Moving to XM Cloud: What you need to know

Moving your CMS to the cloud can help your company improve productivity and deliver more engaging content experiences for your customers across different channels, among many other benefits. However, it can be a big undertaking.

What should you expect? What should you be aware of? This blog will outline some factors you should consider for executing a successful migration to XM Cloud.

Migration considerations

When shifting from an on-prem solution to a cloud-native SaaS solution, there is a series of elements that determine whether the migration will be a success. And while XM Cloud is designed to support your current investments in content and configuration, there are a few important considerations to make before launching your migration project.

Content & configuration

XM Cloud is compatible with existing XM implementations, so all the below are fully supported:

• Structured content
• Media & file assets
• Roles and permissions
• Configurations
• Customizations

Client application

XM Cloud can seamlessly integrate with headless technologies, allowing you to take advantage of your existing content and automate tasks without disrupting your existing stack.

So instead of replacing your entire system with new technology, our solution sits inside the ecosystem you’ve already built. This provides data consistency across all platforms and secures a better experience overall for both you and your customers.

What you should know

There are two things to be aware of:

1. Front-end renderings need to align with the Sitecore Headless Services. Before moving to XM Cloud, we suggest you consider ways to modernize your front-end in order to support headless technology.
2. Traditional MVC server-side components will need revision.

Headless SXA is future-proof

Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA), used for speeding up the production of websites and reusing components, layouts, and templates across a variety of sites, serves as the foundation for developers in code and live side-by-side with low-code/no code components in a Unified Component Framework.

If you have invested or plan to invest in building headless components using SXA, you will have an upgrade path to XM Cloud. So, if you find yourself working on a project today and want to know what steps to take to future-proof yourself with Headless, SXA is a really good place to start.

Easy-to-use tools

Here at Sitecore, we know the importance of being able to use all the favorite tools and technologies that you are already using to migrate content and configurations between current environments.

That’s where Sitecore Content Serialization comes in. Allowing you to serialize, share, and deploy content items, Sitecore Content Serialization is available to migrate content from self-hosted implementations to XM Cloud.

The road ahead

XM Cloud is already mighty and powerful, and this only makes us want to strive for perfection. So what’s ahead for Sitecore?

XM Cloud Forms

Always striving to meet and satisfy our customers’ needs, we are happy to announce that we will soon be releasing XM Cloud Forms.

Allowing you to enable effective visitor engagement, our new feature will support the creation of forms that can be added to any web front-end.

With Sitecore’s intuitive, drag & drop form builder, creating forms is easier than ever. You can quickly create any form or seamless workflows, and add powerful field validation, conditional logic, and multi-page experiences for all your data collection needs.

Also, you can capture form submissions and export for analysis, or trigger journeys in other MarTech platforms, based on various events, like when a member joins your email list.

XM Cloud Forms can then be rendered in any web front-end whether powered by Sitecore or any other CMS, meaning that you build once and use it everywhere.

XM Cloud Deploy

We want to help developers deploy and manage their XM Cloud instances with minimum effort. In order to do that, we are continuing to make improvements to allow IT organizations to effectively manage their authoring environment throughout its lifecycle.

We want to offer:

• Full command of the platform with simplified navigation
• Increased self-service for accessing logs and troubleshoot efficiently without contacting Support

Elevating the developer experience is our goal, so stay tuned for our updates.

XM Cloud Developer Experience

On the Developer Experience side, simplifying and elevating the experience is another Sitecore priority that will offer accelerated developer productivity. We are focusing on breaking down the barriers of adoption to using Sitecore products, and this will be achieved by:

• Offering increased options that will allow developers to use XM Cloud as a SaaS or with traditional Sitecore content and layout
• Simplifying JSS so first-time developers can get up-to-speed faster
• Allowing developers to develop on the front-end faster by using their preferred development tools on any platform, while being connected securely to their XM Cloud hosted environment

Together we can enable first-class front-end developer experiences!

To see even more details about XM Cloud and all the benefits it can provide your business, watch our on-demand webinar here.

Sitecore is helping the world’s leading brands move beyond mere content organization to deliver unique, impactful digital experiences that drive trust and loyalty. To learn more about why Sitecore was named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, read our blog.