This year, SUGCON Europe is visiting Antwerp, Belgium. This location is known for having the best beers and chocolate. If these two are not enough already to convince you to attend SUGCON, then maybe having many Sitecore employees around will. Sitecore has one of its offices there.  

If you are unsure, let me share my list of must-see sessions at the upcoming SUGCON.  

Keynotes 

Keynotes cannot be missed. Fresh strategy announcements, product changes revels, the best speakers, Sitecore Executives – tell you all. If you miss keynotes, you may not have the right background to understand the rest of invited speakers.  

This year again, Sitecore CEO, Dave O’Flanagan will help us understand the direction Sitecore and the community is heading – you cannot miss it.  

Then, we will have a chance to learn more about extending XM Cloud with marketplace apps – something the Sitecore community has been waiting for since it was announced last year (Liz Nelson & Spyros Misichronis).  

On Friday Vignesh Vishwanath will share with us a real-life demo of Sitecore Stream installed in Sitecore DXP, this will not only present us with what exactly Sitecore Stream brings for us but also in what form all new features of Sitecore can be provided in the future. 

It's time to learn some new stuff on Thursday 

Sitecore XM/XP is still strong on the market and will stay with us for many years, but we also have to learn some new stuff.  

I would start with “Events, Webhooks, & the Authoring API: Never Deploy to Sitecore Again” by Jason Wilkerson. Sitecore has always been about customization to customer needs. Jason will show us how to change the approach and customize Sitecore without deployments.  

Then, we can move to Headless architecture and “OpenTelemetry with JSS head and .Net Core” by Jasper Balle and Per Bering. If you have ever worked with headless solutions, you know that they add some complexity to the architecture, and to achieve a certain level of solution stability, you have to remember to monitor your solution. This presentation may shed some light on this topic.  

Nowadays, it is not possible to avoid the topic of AI, so why not review all AI features in 30 minutes? Morten Ljunberg will challenge the time and, with his “30 min of AI in Sitecore,” will try to tease demo gods and present real-life scenarios.   

No time to relax on Friday 

Despite the super early and interesting keynote presentation, I cannot wait to see Adam Najmanowicz's “The joys and challenges of managing thousands of websites in a single Sitecore instance.” Adam plans to show how they pushed Sitecore XM/XP to the limits and ran not hundreds but thousands of websites on a single instance.  

As we speak about the limits – we cannot be at two different presentations at the same time – I still cannot decide If am more interested in seeing “Elevating Developer Experience: Modernizing the JSS SDK and Starter Kits for XM Cloud” by Christian Hahn & Liz Nelson or “Better XM/XP deployments with Kubernetes” by Peter Prochazka. The two topics are very interesting and as I know the speakers – we can expect a high level of detail and very informative presentations. 

Sitecore pricing may be challenging sometimes but one hero from the Sitecore team will try to explain to us how Sitecore SaaS pricing works, and get ready for “Pricing for SaaS Platforms” by Rich Carroll. 

The next session I would like to see is the one from Andy Cohen “Full Circle: The Architect of XM Cloud builds an XM Cloud Site (as a Partner for the first time)”. This is going to be a one-of-a-kind situation when the architect of the product changes the side and has to use something built by his team. 

This year, the SUGCON Europe agenda looks very interesting. I will risk and write that it looks like the most interesting agenda I have seen so far. We can expect a mix of information about a variety of products presented by top-class speakers. I hope to see you in Antwerp, Belgium this April!