Hi, welcome everyone to our webinar today. Hey, my name is Kamruz Jaman. Hope you guys know me from around the Sitecore community. I've been in working with Sitecore for over 15 years now, coming up to 16 years. I think I'm a 12 time Sitecore MVP, and I've been fairly active in the community over the past decade especially, and spoke at a number of user groups and conferences as well. Hi everyone. My name is Akshay Sura. I've been doing Sitecore for quite a bit of time, been an MVP a few times, as well as if you're using Sitecore slack or are part of Sitecore hackathon, that's something I run, hope to share our knowledge about XML today, a little bit about Konabos, as I mentioned. I think when cameras and I first got started, our whole focus was community. First sharing knowledge is in our DNA, so we love sharing knowledge that don't like knowledge silos, as well as bringing people together and being part of the community is one of our biggest things that we cherish here at Konabos, as well as with cameras and I so today we're going to be talking about Sitecore XM cloud. And when we were planning this session, we got talking, and we realized that it's been almost three is that Sitecore at XM Cloud has been released publicly, especially there's a lot of planning in the background from Sitecore perspective, a lot of beta testing and lot of feedback that they gathered before they even launched this product. We've been working in the headless space for longer than that, for almost six years now, and originally it was the jam stack movement, right? It was this new concept, this new architectural movement, which then got really recoined term composable. And we wanted, we were talking about all the innovations that have happened in Sitecore in that time. 

So we, we thought, we thought this was a good, time to catch up and see where we're at. We presented on Sitecore, composable future back in SUGCON, right? I think it was 2022, and we were talking about what it means to what the what this composable approach means, what this jam stack approach means, and what this new tech stack is going to look like for Sitecore, and why it's going to be such a big thing. Yeah, it was, I think, just the start of the XM cloud and testing all of that. So what exactly is Sitecore and cloud? So those of you who have not had the chance to look at it or be part of the conversation, XM cloud is a cloud native, headless CMS of it's built for enterprises, so it's scalable, it's composable. It's SaaS based, so everything's taken care of by Sitecore. It's nothing you have to worry about in terms of infrastructure, and then it includes quite a bit of other integrations into the other Sitecore products. So you could personalize you could integrate with CDP search, and obviously integrates with all the other Sitecore products. But one thing cameras reminded me yesterday is when XM cloud, three years ago, was the center of the universe with everything around it. Now you can kind of see the two distinct content management systems. So one is XM cloud, which is SAS based, the other one, which is still XP, still a great product for you know, whichever use cases apply to it, but manage also self hosted. But then all of the other products which Sitecore offers work well with either of those, and there's integrations into both those content management systems. So XM cloud, you know, is has improved quite a bit in the last three years. I Yep. So what is XM cloud? For those of you that don't know, it is a brand new offering from Sitecore, obviously not brand new anymore, but it was their headless, headless first SaaS based content management system guaranteed lightning fast performance using delivery from the edge, which made it vastly, vastly scalable, global scale and global flexibility. And you're not having to manage all of the infrastructure for that, for that scale, for that scale up, either you. Use because it was headless. You could use the technology that you whichever technology you wish to use for your front end delivery. So the one of flavor, of course, is next js, but you could have also used Angular and view, and they used to have, and they still do have starter kits for those, and.net Core, of course, is a is another one for those of you who have been moving along the site core path in the past, and they are that is, again, also being updated. And we'll talk about that a little bit later, because it is cloud first, you don't have to deal with the upgrades. It's much simpler for marketers and developers alike, due to, due to a lot of the advancements in the technology that I've been using, and the rebuild of a lot of the interfaces, especially here, and then talking about site. So when you think about enterprise, CMSs, you always, you know, think about multi site multilingual. You can absolutely do that. So you could have a multi site with multiple languages. The interface provides you the ability to provision those out, easily manage these sites and keep them separate, keep them together. You work with each other, but it's you still get all of the capabilities of the enterprise management system for sure. Yeah, I do like this new site interface that they have. I know in the site call world, we've been used to running multiple multi site instances, but this does allow you to quickly spin up and duplicate existing sites, microsites, campaign sites and update edit those who launch a brand new initiative. 

Along with that, of course, is a brand new visual editor. And again, we were discussing this yesterday, right again, actually, and over the past few months, when we talked about XM cloud three years ago, we applauded the fact that they had a lot of these features built in that a lot of other headless systems didn't right. So the visual editing, the in built capabilities around personalization, some of the integrated nature of the technology stack that they were bringing, and we were compared to a lot of the other headless systems, which were just talking purely about content and not about any of the visual aspects, whether it's how that content was being applied, it does matter this. We are very visual, visual creatures. Marketers and content authors are also very visual. They like to see what's going to end up, what their content is going to end up looking like. And Sitecore. Had the pages tool, a built, built on top of experience editor, which then became horizon, which then obviously became pages. Three years on, we're at the point, we are here where this is fully, completely working. You can do everything in pages. There were some aspects along the way. Of course, it's a tool that was being built out where, you know, you used to be to do something as an experienced editor, but you couldn't quite do it in pages, and you had to flip between a couple of different interfaces. But we're at the point now where pages is completely, you know, a standalone application. It's fully SAS innovations coming to it all the time, and you have to do any upgrades. It's just there. And it's very slick, it's very fast, it's very, very modern, and it's what you'd expect for this kind of SaaS based implementation of this day, yep, along with that, the Explorer. So this is, in a way, looking at it as a Content Editor used to be, back in the day again. It's basically gives you another editing tool for you to manage content really like you can edit specific content items you can access, you know, content items across all websites you can edit or manage, publishing with it. But just a different interface gives you an option over just using purely pages, you could use the Explorer in order for you to do your work. And this is a type of interface that most headless CMS is that you'd expect that just that basic kind of interface, but it's very, very useful for especially data heavy entry like that. You might have some events or some products or some simple blog where you just want to enter some data, you're not, you know, it's repetitive. You're not having to design pages, so to speak. Components was another new innovation from Sitecore. I don't think I've really seen. This anywhere else, but this is a visual editor for creating the components themselves, so not for creating pages, but for actually designing the components, which can then be reused throughout your site. It's really, really slick. You can you essentially end up with a canvas. You can go in, you can place. You can break up your canvas into multiple, like rows of columns, and then you place in like labels and text boxes. What's really, really neat is that you can then tie those into external or internal or external data sources. It could be data coming from site core, but it could be coming data coming from something like content hub, one or even any other content delivery API, maybe from a different system, or maybe have a pm or a dam, or even a different CMS, and they're connected. You can have them personally. They can, in turn, be personalized. 

So this is, this is very, very neat and a great innovation that's been perfected over the past few years. Yeah, your favorite? Inc, of course, yeah, my favorite. Yeah. And we have talked about this a lot throughout the year. We did a big webinar on this when it was launched almost a year ago, right? And we'll post up some links in the chat shortly. But this is a modern forms builder. We know that the forms are important for data collection, for interaction points and for other business needs. And the This allows the business users to go and dynamically create the forms they need with the types of forms, the types of validation, adding conditional logic, for example, you can then send that data off to external systems such as Workato or Sitecore connect, or any other iPad system, and they can then handle that data and push it into external systems and send emails, push it out to order ordering system, for example. But this gets now built into XM cloud without you needing a third party solution to it, and the forms will just render seamlessly. There's a built in component for the rendering itself as well. And you also got some nice things, like the analytics and reporting on, you know, how those forms are doing, what the solutions are looking like, yeah. The next piece, which is actually pretty important, is the embedded personalization. So by default, XM cloud comes with a flavor of personalization. It gives you ability to personalize your components, your pages. Just want to make you aware that the version that comes with XM cloud is basic. It's a subset of features of what you would get with actually the CDP or personalized but you can definitely add on CDP and personalize on top of XM cloud to bolster your personalization efforts, and it'll give you more capabilities of being able to see real time, being able to store data for more than 30 days, things like that, you would definitely get it. And hopefully this matrix gives you a really good understanding of what you get with XM cloud. But what do you get once you add CDP and personalize on top of it? And I think they work really, really well together if you add all of them on top of each other. And then you always just mentioned the CDP, and with that, we would, of course, expect to see some in depth analytics to go with that. So the neat thing is, as soon as you start using these things, they are very well integrated. These are separate systems. You get the basic CDP, you can still you can go up to the next level CDP, as you mentioned, we saw that product matrix earlier in the presentation, in the earlier slides, you can go to the full fledged CDP and go to the full fledged customization tool, and it's seamless. It's just a, you know, it's just an add on. You're not having to go and integrate those things yourself. But with those embedded analytics, you do get with those embedded analytics, you do see that within the pages tool, within the page insights, the site insights as well to see how those pages of performance performing, and you can then measure, adjust based on based on whatever campaigns you're running. Yeah, for sure. And this one is an interesting one. So the first time we saw this, we had a long conversation about this, because. This was unique to Sitecore at that moment in time, a singular portal where you can log in once you're authenticated, and you can jump between different products that you subscribe to. And I don't know if other providers provide this at this moment, but it is a cool concept, and it can even probably be awesome if you can integrate external providers as part of this. But having one jump point really, really helps. So Cloud portal is a centralized platform where it streamlines all of the digital, composable offering site core has you cannot see them all in one place. Your editors or authors can jump between them. So you know, in terms of what benefits you get. It's unified access, right? You have one single place where all the products that you have access to are there. 

You can manage users roles, who has access to work. So security control is really good. And then audit logging who logged in? What changes did they make? What did they do? Definitely helps. So I really think this is a very unique offering that Sitecore does is having one portal which is unifier for all of the products. So definitely want to mention that we've definitely seen that issue before, where people have been used to single tools, and then they've gone to the composable route, and now they have five different tools that they're having to log in and out of and try to integrate, and trying to piece together the Single Sign On this, the ability to integrate this with your internal Active Directory, for example, and then use the define, assign the roles and the permissions through your own active directory. Now that's something that's just been introduced recently, is fantastic. I think it gives the enterprises the full control, and they're not having to separately. Think about onboarding and offboarding. For example, when you have new team members join, deploy app. I think we've, as we've been working in this, in the site call world, I think one of the big issues we've always had is deployments and automated deployments. It's, I don't know how many times I've seen projects not have automated deployment pipelines, even to this day, which is just mind blowing to me, because it's one of the first things we like to do when we start on a project, because you can deploy once or twice, but it gets a little bit boring and time consuming after a little while. And when it gets boring, it becomes ever growing because people aren't paying attention. So having this deploy built and baked right into the product is really, really great. You can set up, you can just go in, configure the deployment endpoints where your way Your code is being hosted, and Sitecore will just manage all the build and deploy out to the various pieces, right? So you got any changes that you may have in the back end, we don't recommend it, right? But those back end services, as well as deploying those out to Vercel, for example, or Netlify, or wherever your front end provider is. So again, all with all with single authentication, single pipeline, single view, single portal. So that end to end integration is really neat. Yeah, no. I mean, as Canvas mentioned, the deployment, the easier you make it, the better it is. So just being how closely it's attached to the source control, so GitHub or Azure DevOp repositories, and I know they have integrations into GitLab and things too, but just being that close to the code how you can trigger a deploy, it goes into it the hosting integration, at least the ones we work with, which is Vercel specifically, really, really helps in terms of how well aligned both of them are. 

So you push a deployment out, it goes through pretty seamlessly, through the CICD definitely, definitely helps multiple approaches, right? So you could use the deploy app, you could use the CLI just giving you more flexibility in terms of what you can do definitely helps. And again, if you're using Vercel, you could look at feature deploys, and you could make it as complicated as you want or as easy as you want, but at the end of the day, it's what helps your organization work better. I'm a big fan of Vercel, and next year. So this is in my wheelhouse, and I really, really like how the DevOps has been set up with the repository, repository access and things like that. I'm a big fan of that. If I so, you know, I'll balance that out. I. Yeah, and then the cookbook cameras you want to take this one. I think you've been looking into this quite a lot recently, right? Yeah, yeah. So this is interesting, because I think the accelerate recipes for XM cloud is a very documented way. So basically, all it is, is it, it walks you through, if you're doing a new XM Cloud project, if you are working on an existing XP XM How do you move it to XM cloud? And it basically walks you through what you should be doing from a developer perspective, from an implementation perspective, from a user perspective, and it gives you guidance. And I think it's really helpful, especially if you haven't done many of these in the past, I kind of feel like it's a really good gage of what you should be doing. For instance, print zero what you should be doing, or which approach you should take. And cameras brought up this part, where it's a front end first approach, which is interesting, because all of the other SaaS based products, other CMS or E commerce systems expect you to just connect to the SaaS endpoint to do your development. So all you're worried about is just your front end. You're not worried about running things locally. So technically, you could run Docker and then do all of your development, but if you just do front end first, you're just building your front end, connecting it to your dev instance in XM cloud and getting your work done. So I feel like it's a really well documented way of doing things. How can you host How can you set up DevOps? What considerations you should take? What should be in Sprint Zero? How do you integrate with other systems? Definitely would look at that. I'll post a link for the accelerate recipe for XM cloud in the chat during one of the slide scanners is talking about. But it's super helpful, for sure. Yeah, I think that has been one of the big changes over the past three years, moving from that traditional development method, where, the past several years, with Sitecore, had moved to using Docker for development purposes. 

Those were XM XP on prem and local development even out to deployment, deploying out into Kubernetes and things, for example, you don't have to worry about any of that. Here it's, it's, they've moved to a front end first development for philosophy. So if you're working on this, they say, just go up, spin up a cloud instance, and then have your developers just clone their normal front end repository and just connect to that and work with that as they would any other SaaS based products. I think the we've been spoiled with Sitecore developers in the past, because we've had a lot of flexibility within the platform, and Sitecore gave us that flexibility with the initial launches of XM cloud, but and we always knew that they would be scanning this back, and then they're now saying, scale this back. Don't do any development on the X, on this, on the CM, the Sitecore instance, because that's going to mess up some of your upgrade paths and things like that. So they they've kind of scaled that back. Put this in these, put this recommendations in this cookbook, you can still do things like your custom templates and everything else. And then you connect with the CLI to that development environment, and that can then serialize those templates and renderings and layouts and everything else that we've been used to with Sitecore all this time. And then you check it into your source code, and then it goes through that deploy, deploy app, and it goes out to all the other environments. So there's nothing any different there. So you can still use Docker if you do have back end work that needs to be done, but for the vast majority of your team, it's going to be much more, quicker, much simpler, much faster, for onboarding, and your front end team is not going to be so confused about what they need to do with Docker and.net it's not something they really need to worry about. But I think more importantly, we have seen that there's a lot of enterprise customers who cannot run Docker even if they wanted to, due to policies, firewall rules, security lockdowns, etc. And you spend a lot, you waste a lot of time trying to debug these things, only for security to come back and say, Nope, we can't disable that rule. That's our policy.

 So this, I think, gets a this gets everybody moving on, working on site for XM cloud, extremely quickly, extremely fast, and you can see results very, very quickly. Ooh, question on everyone's mind. So this is, again, a couple of the things I mentioned in the recipes as well on the documentation. Side. But one of the biggest things is, you know, how do we get from XM XP to set core XM cloud? And there's a lot of well documented ways of doing it, for sure, one of the things is, you need to be in the most updated version of xmR XP before migrating. Will help quite a bit. And it also depends on case to case, right? So if you are already using XM, XP, JSs with Sitecore, Edge experience edge, life is a little bit easier. If you're not, then it's the path going to that, like how you walk through it, in terms of either you do everything at once, or you do some websites, move some websites, then get to the other ones, you have to think about all the customizations as cameras was taught has talked about So traditionally, in XPR or XM, we're used to customizing pipelines. We're used to customizing the way the UI goes, the way we index things, the way pretty much everything can be customized. And that becomes a problem in a pure SaaS mode, because you don't want to push those customizations as part of the core install, because then your upgrades will be painful. You don't want that. So most of those have to be architected in a way that you want to move away from customization on the instance, as opposed to maybe using web hooks or moving them to external systems which do the work for you. So this is really interesting to kind of take a look at it from a different approach. And every case is unique, because every instance is built in a unique way, specific to the customer or the need. So it takes a little bit of time to plan out, but a good point to make is, these are documented. They are on Cyprus website, but it doesn't give you some guidance. And the advantage, of course, going from XM XP, is you can still reuse a lot of your templates, a lot of your content. The migration path is, is simpler than having to remap everything across. But of course, it's always a good time to have a bit of a clean up as well. Yeah, for sure. So there's been a lot of updates, a lot of changes, a lot of innovation being brought to XM cloud over the past three years. Think we're seeing a lot of nice integrations. I don't want to say tighter integrations, because that's not what we do in the composable in the decoupled world. But those products stay standalone, but they're nicely integrated within the same ecosystem. So you're not having to take an XM cloud and figure out how to integrate a personalization tool or a CDB tool in that Sitecore has done that for you. If you just use add on and you just build up, they built those connectors and those integrations for you. But if you want to just use personalization on its own, or just CDP on its own, or just send or whatever ones of the whichever ones of those products, you can use them as standalone products, but within the ecosystem, it does make them a lot more powerful. So for the future, we did have a presentation after symposium with a lot of the announcements that Sitecore had made there. And of course, the big thing on everybody's lips is AI even this week. Of course, we've got the big news with deep seek, the cheaper alternative AI models that's been released. So this is, this is a world we're in now. 

Everything's going to be driving towards AI. And Sitecore announced a lot of new lot of news around AI is going to be integrated into their entire product suite, as you would imagine, within the content realm. Of course, generative AI is the big thing that's that really kicked off this revolution at this moment in time and with all the content within your own repositories. Of course, what you're going to want to do is have your custom LLM, your custom large language model, which speaks the way that you speak. So Sitecore stream will be looking at all the data that you have, all the content that you have. So that when you are asking it to generate some content for a new marketing campaign and you launch it can write in the same tone, in the same voice, in the same style as the rest of your products and the rest of your content. It's not going to be some very generic response that is giving and very generic, obvious chat GPT like responses that is that's going to be producing, as well as that, they're going to be integrating it in you can, you can have it integrated into things like brand awareness, so that when you have piece of when you've written a piece of content, it can then put it through AI enhanced workflow to say, Does this meet our brand guidelines? Are the. Is the imagery that you're using in this landing page. Match what our brand guidelines are, and does it fit in with the rest of our site? Couple that in and take that in deeper into things like search, so you can then run brand aware, context aware search and return results based on the what you've been what you've already been browsing, what you've already been looking for. For example, it can really, bring really, really relevant search results in. Or if it's a commerce site, then it can bring in products related to things that you've already bought. For example, with the ANA, with the personalization right, it can. It can really personalize based on what you have actually looked at. It can. And on the other end of that, it can actually suggest to the content authors and the marketing teams new segments that they could potentially target and how they could be slicing and dicing their audience better, for example. So there's a lot a lot of probability, lot of lot of possibilities here, and especially when you own this data, it's not generic data, it's very custom. And looking at the data that you already have and you've already collected, I did see a post by the successful CEO, Mark beneoff Yesterday, saying we've just seen deep seek launch being launched for $6 million is what the training cost of this was. AI is here to stay, but the commodity now comes from not the AI engine and the llms behind it, because they're becoming cheaper and cheaper, but the data, right? The data is going to data is King again, right? So before his content is king, data is King again. And so a lot of these AI agents, especially the AI agents, are going to be acting on data, the things you've done and things you potentially could be doing and personalizing and generating based on that. 

Yep, makes sense. Looking forward to that one. This was another one too, at the symposium cameras about the HIPAA compliance, or just from a HIPAA compliance perspective, all the rules and regulations of how the data must be stored at rest and in transit. I'm assuming all of those were taken care of. So now, if you have a HIPAA compliant customer or a solution, you can definitely use set core for it, yeah, and across the product suite as well, and that's the important time. Yeah. Cool. Marketplace. This is an interesting one. Our last topic marketplace is it used to be the old modules that was written by developers and things like that. They're all available in GitHub or NuGet and things of that sort. This is a little bit more of a polished version of it, hoping that it'll have pre built applications and connectors, things that Sitecore bills, as well as things that partners and other vendors create in order to create integrations, or just ability to do things right. And this is something which is supposed to be launched soon with a whole host of existing Marketplace apps and plugins. So I'm kind of excited for this one. Had a recent conversation which got me really excited about partner contributions, and we're trying to see if there's a way for us to contribute towards the App Store to help, you know, customers and solutions so super excited. Uh, can't wait to see this, yeah. And I think the important thing is that old marketplace kind of got a little bit abandoned and goes ghost town like, right? So people would upload modules and things, and then they just wouldn't be supported going because people have moved on, for example, or don't have time, or whatever that may be, and you'd have some really, really great modules there that just weren't supported in the later versions of Sitecore. So with this Sitecore, will be managing this entire ecosystem so, and obviously it's into XM cloud. 

So as updates and things are going to be made, I'm guessing Sitecore, we'll be following up to make sure that all those integrations continue to work as well. Cool and questions, I know we had a couple of questions. Thanks, Diego. I think Natasha had a question. We don't need to buy Sitecore form separately, and it's integrated in XM cloud by default, correct, yeah, it's out of the box. Says that there's no additional licenses. And you can, if you have an XM cloud instance, you can, you can use that straight away, yeah, which is, which is a good I am. Not seeing any other questions. So if you guys have questions, even after this, if you're re watching this or watching this at another time, just post it in the comments, and we will be sure to jump back in and answer any questions that you have. You can always reach us, cameras and I are and pretty much all the socials as well as on Sitecore, Slack and yep, we're here to help you whichever way we can. Thanks for joining us today. Have a good rest of your day. Bye.