Matthew, hello everyone. It is May 14 here as we come towards nicer weather here in the northeast, for Cameroons and myself, at least, and for most of the world, hopefully, I'm Matthew McQueeny, head of relationships at Konabos. And somehow, because I, I work here, and they're really great. Uh, Sitecore, I've gotten two MVPs, but nothing alongside, uh, Kamruz demand partner at Konabos and solution architect and a 12 time MVP cam, welcome. Thanks for talking here about Sitecore XP, 10.4 Yeah, it's great to be back with you, Matt. And yeah, this we obviously did a webinar last year on the 10.3 release, which felt quite big, and so excited to be back here with you and talk through this 10.4 release. And yeah, as you said, Great weather up here in the northeast and just off the tail end of a immense Aurora. Bro realis Northern Light show, right? So let's see what kind of lights, light we can shine on this 10 dot. Full release, yeah. And I think, as we were talking about this, this might not be as revolutionary or awe inspiring as a aurora borealis. But Major kind of shifts in, I like this new word market texture, but major shifts kind of in philosophy of business for site core, and really meeting with the customer, where they are. We've known for, I'd say, since November or October. I think it was October, I had the opportunity to attend the basically site core week, from the MVP summit to a user group to a DX day up there in Minneapolis. And I believe it was there maybe a little before where they were announcing site, core XP 10.4, is coming in April. And as you could see, it was released. 

Here we are may 14, which is about 15 days later, half a month later. But it did just make it in under the bell, which is all that, all that counts, but cam, when you when you go back towards again. We talked about 10.3 last year, right? And we'll talk about how some things have even shifted there, which is a good thing, not a bad thing. It means you're evolving with the market evolving towards customer needs. But when you were looking towards 10.4 early on in the announcement, back perhaps in the in the fall, what were some of the things you were thinking about, separate from what we know has happened. But what were you thinking about at that point in time? About the 10.4 upcoming. So the 10.3 webinar we did wasn't even last year. It was in 2022 at the tail end of 2022, right? So it's a slightly longer period, almost 16, 1718, months, which, you know, is slightly off from their usual cadence. I think that was that had been a slight worry for a lot of us, it's, you know, this release is getting pushed out. What's happening. But here we are. The 10.4 release is out. Now we what I was really looking forward to Was this not just being some sort of a compatibility update. And we saw that with cycle commerce and the earlier release releases, right where it was just some maintenance fixes, roundup of some bug fixes and no real kind of new features. I really like the XM XP platform. There are a lot of customers, a lot of customers, right? Vast majority of our customers are on this platform. So it was, yeah, we needed to see something significant here to give this product life. Yeah. And there's one thing that came up as I was looking at this slide, and we were talking to a customer in the last few days long time, site, core customer, and they asked, what is the difference between XM and XP? So I will be the simplicity straw man, and I will ask you, Kim, can you explain that very basic delineation? Yeah, absolutely. So XM is essentially the product that's was started like, I know, 20 years ago, right? Your core content management system. I think that you're going in and building out your solution, your web pages, your applications, that content tree, those components, the content itself, the content editor, the experience editor, so all of that. What I call the core functionality of the content management system for building out your websites is what is an XM at its core, is what is driving XM cloud. And we did some webinars on this previously when we discussed XM cloud, why it really wasn't brand new technology at the time. It was a culmination of years, years and years of innovation built on top of the existing XM platform. XP, on the other hand, is what we would call your all in one, the XP digital experience platform. So that includes all of the marketing features that we've grown to know and love about cycle, and when people are buying cycle, this is a lot of reasons they buy this product, right? It's those options in there to go and personalize your content, to collect analytical based data and trigger goals and campaigns based on visitor interactions, and then based on that drive further interaction, further personalization. There's obviously integrations with email campaign manager, there's emails with marketing automation tools. So there's a lot of lot of lot of personalization and digital experience features and capabilities within that platform. But obviously it has been for a number of different reasons. 

It they are, it has been difficult to use those partly, partly, I'd say, due to the technology and how you know how it has been tricky to extend it, but also partly to do with customers, and customers maturity and their level of capabilities, I'd say, at any given stage of their own life cycles to drive A campaign. It's not just about having tools. You need to know how to actually drive, measure and retarget campaigns in a continuous fashion. Yeah, and I mean, it's not a criticism to say that it's really hard to be everything to everybody in a really best of breed Composable World. Like to keep your eye on so many aspects of a MarTech stack, it is hard when you're playing off the core capabilities Absolutely, yeah. But equally, there is this space for a lot of players, right? So it's not just everybody should go to composable that all in one the XP, as we, we know Matt very well, is there is a large customer segment for this, so I'm glad to see it's here, and it stayed absolutely so being somebody here in the United States might not understand The illusions and being someone who doesn't go as far back with psycho as you do. What do we mean here with Long live the king and yeah, it's probably cut off at the top, top, top left for some of our viewers, unfortunately, but yeah, for me, XM, the XM platform is the game. It's the one that's been around for, for the longest time. It's the core of XM cloud. It's a core of XP. It's what the vast majority of customer customers are using, even if they have XP installed. But XM XP is obviously the vast customer base of Sitecore anyway. So yeah, I think when we were discussing in the past year, past two years, it was a lot of hesitation around what's going to happen with the on prem. We kind of were thinking, and the messaging was much more heavily geared towards XM cloud and all the features and innovation going that way. So it felt like it was, it was, it was going to die, slowly, die away, but it's back. The King is the king is back, and it's, it's alive and kicking. Just a quick thing. It's going to play a lot into what we're going to talk about here as we discuss 10.4 but we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the experiences we had where we saw a lot of the first announcements of 10 four at subcon in Dublin. Pictured there, we had some really great discussions with the new CEO. Interim tag is gone. New CEO, Dave o Flanagan, previous chief product officer has been there for three years. Came over in the acquisition where he was the CEO of box ever, and this was a home game for him, being from Dublin. So it was a really great it was a really great event to get a taste of, perhaps some of the new psycho philosophy and the ways of working with partners, and thinking about the platform. There's a video there. You can get on the QR code if you haven't seen it. We did do a recap from subcon Europe, but real openness we previous to this picture here, we did have the opportunity when we went up to just congratulate him, and he stayed there. Very open, transparent, spoke with us for a good 15 or 20 minutes really opened the channel, said, email me anytime. And, and, you know, really great stuff. I mean, what do you what do you think on that point? Kim, absolutely. So I know we discussed it in a previous video. And sorry, the QR code is getting covered up by us this time.

 I should check the placement of these things a little bit better next time. But, yeah, very, very open, very honest, very frank conversations. I know there was a couple of articles as well that I had had contributed to. And again, even in those conversations, the author of that article did specifically say, you know, I spoke to, I spoke to Dave. He was very frank. Is very open. It was very honest, even if it was a little bit to the detrimental cycle, you know, it was, it wasn't necessarily showing, I don't want to say the best light, but, you know, sometimes people embellish for marketing purposes, a little bit too much, sometimes, right? But, yeah, it was a great conversation. It reminded I mentioned in the other video. It reminded me of the early days of psycho when you could go up to the original founders, Michael Lars and the other guys, and you could just talk to them like, like normal human beings, as you'd expect. He was there. He was He stuck around for the entire conference, speaking with everybody. So it was a really, really refreshing change, and great to see this new product led and product focused roadmap that they are re embarking on. Should we say, Yeah, and I did change around the orientation here. We had decided before the webinar, let's do the one where we're along the bottom, but it seems to have changed. I think this is the only one. I think we should be good after this one, let's see. So we do want to bring up. We're going to talk where we are, but let's talk about where we've been. I think this was from our 10.3 presentation, as you said, a year and a half ago now. And this at the time, was the hexagon du jour, right? It was the composable products being headless, products being all in the mix there, in the ecosystem. And then along the side you had, oh, and should I say, with XM cloud in that mix Central, right? And then you had the experience platform, Experience Manager, managed cloud, kind of on the side. And I would say, this speaks to evolution, right? And there was a great which we'll get to in a slide. There was a great example about how the electric vehicle and hybrid electric car market can even help explain this. But really, in the last couple of years, it went from probably two years, hey, let's all get to XM cloud. Let's get to the future now to last year being more look, we have this great mix of composable products. We'd love to get you there, but there still is a place for you on prem, but there will be some kind of idea that there's a sun setting with a year to now being more of this, I think it's on our next slide here to being more of this idea. And this was in in Davo Flanagan's right up at the end of 2023 as Chief Product Officer. But this idea of we're incredibly excited about XM cloud and XM Cloud Plus, but I do want to make a clear and definitive statement to our customers invested in platform dxp, which is much like the 10.4 we're talking about today. We are in this together for the long haul. Cam, that was something that you probably felt as well. There's not the feeling of scarcity added. There's not a distinct deadline where you're you know, you go off a cliff. There's a comfort in knowing that as long as the customers are here, they're going to meet the customers where they are, and they're going to provide a runway to be in this solution. Yeah, absolutely. And they've had also specifically called that out, right as long as the customers are here and they need that support, we will continue to provide that.

 I think that's been extremely reassuring for. Or for a lot of our customers, for all of our customers, but not just the customers, I think the entire partner ecosystem and the entire developer and marketer ecosystem that is within cycle, because we are all part of the same community, this one community. So we all live this together. It gives us a lot of comfort that we can continue on the platforms and the investments that we have already made, and then when we are ready, we can move up, move on to XM cloud, and that might take a year. It might equally take five years, because we know there are customers in all parts of this journey. Yeah, and really, the idea too, of, in maybe last year, even half a year ago, saying that you have a home in on premise did not necessarily mean you were going to have access to the latest and greatest and newest products from site, core and other providers as well, which is the way the world works, right? We use many solutions. I mean, I was thinking about the fact, even if you're, if you're talking fortune 100 fortune 500 those are 100 500 companies that all have a unique technological footprint, that are using all manner of enterprise solutions for their entire marketing and technology stack. But really, when we went to that one year ago, and then we look at today, this is what was shown to us in Davo Flanagan's keynote in Dublin. And it's this idea of the composable products, headless products from Sitecore. And honestly, when you look at connect there, that also opens up to other solutions across the kind of composable ecosystem. But it's this idea that they all feed and are in service of both existences, XM cloud and XP. So we're now open, right? We're open for kind of open for business, we're open for composability. And we had some pieces we probably can't say as much here, but that proved that out really from Sitecore leadership. But this really gives the customer an assurance, doesn't it? Cam, yeah, I love this new diagram. It really puts equal weight to XM cloud and to the all in one dxp, and you see that fin, that light band between the XM cloud and experience platform in the background, that is connectivity. And that connectivity is a cycle connect in this particular case, or in the in the case of XP, build your own connectors, right? Because it's just code. But again, we'll see as we go through this that the XP platform is being opened up a lot, and as part of the openness, it gives you connectivity to the entire site called SaaS suite, or any other SaaS suite, right? The connectivity? How you make that connectivity is up to you, but it's not just XML, as you said, XM cloud in the center, and then the platform as a little bit of a side piece anymore. And I think behind this as well was the reality, which could be changing. You know, evolution and revolution happens, but to go from XP to XM cloud, at least in the past couple of years, potentially takes a full rewrite and rebuild, right? So when you reach the end of the your time with XP, if it didn't have these opportunities, it was really an all or nothing. I have to go to the XM cloud and kind of start from scratch, or I have to look, I mean, not to say here, but I have to look at other things in this composable best of breed marketplace, this gives a lot of space to move towards the future in a more iterative way.

 Take advantage of these, these new best of breeds, site, core and even competitor products through Connect, but it gives you more of a runway beyond just where sunsetting, even if they say we're sunsetting in six years, you at least can use these elements and great products now, yeah, and you can take the advantage of all of the innovation of these products as they happen. Because, again, these are, these are SaaS products. So as they're improved, you would just start getting those features and those benefits. And we've seen that numerous times already. The other thing this diagram XP is now also a hexagon. Right in the previous one, it was a square so it was, hey, you're not part of our composable family. But there's no reason that XP and XM is not part of a composable solution, right? I can use XM and a number of other marketing MarTech stacks and tools, right, including these ones from cycle. But also any other one I like. It's not a SaaS product. It's not a SaaS product. I mean, they'll see managed cloud, but it's not a SaaS product. But it doesn't mean it's not a composable product as part of my composable stack. That's right, hex. P I think this plays well into the last point on this, as we then move into the actual features and elements of the 10.4 release, which they announced in the headline. 200 of them. Cam won't speak to all of them, but we'll speak to many of the ones we call out. This was really refreshing from Dave o Flanagan's keynote. It was speaking to this duality between the cloud and on prem. And I think we're hearing a lot more in the last year, year plus, of this term, hybrid, headless, and it's really utilizing the best of both worlds, I think, without getting into the terms and definitions of what these things mean, it serves a very large swath of customer and I think really the car analogy is great, because we have this fully electric and we have this gasoline powered system. And more than that is the network, the global diffusion of gas stations, and I know electric chargers, especially because of Tesla, have become much more ubiquitous and available, but that gasoline is still on most street corners in across the world. And really this was the year as we turned into 2024, many articles about how hybrid cars, hybrid electric vehicles, had become the most sold and sought after vehicle on the marketplace. Really meeting customers where they are, having the best of both worlds. You can, you can charge your car up, but then you know when you use up that charge, you then have the benefits of a gas powered car, and you have a lot of agility and nimbleness in working through those things. 

However, I do believe that you had to have fully electric, just as you had to have fully hybrid, or, sorry, headless, in order to even be able to come back to be a hybrid of it. So there is a benefit to that. And I know Kim, as we were driving around the northeastern corridor, we were actually having this conversation a lot. You know, as we pivot into 10 four, what did you how did you feel when we saw this? There are, we saw this with the 10 three release, but we're seeing a lot more features where they're bringing the on prem all in one dxp to the middle, essentially, to meet customers where they where they need to be going towards, for sure. But again, it helps with that transition, sure. So this is, this was the obviously, it's out now, these were some of the slides we were we were looking at, and some of the elements we will call out in detail, but some of the things that site core really wanted to have the audience know was what we see here, and it's much what we talked about, this simplified personalization. Personalization can be as complex or as simple as you want it. Many people don't do it because you feel like you have to be complex to do it. So the more simplified that can become, the better composable integrations and analytics gets to that part we were talking about opening up a little more to site cores, own composable products and VIA Connect to a bit of the marketplace at large. There were some security improvements. You know, some are granular. Some are larger pieces, such as read only, such as, I think, like whether SVGs can be allowed to be uploaded into the system. But one of the things I wanted to say here is that for marketers, business users, you do hear a lot over the years that Sitecore is very good at doing many of those things, and has been doing many of those things when we're talking about really smart visual builder, Page Preview, page building, not needing developers for some core CMS capabilities, you know, having the best laid plans to have some of those other elements of the marketing stack involved. So I'd almost say, Cam, you go back deeper in this. But while some of the things we talk to with marketers and business users might not be revolutionary, it's because Sitecore has kind of been doing this pretty well already, and those evolutionary steps mean a lot. Yeah, I think so, right. So we've been again, going back to that. Headless, hybrid headless. One of the hybrid headless features that everybody's bringing in now is page composition, right a page editor. This has been in site calls core platform since, since I've used it in in been using it in 2010, and for us, when we, when we when we looked at other systems, it's always been you can't have enterprise level CMS without a page editor ahead, without some way of composing pages templated and so again, like a lot of these things, you might think, oh, it's nice, but it's not revolutionary. But again, it's just lots of these improvements, which makes the customers and the marketers lives that little bit easier, easier and faster to work with.

 And as we said, Cam, we'll go through all 200 features, then some of the roadmap themes, much like we said here, better user experience for marketers, better digital or developer experience for developers, composable integrations, and that is, again, to hit home that's on both of these slides, the composable integrations, this is critical in allowing the outside world in and allowing the elements of your system out, both within the site, core ecosystem of composability, and with the with the different products that you can have handshakes with and handoffs with across the board, but those, those ideas too, as a developer, for a long time on this cam, it's this integration, it's this configuration, and not as much of the customization, right? Because that's where a lot of these update based things can go wrong, and that's where a lot of the upgrade issues come from, right? Because of all the customizations that people make within the system, that's right. So what's new in 10.4 with we look, when we look at this list, we have a we tried to, we originally had about 10 slides, but we brought this down to two. You're welcome when we look at some of these. Why? Maybe Kim, why you felt that beyond the 200 enhancements and fixes? What? Why did we call out some of these? What? What are important about these, both for the future state of the platform and maybe looking back towards what was important about it all these years. Yeah. So I think that some of these improvements, they say minor, and they seem, I'd say, almost a little bit weird as to why would they make this change. But if you think of it from an XM cloud perspective, again, these changes make a lot of sense. And again, why I think we're seeing innovation in XM cloud, and we're seeing these brought back into XM and XP. So it's not like, Hey, we're just going to continue doing XM XP and forget about our All In One dxp. They are like they are making the changes to their entire ecosystem at the same time, absolutely. So back, sorry, go back, and I'll just run through, I just run through a couple of those improvements. So again, like the accessibility improvements in the content editor, like they'll now follow W, 3c, area practices where you can navigate the river and then the tree and components within, within, within the content Editor. Again, this is one of these things I'm like this content editor has been in cycle since a long time. Like even before I started using cycle, pretty sure it was in cycle five, even. And it doesn't make sense to make this changes like in 2024 I mean, it does, as in, you know, we should always look to improve accessibility in any way we can. But from a XM XP perspective, if it was a dead platform, you wouldn't do that kind of thing. Custom languages is a pretty interesting one. Again, we I've worked on a number of projects where sometimes you'd want a custom language for an ISO code that doesn't quite exist, like en EU, it doesn't actually exist. But you might have freu versus like we know we have FRFR for France and fr CAFR for Canada, right? Or FRCA for Canada and en us. But you might have en EU, you might have some other language that you might want to just hack together for lack of a better word, and in, especially in Azure, it just doesn't really work. And if you're, if you're on prem, on the traditional VMs, and you can make it work by making a couple of hacks, but again, it's not great. So I think they've, again, from an XM cloud perspective, it kind of makes sense. You can just use the UI to create these languages, and it's there. 

Then therein, it's then just done, where I had to make a whole bunch of infrastructure code changes in the background, uh, rules based trigger calls and campaigns. This is, this is really great one. So currently, if you want to trigger a goal of a campaign, you've got to go to each individual piece of content and tag the individual piece of content, which can take a long time. Cycle has an amazing rules engine, and it can be used for any number of things, and you're probably using it without even really knowing already. So now you can actually just go and create some goals and campaigns and use the rules engine to say, tag it to this piece of content. Tagging to that piece of content based on this criteria, based on that criteria, there's an XDB codeless scheme or extension module coming. This is great because if anyone's ever worked with XDB and X connect to create custom facets, it's a real pain. It's really, really painful to go and create all the code and things like that. So again, this is great to see this coming. Again, just speaks to the innovation that's still happening on the XP platform as a whole x as there has also been an X connect endpoint added to cycle connect. And this is going to come into play into the opera interoperability that we talked about Matt where, and we'll talk about this in a second, as well as well as part of the modules, but you can now start to push X connect data into site called Connect, and then from there, it opens up to the world, because you can then connect that to any system that's already available in cycle connect. And cycle has a number of custom recipes that they've built, that they built in there as well. Real minor one. There's a new supply content reader role before you'd have to go and configure it all manually, and you'd probably miss something, but sometimes you just want somebody to go in very easily, just to read some content, right? To be able to review some content. So it's pretty minor, yeah. It's kind of like a read only state, right? Basically, yeah, yeah. All right. So a number of improvements in Solr, search, some fairly minor improvements, but welcome, it will help improve the performance updates to a bunch of the JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery, that's used in the core of the platform. Again, this will help with the security and the security hardening of your xMX XP systems. 

These were mostly used in the back end systems, of course. But nonetheless, security is security doesn't matter where it occurs, as well as also a bunch of the core platform libraries. You know, the.net.net libraries have been improved, and there's support added for things like SQL Server 2022, latest Kubernetes services, updates to containers, and a whole heap of optimizations in the background. You know, again, these could be tagged as improvements or bug fixes, depending on how you look at them, or both. But you know, there's things like updates to caching operations and other performance improvements to speed up like processes and reduce the load times, and they've started to phase out some of the old tech in the background, technology in the background, like phantom js, which is used for taking screenshots, actually in the background, but I don't think many people really, really used it again. Just helps improve performance and improve the security of the system. All right, so what's new in XS, S, x a, it's always hard to say that. Now, if you could speak as well, s x A has a very big part in the headless transition, right? Is that its main thing? Or what? Where did s x a start from, and what is it looking to be now, so SX A as the A and SX IS accelerator, right? So experience accelerator. So it was accelerator toolkit which would give you a preset, a predefined set of components, which you could then use to just go out and build a website without requiring any code. I know you love the low code, low code map. So that was essentially the basis of this. You could just install site core, install SX, a start dragging and dropping, create some pages, and you have something ready to go with a whole heap of components. It also has a theming system built in. So you can just go in create a new theme on top of the base SSA theme, and which gives you a brand new look, a brand new feel, a brand new and brand new website, essentially, which follows your brand guidelines. SSA, in this last iteration, SSA, headless has added a more limited but still used. Set of headless components built in React, which will work, which will do the same thing. It's a predefined set of components with the theming and everything else that goes with it. And there's a lot more in Inc apart from what I'm just talking about. But the headless version essentially built using React, using a modern, modern, modern frameworks, and support for things like the experience edge, which will help you with your scaling and global distribution. All right, you want to talk through some of these items that you called out, yeah. So this is yeah.

 So there's now support for tailwind, the tailwind grid system. Previous it was just bootstrap foundation and really old one called Grid 360 which are definitely going to really use. But tailwind has been very, very popular for the past few years. For since it's very, very lightweight, there's been some improvements to the toolbox to only show specific components based on the website. So it's like a site specific rendering in the toolbox set of components, you can now mark specific websites as being internal. So this will help. This will prevent them from being published to experience edge, which will help with your publishing times, of course, and just help improve performance. There may be some sites that you publish into Edge, and there may be other sites that you're not publishing to edge because you're just using the traditional SSA system, for example. And there's a there's a few other number of other improvements, including like, including being able to generate your site map with or without language codes in the URL or and also within the asset optimizer. You can now exclude certain CSS and JavaScript files, which, again, just help with performance and performance and delivery on that Mark internal sites point to a marketer, business user. What would be the use case to that is that if you want to publish something in two days, no, it could be like you have some websites which are using headless and experience age, and you may have other websites. Let's say I've been using SSA for a number of years and I'm not experience age ready for those websites yet, or headless ready for those websites, so I can mark those as being internal, so it won't publish just to experience edge. And I might have another site which is using SSA and using headless and using experience edge, and I do want that to be published to experience edge. It's just going to help a lot with the publishing time and the site regeneration time for those websites got it. So from a business user's perspective, it's just going to be performance improvements from what they'll see publishing time improvements. Very nice. So now JSs, what did you like about some of these bullets here? So JSs got released, and pretty, really nice to see it released, I think, within a few hours of 10.4 game release. So traditionally, we have seen some of these modules take a number of weeks before they're up to date with the core platform release. So again, you can 10.4 got released. JSs got released, SSA got released. Everything got released at the same time.

 You can start using those at the same time, it has been updated to use next JS 14, which is again the latest version of next JS again, it helps with improved security, improved performance, as well as increased functionality. Because there's a lot of new features that were added to next, next, JS 14, within that framework. Along with that, they made some changes to update experience edge retry strategy. So some before, sometimes you to get a get a timeout error, which would then prevent, which would then cause a build failure, and then you have to reach it, have to restart the build again. So they've added some retry strategies to say, you know, check again, check again, check again, type of thing which will again, just prevent those build failures and help those deployments happen the first time, as they should do, there's a they've also added some deployment guides for Netlify. I've, I've actually been using Netlify since long before I had heard of this cell. But am I still use Netlify for quite a few of my personal projects. Really, really great system, great alternative to Vercel so, and I know a lot of people would have been using it for their other applications. So great to great to see that being added. And there's a bunch of other fairly minor improvements, I'd say, but improvements nonetheless. But along with the JSs, I'd also just recommend everyone check out the Sitecore accelerate cookbooks that cycle have been pushing out there for the past. Few months. It's XM cloud related. But if you're going to be developing in JSs and headless in general, I still recommend looking at those, because it will help you again, just improve your solution and then get XM cloud ready at the same time. So on this slide here, modules is a big word. It's a very, you know, you always hear modular design module like it's a very kind of new way of often talking about headless and elements like that. The other thing I want to call out from this picture is we do see a graphical representation here of Connect playing a central role in an integration here with XP and CDP, and we can imagine that writ large, as an extension between a lot of the composable solutions and XP, and also solutions outside of Sitecore. But for the purposes of what you have here, Cam, why don't you talk a little bit about modules? Yeah, honestly, this is the part that I'm most excited for in this 10 dot for release this. This is these new tools open up a really huge world of possibilities. But cycle, have they mentioned, I think, did they mention it in second that they are going to follow this modular approach? I can't quite remember, but they're going to be essentially following this modular approach to future product enhancements, and this, the beauty about this is that each module can be updated and enhanced independently of the core products. So you're not really waiting for 10.4 to get released, for a module to get updated along with it. Those can happen as of when they need to. Happen in the same way that XM cloud gets updates all the time.

 I mean, you probably want these upgrades all the time, because you don't be focusing too much on just the upgrades, but at least if you know there's some new features in these modules that are useful to you, you can go ahead and just update those individual modules as when you need them. This I want to say that also, though, that this module approach isn't something new, because we've previously seen some things with modules, like the publishing service, universal tracker, technically headless services, is a module, ethics say, is a module, and Those traditionally haven't, unfortunately, been updated separately. But I think given the synergies we're seeing XM and x between XM and XM cloud, I think it's more likely going forward that these modules will be updated independently and separately. The three to call out there is XM cloud to XM cloud migration tool, again, will help you get from your current XM on prem to XM cloud to help update upload the data. It's not a magic wizard. It's just for data migration, and not site migration, code migration, but the other two, XP analytics extractor, a new tool that's being released as open source, so you can go in and adjust it for your needs at that particular moment in time. Will allow you to extract your data from x connect to a CSV file or an or a SQL database, and you can then do what you like with it. I've got it in CSV file. Imagine the power that I now have because it's now in Excel. And I hate I'm not very good at Excel, but even I remember as a university, you could just grab, grab some data, and you can create a chart from it, very, very easily. Or if you're a bit more of a power user, you can start to create some pivot tables and things like that. Things like that, and do whatever you like with that data to and once you've got it in a format that you need it, you can just keep re running those reports over and over and get over again. And then once you've actually the other powerful The other neat and powerful thing here is once you've actually extracted that data, if you wanted to, I can clean out my XDB data in my XDB for data that's like data that's over two years old, let's just say, because I don't find it relevant, but I've also got, now got a record of that historical data that I can keep off site, and I'm not overloading my databases that I'm paying production, premium value for backups and everything else that goes with it, right? So there's, there's some good cleanup opportunities and cost saving opportunities as a result of that. There are also some templates included in this for some Power BI reports to help you get started, some sample templates, essentially. So that's going to really, really help. Think, help people with their reporting tools going forward. And there's also a new going to be, a new XDB to CDP migration tool, right again. This uses X connect, as you said, as the glue, and this will either help you get this data into CTP, which then allows it access, allows lots of other systems access to this data, or help you with a transitionary period.

 If you want to get from XP to, let's say, XM, right, you can go from XP to get that data into CDP to migrate across to XM, lower the footprint of your solution and your hosting costs, and then you can move the transition up to XM cloud, essentially, nice. And then there is a question here from one of our LinkedIn users who I think is Ken Gray from us, but it makes me think of this, which I'll have you talk through this slide, but I just want to show it for a customer that has just moved to 10 three, what would be the recommendation regarding going to 10 four and how much of a changed lift will be required? Why don't we answer that with what you have before then we talk about this, because I see this funny one here for available for 10, three one, yeah. So the migration from 10.3 to 10.4 should be very, very minor for the for the vast majority of customers. Obviously, we know there are some projects out there which are huge, gigantic, and there's, unfortunately, not a lot you can do about those, but for the vast majority of the customers, I'd say anyone actually over 10.1 will if you had upgraded 10.1 and you have upgraded to 10.1 following the recommendations in that cycle have provided using some of the new systems and we talked about these items as resource files in the previous, previous, really, previous, previous presentation. If you had followed all of those things, it would almost just be like going in and updating a few reference changes, and you should be good to go. There shouldn't really be any, any major changes that you'll need to require, that you'll be required to do in terms of the upgrade itself, cycle recommends just spin up a new system, a brand new instance of cycle. Just connect the default databases, connect your existing databases to on 10, 110, 210, three, deploy your code. You should be good to go. And it should be as simple as that. But of course, it depends on how it's been implemented and what your deployment processes and things like that are like, all right. Now, if you take a sip there, how about let's talk through this, manage Cloud Support. Now, this is something that actually wasn't in Kent up for officially in the release notes or anything like that, but I kind of saw this just kind of pop in because I was curious. We've been speaking to some customers about managed cloud recently, and I've been looking at it to see what improvements have been made. And I saw this finally, saw this past two released, and the notes say it's been released since. It's been available since 10, dot 3.1 and it was very, very quiet release. So again, if you're on a 10, is a point release, so it's probably why it didn't make that much of a big noise about it. But there have actually been significant improvements to security, performance and cost optimizations, because it is the architecture has been changed, so it's now using Microsoft's Hub and Spoke network architecture, there's a lot of security improvements around that, around how those instances are accessed and deployed, who has access to them, how site calls on support team have access to those as well, because that's also a security concern For your organizations. For example, there have also been all the app services have been updated to the latest version, so version three, that alone will give you significant speed, performance, RAM, resource improvements. 

All of the databases are now within SQL elastic pools. This is actually a recommendation that we had made to all of our customers on Azure paths, whether that's their hosting themselves or through manage, manage the cloud services. That just improves. It helps, it helps with the cost, and it actually helps improve performance, because you're now in a larger pool of resourcing, like having a big server, as opposed to having five separate individual servers for each database. And you now have the ability to have a site to site VPN, which is great, because you know you'd want to lock down your CM and your CD instances on the lower environments, and your CM instance in production to only be accessible to your content offers. Via VPN, and then any internal services that you might want to access. Maybe there's some internal databases, some internal web services that you want to access are only accessible via VPN. Nice, and I just want to call out docs and the downloads, again, not part of the 10.4 but the documentation did get updated last August, I believe August 2023 as a new, fresh, clean look to it. It's much, much faster, it's much more organized, it's much more readable, it's much more usable, in my opinion. And you can see straight off as a section for business users and a section for developers. And along with that, the downloads have been changed to have been moved to a different host, to a different site, a different hosting, way of hosting, again, much faster downloads globally. And cam is that on XM cloud? I'm sure, I'm sure it's using at xa headless in the background to generate these. So just a quick call out here. We talked, we talked about this very same slide in the 10 three. But you have some news here on this. Yeah, I think unsurprising to anybody. XM, experience commerce will no longer be supported in 10.3 so if you're using experience commerce, 10.3 is the end of the road for that one, unfortunately, cycle, ourselves included, do recommend that you transition to a different commerce system. OrderCloud, of course, is a really, really great system within the same ecosystem as well. We know that that that can, especially for these large customers, can be an issue with procurement, but there are other systems available. Obviously, it's a composable. You can work composable. So we have, obviously, there was a brand new release from the folks over at newcomers on a new build using.net core. For those of you that are already on newcomers, the upgrade part for that is actually very, very simple. But if you that isn't a viable alternative, I think if, if you're looking for newcomer systems as well, and I do want to give a little call out that I will be hosting a webinar with the founder of ucommerce, Soren spelling Lund, on the digital experience community next Tuesday. So check out for that. If you want a little more info, he's a he's a really good guest thought leader, and we'll give you some good insights into the commerce experience here in 2024 so we kind of spoke to this cam when we were discussing the 10.1 and up, right? And this is pretty much verbatim from the 10 three we did. But I think it always resonates, because you never know at what part of the procurement cycle you are. But why don't we answer these two questions? What kind of site core customer is? XP, 10.44 and why would a customer upgrade to 10.4 so kind of customers, of course, who are the customers who need an all in one system for XP? Specifically, you might not already have your own MarTech stack. You might not be using individual systems, or you might be very used using very few or you might want to be delivering a completely end to end, personalized experience, from a visit to the website to the email that gets delivered to all the marketing automation triggers that happen. And there are, of course, a lot of customers that are on XM XP already. 

So for them, it just makes sense to continue with this if it works for them, especially even if it doesn't work for them, you might want to just continue support until you figure out what does work for you. Because sometimes it is also not just the system. It is internal processes, business processes and team compositions that that that need to change, rather than the systems needed to change in terms of upgrade. Of course, we talked about all the new features or the new connectivity. I really do think that, although you might not see these huge like headline, oh, we got this brand new system, this brand new component thing, we got this brand new module thing, whatever. There are a number of those. But you might, you know, you might not be. We've got this. We completely re architected this thing with that thing. I think the modules that we are seeing and the direction that we've seen this platform now go built on top of what we saw in 10.3 as well. Is the on prem solution has actually become a lot more composable and a lot more open and a lot more connected to a number of other SaaS systems. Again, through this cycle connect integration, but again, and also through the APIs and the web hooks that they added in the 10.3 and including things like the. Data Extraction, right? The XDB data extraction, you can now take that and put that into any system and use that data as you want. So I'm why would you want to upgrade if you want to, if you want a much more open system, then I think 10.4 is, is the system for you. And I think you brought up the support life cycle, which kind of resets with each new version, right? So this can be an important aspect to Sitecore customers, right, to not feel like you're out of support. And so when you look at 10 one and earlier, like if, in your example of a 10 one, that support has ended, right? Mainstream support? Yeah, extended support was still available, but mainstream support has ended, but exactly right. Matt, so as I mentioned, 10.1 it is, in my opinion, an easy system to upgrade from, because if, if you had upgraded to this version in the correct in the correct way, in my opinion, right? And then 10.4 you know, it's venture support until the end of 2027, and then all the way up to 2030 which is, which is huge, right? It's, it's, that's a lifetime away, almost, especially in tech. Oh yeah, oh yeah. 

So the future, I know we're coming down to our last couple minutes here. I'll just, I'll just talk through this one that they there is discussion, including in writing of a site, core XP, 10.5 whether that turns into a new version number or not. There is, you know, I don't want to say it's written in stone, but it's, it's, it's written in component that it's slated for release in early 2025 much like this one was April 2024 for 10.4 that does show that maybe they want to have a quicker iteration, even though 2025 feels a long way away, it would still be shorter than 10 three to 10 Four, but just continues the narrative of and the reality of support for this on prem solution and bettering it and really giving plenty of runway for customers in this world. Yeah. And in the meantime, we have the regular, will have the regular release of the new modules. So it's not like we have to wait for 2025 that is right. Nope. I think that ended my thing here where we do have a thank you slide, which maybe I have accidentally hidden. But I think everybody knows where to contact us. We try to be ever present and here to here to help and assist customers, community, community members, any and all folks with our knowledge, which you can take or leave cam you want to give some final words, though, I think so. I'm excited for this release again, just the openness and the interconnected ability of the system is really, really great. Yeah, looking forward to, I don't know if we have any questions, but I know we're kind of very hit the tail end. But yeah, if anybody does have any questions, and obviously, just feel free to reach out to me in the usual spots, but looking forward to digging into this in a bit more detail and seeing what we can do with some of this new open connectivity, we have absolutely stay connected. All right. Thanks everybody. Thank you, everyone. You.