Sitecore Symposium 2020 Recap, What's coming Content Hub?

 In this year special Sitecore Symposium there were a lot for new stuff and news around Sitecore Content Hub, a lot has been shared through the road map keynote by Desta Price, EVP Product Management at Sitecore and Tom De Ridder, Chief Technology Officer at Sitecore, starting from Content insights, Content Coverage until the new Content as a Service (CaaS) offering that is coming in the early 2021, also some new news about the CMP connector that has been recently release and the new versions on the roadmap, want to know more about these, keep reading! 

What is the problem? what is the Solution? 

As a start, we all should understand the problem and the solution around content and content hub, so I'll summarize quickly the problem and solution based on a couple of sessions I attended at Sitecore Symposium 2020, its all start with the Content Crisis problem,  caused by a disparate Systems across dozens of business unit, content scattered across multiple siloed systems Content Management Lacked of control Duplicate Content, digitals rights management (DRM) over content issues, complex multichannel, multi-brand requirements and associated governance, systems used are legacy and disconnected which leads into inconsistent customer experience across different digital channels, or Inflexible Content data Modal,  at this point Content hub raise to be the solution for all of these issues, but How? :

1.  Single, centralized content repository. 
2. Auditability and traceability across all content and assets, in addition to the technical capabilities to integrate with different solution.
3. Deliver best value and fastest time to market.
4. You can used (Digital Asset Management (DAM), Product Content Management (PCM), Digitals rights management (DRM), Marketing Resource Management (MRM) in a single unified platform.
5. Integrations with other business application like salesforce.

What's Coming? 

Content as a Service

Is one of the big news which is the publishing of data managed in Content Hub to Sitecore’s distributed content delivery platform. with provided API and using GraphQL endpoint make it flexibly for developers to retrieve and do presentation of content in different channels.

GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, want to know more about GraphQL? Click here

GraphQL with the CaaS, allows us to control what data is fetched. The endpoint can be used to fetch as much or as little data as needed, 

1. Fetch data for rendering page HTML in response to a page load request
2. Fetch data to dynamically change sections of a page with AJAX

At this point you may start to compare between CaaS and DXP or XM, the simple answer is, CaaS is not a competitor, nor a replacement of XP or XM. CaaS is a new offering that complements XP for brands that do not need the full functionality of a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and Content Management System (CMS)

Here are some consideration you would need to think off when choosing between CaaS and XP:

1. CaaS serves is a truly headless, highly scalable offering. It does not have the same DXP and WYSIWYG page authoring functionalities that XP has.
2. XP provides full DXP and CMS capabilities, provides experience optimization and personalization. Sitecore Headless SDKs (JavaScript SDK or ASP.NET Core SDK) can be used to achieve a “hybrid headless” solution with XP.

Here are some consideration you would need to think off when choosing between CaaS and XM:

1. XM keeps business users in control of presentation through Horizon and Experience Editor.
2. CaaS allows business users to manage content, but developers build the presentation in the apps that consume the delivery API.

Do you have any questions, please feel free to comment here or send me an email, click here.

Content Strategy Board new features:

Content Strategy Board in Content Hub used by markets to visualize their content and see how it delivers key elements of their strategies: 

Content insights and the Engagement value:

Represents Performance of content, average engagement value by country, by region) which provides insights to where content perform best.  

Content Coverage using Sitecore AI:

based on segments, which enables the marketer’s team to build the best strategy to create additional content by clicking a specific segment.

 

*Segments is a categorization of contacts based on some conditions.

CMP Connector

The Entire content lifecycle from planning, publishing (content hub and XP) and delivery (XP), the bridge is the CMP connector, with the improved connector between Sitecore 10 and content Hub, it allows customers to leverage the combined power of both platforms. 

How it works

1. The connector needs 3 places to be configured:
1. Azure Service Bus
2. Content Hub
3. Sitecore Content Management 
2. When changes made in CH (entity creation, modification, deletion), using a trigger and action, changes will be messaged to the Service bus where the app is listening. The app will get the targeted entities from CH and write it into Sitecore, data like where used messaged will be shared by back to CH.
   

CMP connector 3.0 (September 2020) with 

1. Fault tolerant for sync, retry 3 times to complete the sync after entity failure
2. Support all simple field types (support all non-complex field mappings between CH entity and sitecore items), 
3. Sync of tags (Sync Taxonomy values from CH as tags to the corresponding items in Sitecore). 
4. Introduce related Entities, bring an entity and maintain the relationships from CH to Sitecore.
5. Enhanced DAM & media link support, attachments asset from CMP to public in sitecore, images can be pushed from CMP to XP if they are part of rich text, content piece as pdf. 

CMP 4.0 (and Future) is close to be released with:

1. The content in CMP is written to target certain personas which will map to profile cards in XP that will allow us to infer the interests about a contact based on the content they are browsing
2. Knowing where and how content is being used which allowed editors/authors to make the right changes to the content. 
3. Support of item versioning from the changes originated in CMP
4. Support Item workflow from changes originated in CMP 

Hope the above gave an overview of what's coming around Sitecore Content Hub, if you have any question please feel free to comment here or send me an email, click here.