I'm particularly excited to discuss and watch grow.  I will be expanding on these and more topics this year as we all enjoy the exciting things 2014 will bring.

"Content Anywhere" and the Sitecore Item Web API

The Item Web API is Sitecore's initial entry to the modern, RESTful, JSON-based APIs.  Sitecore's API has always been an amazing part of the product, giving developers the framework, event system, configurability and extensibility to perform virtually any task at the right time within the product's well structured pipeline system.  The Item Web API provides the framework for the vast Sitecore API to be exposed in the modern, REST / HTTP verb service layer.

The full documentation for the Item Web API may be found on the Sitecore Developer Network.  For now, consider that the Item Web API represents new possibilities to consider Sitecore as a publish-once, use-anywhere system.  Think of the benefits of modeling business rules, conditions, personalization, presentation and more within Sitecore's intuitive user interfaces...then leveraging that modeling work from any device or application.

Sitecore 7, High-Powered Search and Querying

Sitecore 7 has a lot more to talk about than this one paragraph.  In future posts I will share my learnings in the major areas of expanded search capabilities (facets, boosting, search operations), item buckets (the ability to combine hierarchical and non-hierarchical data structures within Sitecore for virtually limitless content trees), and new querying techniques (including an exciting query data source capability).  There is already lots of great information to peruse from our incredibly talented developement team for this release.  I will be looking to add some commentary around specific use cases we model in Launch Sitecore.

Commerce

You might have already seen the Sitecore commerceserver.net announcement.  This alone is an exciting development for Sitecore ecommerce in 2014.  In addition, this solidifies the fact that Sitecore provides for a flexible set of ecommerce options without dictating a one-size-fits-all approach.  We will be sure to see a rich marketplace of Sitecore commerce solutions that bring together the full Sitecore landscape of product modeling, contextual search, personalization and recommendation engines, experience analytics, ties to CRM and other customer profile repositories, customer journey workflows.

Pattern matching, personalization and audience segmentation

This is an area I think about a lot in the product.  The Rules Engine in Sitecore is an amazingly straightforward personalization modeling tool that easily expands to any condition.  This Engine becomes the core for strategizing rich combinations of attributes that mirror your company's core marketing discussions around visitor profiles and audience segments.  The pattern attributes span the range of possibilities--from behavioral aspects such as page views and conversions, to anonymous input such as polling and form submissions, to authenticated profiling from a single-sign-on system, CRM, social network, etc.

Launch Sitecore

A note about Launch Sitecore, the site / package our North American Sales Engineering Team makes available to evaluate and understand Sitecore.  Soon you will see this site flip to a new version--built on Sitecore 7 using a standards-based responsive design, this site will continue to be my choice for walking through examples and concepts.

Being a publicly accessible site allows our Sales Engineering Team to truly discuss goals, personalization, patterns and campaigns.  It allows us to review and discuss Sitecore analytics (while also considering Google Analytics at the same time).  It allows us to visualize an Engagement Plan for our visitors that ties their experience to data tracked in Dynamics CRM.

For me, this release allows me to revisit some of the core strategies our group took as we populated our first Marketing Center a couple years ago.  I'll describe the updated discussions we've had and the lessons learned that has our team excited about the digital experience insight we will be able to gather in 2014.