Sitecore MVP Summit and Sitecore Symposium 2016 Take aways

Dear Readers,

How are all of you? Did you attend the Sitecore MVP Summit and Symposium?

I know, its been some time Sitecore MVP Summit and Symposium happened, but better late than never!

It was great to meet so many of you in person. Firstly, Thank you Horizontal Integration (Sabin Ephrem and the whole Leadership team) for this great lifetime experience! With ~30 HIans at Sitecore Symposium, it was truly our Domain!

There were great golden nuggets that we got out of the Sitecore MVP Summit and Sitecore Symposium. Here are a few which I felt most important out of those.

Helix
- Sitecore Community has grown a lot over the years, and with Sitecore maturing to be a highly used Enterprise level content management platform and having the power to connect with any third party API’s easily, there was always a need to have some guidelines and recommended practices.
- Anyone can start development on Sitecore, but only a few implementation partners like HI really know how to do it the right way.
- With Helix, the best thing is Sitecore has shown a direction to improve efficiency, effectiveness, scalability and maintainability of a solution, along with reducing cost and time of development in longer run.
- The best part about Helix guidelines, is its on GitHub and the community on the whole can contribute to make it a more robust and effective set of guidelines.
.NET Core 1.0 and Sitecore Publishing Service
- It’s fascinating to see Sitecore having a vision with the new technology trends and keeping up good pace in updating themselves.
- They have launched Sitecore Publishing Service as a standalone add-on product, built on .NET Core and the best part, it doesn’t require additional license for it.
- Moving forward, we will see a lot of core platform things being moved to .NET Core and Sitecore’s development community needs to be geared up learn and be ready with .NET Core and its concepts.
NuGet
- The community was asking for making Sitecore assemblies available via nuget and Sitecore heard it!
- The Sitecore Nuget feed is going to help the development community in getting the issues of DLL references solved to a big extent.
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA)
- SXA, is going to change the way Sitecore projects are implemented currently.
- Built on the Helix principles, it’s going to be very useful for the whole team (including Front-End Back-End, Content Authors) to work on the Sitecore platform almost in parallel and thus reduce the amount of time taken for a website to go live.
- Currently, various teams in an implementation firm, work simultaneously by following their own best practices. With SXA, things will be streamlined for good.
Sitecore User Voice
- I think we should call this Sitecore Democracy!
- You have an idea, which can make your and life of other developers/marketers/Sitecore users better?
- Go ahead and submit it, share it, discuss it with other community members and if they like it, they vote for it.
- And based on the community response, Sitecore will prioritize it into their own queue.
- This is the way Sitecore is going to do Idea Management from anyone in the Sitecore Community.
Sitecore Commerce
- Sitecore is accelerating into the Commerce world with a whole new Revamped Commerce Engine, which is built from scratch on .NET Core 1.0
- It’s going to be the next big thing in the market.

Along with these, it was a great experience presenting at Sitecore Symposium on Sitecore Print Experience Manager along with Dave Michela, Andy Cohen, Dan Sinclair and JD Little.

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