Sitecore 10: what’s new?

Today, Sitecore 10 has been released. Sitecore’s flagship product, Sitecore Experience Platform, has been a recognized state of the art Digital Experience Platform for years now.  

With the release of Sitecore 10, we believe a new era has started, where the digital marketing platform gets even more robust with a DevOps friendly architecture – maybe as the architecture for their new Sitecore SaaS roadmap?  

Let’s talk about the new functionalities for marketers and end users first, before diving into the technical details in a later article – stay tuned! 

This is big: you can filter your analytics reports on segments! 

Getting insights from Sitecore’s analytics reports is great, but it has bothered me in the past that you cannot filter on specific segments. Now, there is a new filtering functionality available in all reports! 

This means that you can use the Segments as we know them from the List Manager. In this module you can create segments based on all sorts of segmentation rules as filters on your analytics. In the past when the “Use as analytics filter” was enabled in a Segment, you needed to apply some extra configuration to have this filter available in your reports. 

Now, this filter is available in the analytics reports without any extra configuration:

This is great, because with the extensive set of available segmentation rules, it’s very easy to focus on a group of contacts in your Experience Database. And now it is possible to zoom into the analytics for these specific segments.

Horizon

There has been a lot of buzz around this new editing interface for years. As from Sitecore 9.3, a first version of the new content editing experience called Horizon has been released.

In the first version, limited functionalities were supported. For those who don’t know Horizon, this is a screenshot on the Sitecore 9.3 environment on an SXA website:

Now with the newest version of Sitecore, Horizon supports more functionalities:

• Multi-site and multi-lingual are now supported and added to the user interface

• Drag & drop support in the page tree to organize your site’s structure

• Horizon Content: a content manager that you use to manage content without a presentation layer. In Content you can see meta data for each field and you can edit content that is not accessible in Pages

Email Experience Manager

In earlier versions of Sitecore, if you wanted to use components in Email Experience Manager, there were no standard templates available out of the box. In Sitecore 9.2, out of the box EXM templates were announced and in Sitecore 10 several additional templates are added to the product: Left Image Block, Right Image Block and Image Focus. 

This enables the customers that want to use EXM to work more efficiently as these templates can be a starting point without the cost of developing email templates from scratch. 

Extended Marketing Automation functionalities

New rules are available to trigger a marketing automation plan based on a contact’s birth date. This enables marketers to send automated messages, for example: to send a Happy Birthday email with a promotion and a communication follow-up. follow up on communication.

Furthermore, the “Update consent settings” now allows you to remove contacts from marketing messages or all messages.

GDPR APIs

Sitecore 10.0 and later provides API calls and configuration options that makes it easier to enforce explicit consent for tracking a contact's activity on your websites. Also, there is an API to anonymize form submissions.

Copy/Pasting content from Word to Sitecore

It’s no secret: the draft version of this article was written in Word and reviewed by our marketing department. The final version will be copy-pasted into Sitecore. But wait, isn’t that workflow a case for the Sitecore Content Hub? Yes! Don’t worry if you don’t have the Sitecore Content Hub, this new feature is amazing too. The Sitecore editor cleans markup from MS Word, allowing for clean markup on your website. 

We hope you enjoyed learning more about Sitecore 10 and its new functionalities. In next week’s article, we’ll cover more of the technical details, which include:

• A brand-new developer experience with new ASP.NET Core headless development option

• Sitecore containers (!) with Docker and Kubernetes technology

• And more...

Don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date with new content.