Like last year, I have had a chance to participate this years SUGCON 2023 at Malaga, Spain both as a Speaker and as a participant 😊. It was a great two day event packed with lot of interesting sessions. This year I had a privilege to present a talk along with my friend Ram on ‘Leveraging XM Cloud APIs and Webhooks to powerup Integrations‘.

To be honest we needed to fine tune our presentation a bit at last minute with couple of dry run for the Demo part. So I could not attend all the sessions but managed to cover some of the sessions related to XM Cloud. Last year in the SUGCON Sitecore introduced the XM Cloud, so this year my focus was completely towards XM Cloud to see the updates/improvements and future roadmaps.

I have listed down some of the important sessions which I found interesting and useful.

Keynote – by Steve Tzikakis and Dave O’Flanagan

From the key note it is evident that Sitecore has grown a lot over past few years in terms of SaaS and Headless while other companies have slowed down in the race. Steve pointed out that Sitecore in recent time has outgrown Adope in the net growth by standing top in the CMS space and no doubt they are at the forefront.

‘The Sitecore Product team is well ahead of the marketing team‘ – added Dave O’Flanagan as part of the speech.

Some of the main takeaways are,

• Sitecore leads by Innovation
• They are investing more on the R&D
• ChatGPT integrations soon would be available
• Some of the Clients are having restrictions geographically with SaaS. So still for them the self-hosting is possible with DXP
• Sitecore will help us in the SaaS journey with improved guidelines on Architech guides, Best Practices, Documentation etc.,
• ‘ We do not have any new product annoucements this year as we wanted to slowdown in the pace a bit and help customers to better understand the existing new Products and help them to migrate to it’ – Dave added. Its clear that Sitecore well understood that their customers have invested more in the XP and it may not be easy jump into SaaS in shorter period.
• XM Cloud has seen lot of improvements over these days ever since its released
• Sitecore constantly listens to the feedbacks from community and customers to adopt and improve
• The Sitecore Forms is one of the main requested feature from the community recent times and they are working to have this integrated into their SaaS product. It would support Drag and Drop form creation and add them to any web frontendAccelerate Developer Productivity by reducing barriers to adoption

‘Accelerate Developer productivity by reducing barriers to adoption‘

• Sitecore also aims to improve the developer experience by providing more support on MacOS, simplying JSS and World class CLI
• Content Hub One will be fully lightweight headless CMS and they will be working to integrate it with XM Cloud
• Dave also talks about cost of the XM Cloud. He points out that the Customer needs to consider total cost including maintenance, upgrads, infrastructure etc., if we add these all together and compare the cost of XM Cloud licensing, then it will be nearly same or even a bit cheaper

Life at the Edge with Vercel and Next js – by Javi Velasco, Tech Lead at Vercel

I was more interested into this session because I have been working with Next js and Vercel in recent times a lot and we are also working in creating some Vercel Integration applications for XM Cloud.

• He talked about Edge workers and how they can execute code faster providing dynamic content at the speed of static
• Explanation about Vercel Edge Middleware and how it helps to provide more personalized web experience, authentication and authorizations
• He also explained how Sitecore and Vercel together helps the composable journey

Innovation in Deploy – by Andy Cohen

Again I was very much interested in this session as its related to XM Cloud. And our presentation would be extended session of this one focusing on the XM Cloud APIs and Webhooks and some of the important take aways are,

• It will be possible to browse through the log files directly from the XM Cloud portal
• New enhanced XM Cloud portal UX experience and it is still in beta mode. It will be rolled out soon.
• During the session there was a request to link the XM Cloud environment variables with Azure key Valut and I hope Andy would be considering this as it is an important feature
• They will be rolling out the deployment web hooks
• The XM Cloud Vercel Integration is available in the Vercel market place now
• Azure DevOps connections will be soon rolled out
• There will also be new end points to monitor the Environment and Organization healths
• The Sitecore updates are fully automatic now and Andy explained about the upgrade strategy
• XM Cloud Swagger for Deploy REST APIs – https://xmclouddeploy-api.sitecorecloud.io/swagger/index.html#/

SXA MVC & Headless SXA – a Moving tale – by Jason Wilkerson

Jason is really an entertaining speaker and I liked the way he carried his presentation in more funny way with Hipster Developers.

I could fit myself into the story of Hipster Developers more because I was a back-end/.net developer by birth 😂 and how my life has been shifted into all these recent fancy front-end headless development with React/NextJs etc., becoming as a Hipster Developer.

• He explained with couple of slides creating a Components with rendering variants in MVC
• And again how the same component can be built in JSS and possible ways to scaffold the components with variants

Accelerating Sitecore JSS Applications with Predictive Caching and AI – by Ehsan Aslani

• Ehsan explained how AI can be used with Sitecore JSS application for predictive caching to cache the data in advance well before the actual request
• He explained about the approaches to the Predictive caching with different AI models and how the data can be trained with different data sources
• He gave an example how the models can be trained with Tensorflow and a good explanation about Open AI Text Completion API

Sitecore Components Explained for your marketers – by Ugo Quaisse

• Ugo explained about Sitecore components and how it would help the marketers to save the time
• He also explained how the Sitecore Components can be built with XM Cloud and Pages tools
• Explanation about data for the Sitecore components from APIs and about FEaaS

and the last one,

Leveraging XM Cloud APIs and Webhooks to powerup integrations – by Ram and myself

“Thanks to Una Verhoeven for finding time amidst her busy schedule to have the dry-run and correct the Slides. The inputs from her actually gave a shape and idea as to how to sell our work to the audience and have them hooked !!!! ” 🙏🏻

We had a full packed room like last year and it was great experience to present our talk with rest of the Sitecore peers. Thanks to the Demo God as the Demo went really well and we hope everyone found it interesting.

We will be explaning about our session in a detailed seperate blog asap. So stay tuned with us !!!!

Thanks to the SUGCON organising committee for the nice gift hamper at the end of our session !!!!!

Speaker Dinner – by SUGCON

Had a chance to meet many people in person from the Sitecore Community who was known to us only via their blog posts, slack etc.,

The Speaker Dinner was hosted by SUGCON for this years’ Speakers. It was on a nice roof top with eye popping view of the Alboran sea at the background.

Though not a big fan of sea foods, still could found couple of Spanish foods tasty with less fishy flavour.