Sitecore 10: moving everyone forward

Sitecore have released the latest version of Sitecore Experience Platform – Sitecore XP 10 – and the latest release offers some great steps forward for developers and business users that are especially welcome given the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.

Making developers more productive

The first notable feature is proper support for containerisation. Containerisation is a technology based on surprisingly old principles that has (relatively) recently found favour in the technical community. It allows developers to describe all the dependencies they need for an application and run it in isolation on their machine with a few simple commands.

The Sitecore community have done some great work 'unofficially' getting Sitecore up and running inside containers, but Sitecore 10 fully embracing containerisation is a great step forward. It means that developers can guarantee a degree of consistency between different environments, easier deployment and isolation without paying the heavy cost of running virtual machines.

Sitecore have also provided a .NET Core SDK which will make it easier for developers to build microservices or .NET Core apps that communicate with Sitecore. 

.NET Core is fast becoming the tool of choice for developers – it's cross-platform, highly performant across operating systems, and completely free. Making it easy for .NET Core developers to integrate with Sitecore is smart move, especially as Sitecore’s architecture lends itself nicely to headless integrations. 

Making marketers more productive

Sitecore 10 also includes some enhancements to the Horizon editor, the replacement for the older Experience Editor interface. Horizon offers the in-page editing advantages of the Experience Editor while also bringing in data from Experience Analytics for more contextual, informed content editing, along with integration with Sitecore Content Hub. 

There are also some quality-of-life improvements to the Email Experience Manager and Experience Analytics, making it easier to get hold of the right data in the right shape and leverage it for marketing purposes, including new audience analytics filters for enhanced insight and segmentation. 

For those using Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA), Horizon has tight integration with SXA for editing all supported field types in-page, with further enhancements promised in subsequent versions of 10. 

A good time to upgrade

There are plenty of organisations still running older versions of Sitecore, even as far back at Sitecore 6.x. 

Sitecore 10 builds upon previous versions to deliver a radically different product to Sitecore 6, 7, and 8 – and Sitecore 6.x will no longer be under support after 2020.  

Running a fully supported version of Sitecore is really important – it means you’ll get security fixes, assistance from Sitecore with production incidents and upgrades, and even patches for product defects that are discovered. All of that on top of the significant new features each major version of Sitecore has built on top of the previous versions. 

As Sitecore Gold Partners, we have a huge amount of experience building Sitecore platforms from scratch and upgrading older versions to make the most of new features. If you're currently running an older version and want to know more about what the newer versions can offer, please get in touch.