Presenting the most reliable vision on omni-channel content support, elevated collaboration and increased productivity, Sitecore has been recently named as a ‘Strong Digital Experience Platform’ by Gartner. ‘Sitecore’ had always been the pivot of many CMS discussions since the beginning, but the launch of Sitecore 9 marked its shift towards building a cloud, commerce and data-based strategy to help businesses create compelling personalized experiences for their customers.
Sitecore 9 is smarter and powerful than its predecessors, loaded with new features like Sitecore xConnect, Cortex, Marketing Automation, Sitecore Commerce, Forms, JavaScript Services (JSS), Federated Authentication and Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA). These features represent significant improvements, including addition of new modules to enable Sitecore as an end-to-end solution for empowering marketers to create high-quality customer experiences.
Let’s take a brief outline of each of the features.
Sitecore xConnect is a new single and unified API in Sitecore 9, for collecting and sharing of complete data in Sitecore including data for Content users and Analytics. This new feature replaces the current API that restricted the sharing to only core users’ data and content.
The all new Sitecore xConnect enables full data interoperability between Sitecore and 3rd party systems, making it the perfect choice for marketers to gain a holistic 360 degree view of customer at one place. Additionally, it supports a bi-directional data transfer to and from leading CRM systems for CRMs like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.
Sitecore 9’s marketing tool has an easy-to-use interface with automated functionalities for marketing campaigns and engagement plans. This tool empowers marketers with personalization to nurture contacts by adapting interactions for each unique communication. Additionally, it enables complete tracking of contacts throughout their journey.
This marketing automation is based on high-value scenarios like:
Sitecore 9 features focuses on personalization and retargeting options for promotion or conversion while the visitor is still in-session or navigating through the website.
Sitecore 9 JSS enables developers to build full-fledged solutions using Sitecore and JavaScript (JS) UI Libraries and frameworks to enable a flexible and an independent development using any tool (even without Sitecore and its installation). This feature empowers marketers with access to:
However, all crucial features from Sitecore Experience Platform are preserved including Experience Editor, Personalization, MV Testing and Analytics.
Cortex connects, collects and processes data from all sources on a continuous real-time basis to increase the relevant of data. It delivers compelling experiences by analysing every single purchase journey to identify and map high value audiences and their preferences followed by proactive cross-selling and up-selling products to them.
Cortex Insights
In the previous versions of Sitecore, permissions are simply synchronized with Sitecore membership database and are locally managed by Sitecore, which creates problems and permission errors when the numbers of users are dramatically high. Sitecore 9 facilitates authentication against OWIN middleware like:
Tooling with Sitecore Accelerator
Sitecore impresses with all the new Sitecore 9 features with upgrading advantages like real-time improvements, best-in-class technology features, enhanced security and amazing support. Want to learn more about Sitecore 9 features? Check out our Sitecore expertise.