As the first half of the year ends, we wanted to provide you with a review of the improvements we have made to our product portfolio. Our mission is to elevate leading brands through unforgettable digital connections with their customers.
You will see this mission in abundance with the improvements we have made to each of our products. Composability, usability, and integrations are at the heart of our updates so far this year.
Let’s dig into what’s new at Sitecore in the first half of 2023.
What’s new in Content Cloud?
XM Cloud
Introducing early access XM Cloud components: Create visually captivating digital experiences with Sitecore’s XM Cloud Components, an innovative front-end-as-a-service application for your website. You can effortlessly build and customize visual components for your website, all while maintaining your brand's unique style with an intuitive WYSIWYG editor.
The two key features include:
- Styles Library: Easily achieve visual consistency with the Styles library that allows you to effortlessly design and save on-brand style rules.
- Components Builder: Create your own website components either from scratch or import a React component and customize it further with just a few clicks.
XM Cloud Components enables seamless collaboration between content authors, UX designers, and marketers to speed up the process of creating on-brand digital experiences for customers.
Flexible device layout options in the Pages application: Ensure seamless user experience across any device with Sitecore’s extended list of device layouts. You can now accurately visualize how your pages will look on diverse devices and screens.
Experience the flexibility of adding additional devices here.
Custom language support: Break down language barriers and engage with global audiences. Expand your reach and target a specific audience by adding custom languages by easily combining an ISO language code with any country/region code.
Content Hub
Seamless upgrades and versionless SaaS model: Introducing Sitecore Content Hub's versionless Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Say goodbye to the hassle of version-specific upgrades and hello to continuous enhancements. With our versionless SaaS model, you can enjoy the latest features and improvements without the need for complex and time-consuming upgrades. Updates are delivered automatically and identified by dates, ensuring you always have access to the most advanced capabilities by announcing them within the user interface and detailed in the release notes.
Latest enhancements: Our commitment to enhancing Sitecore Content Hub continues. We have introduced new features and improvements that enrich functionality and streamline user workflows. Valuable feedback from our users drives our focus on addressing platform stability and reliability.
Sitecore Search
Cloud portal integration: Say goodbye to the hassle of managing multiple platforms. With our Sitecore Search update, we've seamlessly integrated it into the Sitecore Cloud Portal, your one-stop DXP administration platform. Now, you can effortlessly manage all your Sitecore products in one workbench.
Faster onboarding: We've revamped the onboarding experience to make setting up web crawlers easier. With smart defaults and step-by-step troubleshooting, you'll have your first source up and running in no time.
Enhanced personalization with segment support: With robust segment support, you can create segments from your Customer Data Platform (CDP), allowing you to target content rules with precision.
Expanded data ingestion options: Our latest update introduces powerful source connectors, including the Push API and API Crawler. Whether it's pushing data in JSON format or crawling REST API endpoints, you'll enjoy faster indexing, valuable analytics, and seamless troubleshooting.
Geo-location filtering: Location-based experiences are now within reach with Sitecore Search. Our platform empowers you to recommend content, sort results based on popularity and recency, and create targeted promotions.
New Sitecore Search training: We're excited to announce that we have also released our first training content for developers and marketing managers. This comprehensive training resource will empower you to maximize the potential of Sitecore Search and unleash its full capabilities. Take advantage of this opportunity to enhance your skills and propel your search initiatives to new levels of success.
What’s new in Engagement Cloud?
Sitecore Personalize
Personalize and XM Cloud integration: The integration of Sitecore Personalize and XM Cloud brings the best of both worlds, combining a modern, flexible content experience with a full-stack personalization and A/B testing platform. This powerful combination enables the creation and deployment of fast, scalable, and secure digital experiences.
Read more
Unified access and roles: Sitecore CDP and Personalize now offer unified access through the Sitecore Cloud Portal, streamlining the user experience and providing benefits such as standardized role management and secure multi-factor authentication.
Read more
Conditions for real-time targeting: Conditions, a no-code solution, allows marketers to target visitors based on real-time parameters like location and device. This feature is available for users with an XM Cloud + Personalize license, enabling seamless personalization across platforms.
Enhancements and developer experience updates: We've introduced a new navigation menu, streamlined the distinction between Experiences and Experiments, and added a Site Analytics homepage for real-time metrics. The Developer Center now hosts JS Modules and User Generated Tokens (UGTs), providing a centralized location for developers to access tools and resources.
Read more
Sitecore CDP
New analytics homepage: The new site analytics section on the CDP homepage allows you to view real-time website metrics in one place enabling you to make decisions based on real-time data and trends. The visual analytics section offers an interactive overview of visitors and views over the selected period.
Whether you use it for targeted marketing, or for planning your next update, the analytics dashboards come equipped with a game-changing interactive heatmap grid to help you identify the periods when your website experiences heightened traffic.
Enhancing insights and customer behavior understanding: CDP reports also have just got more powerful with valuable insights to help you optimize your website, understand customer behavior, and make data-driven decisions for your digital marketing strategies.
Enhancements to Sitecore CDP Audience Sync: Audience Sync has been enhanced to enable marketers to target customers quickly and efficiently. Marketers can now filter to drill down to a custom segment or choose from a previously defined audience and export in real-time.
CDP Data Browser - unified data view: Data browser is a newly released module that enables you to easily understand data quality and quantity available for your upcoming campaign.
Enhancements to CDP batch segmentation: The latest updates to Sitecore CDP batch segmentation allow business users to easily create segments on the CDP by transcribing their business logic through different fields and attributes.
Sitecore CDP on Cloud Portal: Sitecore CDP is now available on the Sitecore Cloud Portal, enabling users to switch between different Sitecore solutions from a unified ecosystem.
Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Connect: Integrating with Sitecore CDP has gotten easier as the CDP is now linked with Sitecore Connect enabling seamless in and out data integration with different applications.
Interested in learning more about Sitecore CDP updates? Check out the Sitecore CDP release notes for detailed information on the recent CDP updates.
Sitecore Send
Sitecore Send and Content Hub DAM: Sitecore Send is now integrated with Sitecore Digital Asset Management (DAM) which enables Send customers to use images from DAM in their campaigns.
Sitecore Send and Sitecore Connect: Sitecore Send is now integrated with Sitecore Connect. Now you can easily manage subscribers in Sitecore Send based on triggers from integrated external applications.
CSA Certified: Certified senders alliance (CSA) acts as an interface between email senders and mailbox providers with the certification aimed at driving quality and deliverability of emails.
We are delighted to have received the certification from CSA, which improves the credibility of emails sent from us to your audience.
Mobile-friendly design: Sitecore Send is now mobile-friendly, enabling you to manage email marketing on the go from your mobile devices. The mobile-friendly design allows you to customize campaigns settings, landing pages, and subscription forms.
Audience discovery automation: Audience discovery now allows you to leverage automatically discovered segments and auto-created campaigns, giving you the ability to deliver more personalized content to customers who have high purchase intent.
For more information on recent Sitecore Send updates, check out the release notes here.
What’s new in Commerce Cloud?
Sitecore OrderCloud
Inventory record assignments: OrderCloud now supports your ability to assign inventory to a particular group of users. Limiting what inventory is available for specific customer types, roles, departments, or geographies, for example, is often a necessary requirement.
For example, one OrderCloud customer needed the ability to limit access to inventory by geography for its customer base that extends across five continents globally. This new feature makes that use case possible.
Subscriptions: Subscription services, where a buyer agrees to regularly purchase a product or service for a specified period, have become increasingly popular models. To support that, OrderCloud has introduced subscriptions capabilities to enable this type of ordering.
A new feature now gives you the ability to support recurring orders, similar to what many of us subscribe to with Amazon’s Subscribe & Save service. The ability to set special pricing if someone is ordering a subscription, and set up the frequency of that subscription is now available.
Using Ad-Hoc products on subscriptions is now possible. We know that product information isn’t always managed or stored in OrderCloud – you’re often integrating with other systems or data sets where product details are stored. This feature makes incorporating those product sets into subscription packages easier.
Promotions: Enhancements were made to the rules engine that will check an array of items to include in your promotion. You can create promotions based on an enhanced set of functions.
Product Collection enhancements – coming early summer 2023: With OrderCloud, a new feature will allow buyers to create a Product Collection, or a group of products saved in a list that the buyer saves for themselves. Enhancements will allow you to share that list with other users – you can make your list public or private, shareable, and even invite others to access and administer items on your list.
Sitecore Discover
New Discover documentation: New Discover documentation is now available here. You can now access the latest documentation for Discover, designed to help you create search experiences that amplify customer conversions with hyper-relevant search results and automated merchandising.
New developer tooling: A new Open Source starter kit, SDK, and Getting Started package make integrating Discover with your ecommerce experience easier than ever.
Frequently bought together automation: With Discover, you now have the ability to fully automate the “Frequently Bought Together” experience delivered to your shoppers. Discover achieves this by gathering context from individual buyer behavior via different recipes.
Navigational enhancements: New out-of-the-box support for hierarchical category facets via Discover improves the navigational experience you can deliver. The ability to display direct subcategories on any given category page, is another way we’ve enhanced your ability to help your customers find what they’re looking for faster.
The only people working harder than our R&D team is our customers. That's why we are so happy to bring all of these enhancements to market. The second half of 2023 promises to bring even more customer-driven improvements. Join us as we add many more links to the value chain.