Day two of SUGCON did not disappoint with so many breakouts that there is no way to cover all of them! A few sessions had some nice photos from them so I’ve tried to collect these together here along with notes from what I could tell was being shared. You can find Day One recap with community recap links in the previous blog post!

Photo credits by various community members: Rick Bauer, Jacqueline Baxter, Koen Heye, Kamruz Jaman, Nicole Montero, Christa Marousek, Anastasia Plati, Yogendra Reddy, Sebastian Winter, Sumit Upadhyay

Kicking off Day 2!

The big launch of the day featured Colin Te Kempel and Peter Kapsopoulos talking about all things XM/XP and Managed Cloud. The message was clear: XP isn’t dead and has a big future ahead of it. There were a lot of updates on the roadmap in this session and renewed the commitment to the platform:

• Sitecore is committed to supporting Platform DXP with support into 2032 and beyond
• Sitecore is committed to continually modernizing XM and XP in its ability to orchestrate and connect across your digital experience eco-system with a proven industry platform.
• Sitecore is committed to providing customers with alternative hosting solutions via Managed Cloud

On Managed Cloud, Peter spoke about how Sitecore currently has about 400 businesses actively hosted on Sitecore Managed Cloud, globally. Their teams provide support representatives for 24/7/365 coverage, giving these customers one point of contact to support hosting.

During the roadmap section, there was an interesting mention of codebase modernization. Sitecore wants to build out some tooling that can help customers bring Sitecore MVC into a place where it can work with a JSS rendering host.

• Leverage static analysis to identify what code needs updating
• Leverage code transformations and opinionated generative AI to reduce the amount of manual work required.

There were also a bunch of other SXA Improvements and roadmap items highlighted. Here are some I noticed from social posts:

SXA Improvements

• Added the ability to configure headless sites using the Tailwind grid system
• Additional roles for finer grained access control
• Added the ability to create modules at the Project layer
• Data source workflow action improvements allowing workflow to effect descendants
• Sitemap improvements for multi-lingual sites
• Enhanced 500 error page to support multiple languages

Key XP 10.x roadmap items

Core XM/XP items:

• AI Content Generation with Bring Your Own Key Support and Future Sitecore AI Services
• Refreshed Editor UI with Ongoing Usability Improvements
• Native User Support to Seamlessly Switch from XM/XP and SaaS Capabilities
• Tools to Assist with Codebase Modernization

Site Delivery

• Optimized MVC CD Topologies and DB with Azure PaaS
• Microsoft Fabric Datalake and Analytics Support
• Faster Edge Publishing and Layout Management Module
• Port XM Cloud Edge Personalization Capabilities

Integrations

• XM Cloud Content and Asset Synchronization
• Sitecore Search Module with SXA Support
• Sitecore Connect Module 2.0 with Marketing Automation and Forms
• Unified CDP Audience Management with XP Personalization

Building for resiliency

Andy Cohen has been touring the SUGCON circuit bringing this session on how to build large systems that are resilient, like Sitecore XM Cloud. Lots of great advice in this talk and one day I hope to catch it in-person! Andy made a few O’Reilly reading suggestions for those looking to build these types of microservices and event-driven systems: Building Microservices, Building Event-Driven Microservices, and Designing Event-Driven Systems.

Making the right content

Jacqueline Baxter from Sitecore always brings a great talk, and this year at SUGCON she tackled modular content design so that you create “sticky” content that gets better engagement, is findable, understandable, and shareable! Jackie even touched on my favourite content tactic: BE HELPFUL!

On the subject of Generative AI: 72% of marketers are using generative AI, but 61% say their organization lacks guidelines for its use.

Why are marketers not using AI?

• Accuracy concerns (36%)
• Lack of training (27%)
• Copyright concerns (22%)
• Corporate mandates not to use them (19%)

I loved the slide about “Being helpful”. As one of my three key beliefs, it obviously spoke to me personally. Especially with a technical audience, our best way to connect with people is to help them and allow them to build trust with you. Jackie outlined how being helpful is the key to building great experiences.

• 57% of marketers cite creating the right content as their top challenge
• 54% say consistency and differentiation, while 45% say optimizing for search and creating quality content

When you build helpful content, you bring your target audience to you, rather than you having to hunt after them and try to reach out to them.

Optimizing for Headless

Another SUGCON session I saw quite a few pics from was Megan Jensen (MJ) speaking on Optimizing for Headless. “Make things easy before they’re sexy”. As Jacqueline Baxter summarized, this is about “designing for accessibility, making headless valuable to marketing AND dev teams, and simultaneously maximizing site speed and user satisfaction”.

The “Why Headless?” slide that I saw from MJ’s talk had some good points about making the case to the business:

• PERFORMANCE: faster page load speed = higher Lighthouse scores and Google Core Web Vitals
• EFFICIENT SITE BUILD: back and front end developers can work parallel to each other simultaneously
• SCALABLE: both the site itself and ability to handle variable traffic loads
• SECURE: front end and back end are separate with a lower entry point for cyber attacks

The analogy of headless content being like ingredients used to make different dishes also seemed like a nice visual. I wish I could have seen the talk-track for that one because I’d like to know more about that analogy!

So many breakouts!

There were just too many breakouts to summarize all of them, but here were some nice photos from a variety of the other sessions on Day 2!

Saying goodbye for another year

SUGCON Europe came to a close but everybody seemed to have a great time connecting and getting excited about the year ahead! I loved seeing all the faces of our community and Sitecore folks coming together.