Today the 2016 Sitecore Symposium was about to truly get underway with keynotes and sessions and music, oh my! It was a very busy day to recap, but before we get to that there is a little matter of a breakfast (or two) to enjoy.

My day started bright and early joining the Coveo partners at the Coveo breakfast where we got a chance to chat with the Coveo team about Coveo for Sitecore 4.0, Coveo Cloud, and the new intelligent search product Reveal.

After soaking in the Coveo goodness I made my way down to the Nonlinear-sponsored breakfast and met up with my pal Rodrigo and chatted with folks until the keynotes.

Mr Seifert kicks us off

Michael Seifert and his demo-buddy Darren Guarnaccia put on a show making sure everybody knew about how Sitecore is taking steps forward to address the need  to make sure that context is taken into account when delivering content. The new SxA triggered quite a few reactions and I like the ‘demo-wow’ of Path Analyzer visualization.

The Jason Silva Overload

I was not prepared.

I don’t mean that I forgot to bring the necessary equipment to this Keynote. I just didn’t know what I was getting into with Mr. Silva. The ride for the next 45 minutes was so frantic and high-energy that I was wondering if my mind could consume this properly. It was very early for this much enthusiasm and I was not the only one who felt this way.

As futuristic-sounding as Jason’s talk was, there was some truth behind the rhetoric. Which scared me.

The Developer Keynote

Lars’ developer keynote covered much of what we had heard during the MVP summit, but now that non-MVPs were in the room they got to hear all about the community initiatives, new directions for development, and tools coming for everybody. (NuGet is still my favourite)

The Breakout sessions

I attended sessions for Azure vs. AWS, Intelligent Search (Coveo/Reveal), and SXA. The Azure vs. AWS session gave me some performance reasons and cost reasons to choose Azure over AWS in most situations. This is something I can use now!

The SXA session left me with questions. As part of the team behind the Keystone accelerator, how do we make things play nice with SXA when licenced, but somehow still work if SXA is not licensed? Two versions? And what if the client buys the SXA license later? Even without Keystone in the question, how do we build solutions that will be SXA-compliant in a scenario when the customer doesn’t have SXA yet but might get it later? This is definitely something to chat about when Nick and I return.

The House of Blues

This year’s party at the House of Blues was full of food, drink, and great music. I found 4 bands, but my favourites were Mia Borders on the small stage and the great high-energy group outside on the pavillion. A great night!

Rodrigo: I don’t know what you plan on doing with that video of me dancing, but I have a feeling I am about to be blackmailed for beer.