XM Cloud - is it really the future for Sitecore?

Akshay Sura 

Today, we'll be talking about Sitecore XM Cloud. And it's really the future of Sitecore. And I think one of the things before we get into it Kamruz and I were talking about Sitecore has bought a lot of these companies, right? We were like, what are the names of the products again, XM cloud, order cloud, personalize, Sitecore search is discover and it is confusing. And it's not like Kamruz and I have been our newcomers to Sitecore. Alright, we've been here for 13, 15 years. And the two last few years have changed a lot. So there is a lot of confusion in terms of names, the names keep evolving, as you know, Sitecore evolves the product as well. So we're trying to do the same thing as you are trying to keep up with things and try to explain it as we see it. And that's what this video is all about. I will I guess an introduction, right. So my name is Akshay Sura. I'm a Sitecore MVP. I've been doing sidecar for a while and our job is to educate fellow MVPs fellow Sitecore community members and with me, I have my partner in crime,

Kamruz Jaman 

and Kamruz Jaman, and they have been in Sitecore for a while. 10 times Sitecore MVP.

Akshay Sura 

Cool. Look at me. Alright, so what is this video for? So we wanted to be very certain you could get into it's very easy to get into technicalities and go through these rabbit holes and get too technical. But what we wanted to do was make this video a little bit more. For people who are the decision makers who want to know what is this XM cloud? How does it benefit me? Or how does it help us improve things? Or is it worth us looking to migrate to it things like that. So we're not going to get into too much technical, too much into the technical aspect of it, but we will try to cover the best we can. So the CMO CIO CTOs, architects, and decision makers can have a very knowledgeable discussion with their peers. So this video is going to have a lot of things. And hopefully, we're gonna try to wrap it up really fast. But we want to do detailed videos on each of the topics we talk about, because each of them do warrant more explanation, some of the more technical, some of them more exploratory and more marketing. So like, we have to figure it out. This is not a sales pitch. So we're just sharing what we know. And we've spent a lot of time with Sitecore employees as well as others in the community in order to figure out, you know, XM Cloud, what does it mean to us? What does it mean to the customer? So we're just trying to share our knowledge. We're going to talk about headless and composable. Because that's a prerequisite for us to have this talk, you'll understand why. What does XM you know, the perception of XM Cloud , what it is not is super important to know, what does this XM Cloud include? And if you're thinking about migrating to it, is it possible? How can it be done again, we're going to just skim through them and seem to it and then go into detail in a little bit. So to kick us off, what is XM Cloud so I'll take my first stab at it, see if I understand it, right so XM cloud according to Sitecore is brand new CMS which will help us create and deliver content superfast. It's similar to how we talk about more from a composable perspective, right like the its speed to market whether in terms of development or marketing, deploying your channel specific content being very omni channel, being super faster doing it and the best part about XM cloud, the hope is that we'll have the same awesome authoring experience that we're used to in our classic XM or XP model. That's what I understand Kamruz have what is it? According to you? How do you understand I think

Kamruz Jaman 

I think you've got some good points there. I think one of the, one of the most important points about XM Cloud is, as the name suggests, it's cloud based, right? It's a SaaS offerings and Sitecore. And this is aiming to reduce some of those burdens that we have with a traditional XM installation on prem or a Azure, right. And which is, you know, the maintenance and the upgrades. And, you know, moving up to the next versions, as features are released, bug fixes, and everything else that goes with it. So it has, it brings us all of the familiarity of XM. But it's now cloud and SaaS based. So we don't have to deal with all of the infrastructure, the scaling, the geo distribution of all of our content and our site.

Akshay Sura 

That's a good point. I totally missed that. Yeah, it's fully managed, which means Sitecore takes care of everything. And just like any other service, you don't have to worry about how its deployed, how it's stored. Is it in containers, is it in virtual machines, it's not our problem, we subscribe to the service, we have SLA s with the service provider with Sitecore. And they manage it and that's the key difference. And like Kamruz said also

Kamruz Jaman 

other things around XM Cloud we have a slide coming up, but it's not. So it's not just a traditional XM. XM CMS as we know it, there's a lot of periphery systems that go with it to make the XM, the entire XM Cloud offering.

Akshay Sura 

Alright, so next, you're up Mr. Kamruz, what's composable DXP?

Kamruz Jaman 

Right, so we've been talking about composable DXP, myself and Akshay and Konabos as a company for a few years now. We presented SUGCON recently on our journey to composable. And as a .NET Architect. So one of the distinguishing features with composable DXP is these little small services is micro services, micro systems that you bring together, best of breed systems that you bring together to compose your digital experience platform, to have a system for content or have another system for search, you have another for commerce and other for personalization, and then you orchestrate all of this together, and bring it together into a presentation layer. So that will be your website. And which, which then brings you your composable digital experience platform.

Akshay Sura 

That's awesome. And you can go to composable. In your own time, it's agile, you don't have to do all at once. It sounds like repetition, but education needs repetition. So and all the systems you can either reuse what you have or find the best of breed for your company, not necessarily best of breed for the industry. The next thing is monolith for vs headless CMS. So I think we've gone through this as well. So monolith system, it's all in one, right? So the way you do things are the content, deal with the content, publishing content, as well as building something is very tightly coupled in one system. As opposed to headless, where you have your content models, you do the authoring the authoring experience, and everything is done inside of the headless system. But remember, the core duty of a headless CMS is to provide you omni channel content. And by definition, Omni channel content, headless CMS doesn't really know how this content gets used. Its job is to let you add the content and provide the content to you using an API endpoint whichever way you want. And how you use it. Whether you use it in a mobile app, a POS system, a website is your domain at that moment, and you're free to choose whatever you need to in order to implement that. And that's a key distinction. We want to mention, because as we talked about XM cloud, these will come into purview and will become important for you.

Kamruz Jaman 

Absolutely your frontend is completely decoupled from your back end right it's using API's is a very, very loose system of consuming content. The front end consumes the content from the back end they are completely the decoupled.

Akshay Sura 

Yep. So you know, we've seen, like all the people who are probably watching this video, we've been through Sitecore to everything through the 5.3 to six to seven to eight to nine to 10 version and we've gone through some changes stayed with the core. The XM cloud as we understand it, does look like a step in the right direction more towards coming was ability more towards being that omni channel source of content as Kamruz mentioned earlier in the in the video that it now pushes to the edge Sitecore edge was there for a while now, it's proved itself, it's an endpoint available and it gets pushed to all the CDN'saround the world. So you can pull things from wherever it is really easily and use it in whatever you want. So it is a step in the right direction, just remember that Rome wasn't built in a day. Sitecore is putting in a lot of effort. And you can see that in the way they're trying to communicate with the at least the community folks are trying to share information. And I'm sure there's a lot of products in the backlog which has come which are coming in which will help you with your composability. But it is going towards more of a composable DXP future and XM cloud does let you do that. Alright, next, this is an interesting slide. So a lot of Asterix is everywhere. But we want to cover that. So there's misconceptions about XM Cloud. So I think Kamruz in it was talking about it. And with a few other MVP too, there's a lot of new terminology XM Cloud this experience Sitecore experience XM cloud, there's different names for products and product names keep evolving, as the branding keeps evolving. One thing is clear is that it's not a monolith platform anymore. It is XM Cloud is a combination of multiple things like what like Kamruz has said it is a I think certain people in tech are frowned upon being called as a platform. So platform, according to the dev folks in Sitecore is a fully customized self managed kind of system. But remember, XM Cloud is a fully managed service, you can just install a production instance of it on your own VM, it is fully managed. So Sitecore maintains all of that. And now I will stop talking after this Kamruz. But think of the concept of service, right? This is a service provided to you. And when you have used multiple services, you don't want those services to be customizable. What I mean by that, you know, my own explanation is, I wouldn't want a headless CMS headless commerce provider to be customizable at its core in the sense that the way we are used to Sitecore, the way we've built sites forever is we customize the pipelines, we customize the rendering pipelines, we customize the request pipelines, we do a lot of things to our CMS, a lot of them are necessary. But a lot of them could be done a different way. And what you have to think when you're consuming a service from a provider is for them to provide different things. So we'll get into how that's possible in a service scenario. But just remember that expectation wise don't expect it to be 100% customizable.

Kamruz Jaman 

yeah, don't expect it to be Sitecore XM, I think it's probably important. XM Cloud is not Sitecore XM, although the look and feel and it's probably based on XM is not the same way. We don't want to develop for XM cloud, in the traditional ways that we've been used to developing for XM and XP, right? I think one of the misconceptions and throw a few comments on the social is like, I want to be able to deploy CSS and JavaScript files and customize it and do this and do that. Actually don't because that's been the problem, write our code. The platform and our custom code is so intertwined that when I go to do an upgrade, that's where we hit the roadblocks, right? That's, that's the pain or the upgrades in Sitecore does something changes something in a way that I wasn't expecting it to change it or introduce a breaking change or whatever that is right. Now breaks my code. Whereas if I don't do any customization to it, I got no code to break, right. This is the way it works with other composable SaaS based systems. It's a way that Salesforce has worked from day one, right? And they were obviously pioneers in in this SaaS service offering. I do not deploy code into Salesforce, I can go in and I can customize it in terms of, you know, the, the Salesforce objects, and in this case, the Sitecore templates and the renderings and allows me to do all of that customization. It makes customization but not code base customization.

Akshay Sura 

Not saying that you shouldn't do customizations you can write like, by doing other things like web hooks, or in your own front end application or the application which consumes the edge endpoint. You can absolutely do your customization is this where it's done, and where it expected is what You need to change your mindset on because other service providers don't provide it. I think Sitecore by default, is used to a lot of the implementers. Customizing, and they're trying to make it easier for you to transition in. But technically, on paper Sitecore should have been like no customizations at all. But they're trying to give you a bridge to go past it. But once you get onto the other side, you should not expect many, many customizations. So what does XM cloud include? So this is this is an interesting topic. Part of the reason why Kamruz and I are on this call, trying to record this, as we saw a lot of people talking about it, there's documentation available, but interpreting it or not asking the right questions won't give you the right answers. And that's kind of the reasons why we're here to hopefully try to give you some clarity and dig deeper once we once we get past this video. So content authoring experience, that's such an interesting, interesting statement. So one of the things Sitecore claims is you will have a great visual content authoring experience, we've always had an amazing content authoring experience, I think in the in the C in the CM instances, because the experience editor is very customizable, it's really, really good and can do a lot of things. And it was slow. It's okay. But I have yet to see a visual editor like experience editor, so they're hoping to keep that thing going to give that kind of capability using the editing host for someone to be able to have this content authoring experience. Do you know anything about this part Kamruz and what you've read and spoken to people? Yeah, we

Kamruz Jaman 

had a bit of a demo preview of this at SUGCON, if you remember, it was at the time it was called Symphony right and now renamed to Sitecore pages. It's an enhancement of, of Sitecore horizon, which is next generation Content Editor. But yeah, as you say, we're so used to in Sitecore, being able to go and create pages exactly how we want with the set of components that we want. But we forget that this isn't the normal editing experience. So normally, you go in, you have a page template. And that's what you're getting on the pages. For us in the Sitecore world. That's just the starting point of our canvas, for our for our content. So Sitecore has always accelerated this, and it's great to see them bringing this bring this forward into this space, it's much needed. And it's worked well for all of our content authors in the past.

Akshay Sura 

Yeah, and so just to start things off, XM cloud will have a cm content management, there's two flavors for it. One we can talk about today. And one we don't really know much about which is the headless CMS, which is very pure, headless CMS content modeling, content authoring publishing. Not much else. And that's in the works. We don't know when but we'll hear about it. The flavor we are going to talk about is the CM instance, which we which is based on the CM we used to, you get all your content modeling, authoring personas, like everything you're used to, you're gonna get that that's something we're going to talk about unified identity. So I think a lot of people have talked about it, we have identity services. In the past, we've all worked with different identity services. What makes this one a little bit interesting and different is that this is the identity the for all Sitecore SaaS based products. So where this becomes crucial. And I mean, he doesn't have the federated authentication at this moment. But that's the number one feature anyone wants. And I think they're working on it. But the unified identity the imagine something like a Sitecore portal, which we'll go into next is Sitecore portal is just a jump off point for all Sitecore SaaS based services. So you might be in send. You want to you know, from your portal, you can go to your CM instance, you could go to Sitecore send, order  cloud personalized CDP all from one jump off point. And it's possible because you have unified identity so I think it's kind of cool. I saw the screenshots for portal I think it's icon do and it looks kind of like a really nice Launchpad.

Kamruz Jaman 

And this was if you remember in our talk at SUGCON, this was one of the disadvantages of composable DXP these separate systems and there's no you have to DIY yourself together a dashboard. Yeah, this dashboard, but in a portable Launchpad. So yeah, it's great to Sitecore you know, looking at this, looking at the environments and seeing Okay, well, these are the things that are missing and this is the things that Enterprise customers are expecting so, you know, the portal was one of these much needed Launchpad that we used to Sitecore Launchpad. Right? Yeah, the unified entity Single Sign On across all your services. Again, this is just almost a basic thing we expect in this day and age from, from a company.

Akshay Sura 

Yeah. And that's, that's the, that's the best part of that. And then Kamruz mentioned there. So you could have several XM cloud environments. Each environment, in turn has the CM instance again, flavor one and two, but right now, it's only flavor one and edge tenant. You guys heard about edge for the past couple of years, if I'm not wrong, we've actually used it quite a bit in our demo as well. Basically, these are CDN endpoints where all your published data goes to, and people can use a Graph QL endpoint to query them search them. And then you know, it also has the JSS endpoint, I believe at the end of it. I've never used it, but I've heard of it. So you can use that and it's geo located everywhere. And then you have a pages tenant as well. So pages is this new app Kamruz, which lets you have editing experience on the CM?

Kamruz Jaman 

Yeah, so it's that is a content authoring experience that we spoke about. It's so as you mentioned earlier, evolving names. It's the new name for Sitecore symphony, which was Sitecore horizon, which was the precursor to experience editor. And page editor, as we used to call it, right. So you still love. So yeah, Sitecore pages is a new name. It's the new content authoring experience. In terms of the CM instance, of course, it's not just types of CMS that you were talking about. It could be your dev, UAT, production instance, as well. So I don't have to host any of those environments, I can just have Sitecore host, all of those, all of those environments. The Edge tenant, as you mentioned, that uses the experience edge, the published content for your site. So it's almost like your content delivery nodes as we had used to happen. Obviously, we don't build in the same way. But it's kind of the equivalent of a semi quasi contract delivery node, but globally, scale.

Akshay Sura 

Yep. And then so like the instance. So in the in the dashboard, which is the next one, basically, that's the dashboard of your CM instance. Right. So the each instance, you can have multiple sites, the site creation is very similar to how you would create an SXA site. So it'll ask you for the host name, the path, all of that fun stuff to create the, you could have multiple sites in the tool section, if you've been part of the preview. In the tool section, you have all the tools like PowerShell, all the things which you usually see in your Sitecore admin area are available there, including, I think, right now even Content and Experience editor in there, I don't know how long they will be as pages evolves, those might drop off. And then you have your host of deployment tools, I'm no longer into like the deployment part. But there are CLI tools available. There's a lot of tools available for you to deploy how you deal with it locally. And we can get into more of the technical stuff later on. But essentially, all of this encompasses XM cloud. And one thing to remember is, right now, customizations are allowed, but they're not encouraged. So remember, it's a service. If you want your upgrades, patches, things to be smoother, try to keep the customizations away from your CM instances. So yes, it is possible, but at the same time, you should look for future versions where web hooks are available for you to take those customizations out of needing from the CM instance, and then move them elsewhere. So you still customizing but not clouding up the instance, you shouldn't

Kamruz Jaman 

need to customize the instance right? You can, if you're building your system in a micro service, composable architecture, then you can use serverless functions, or you put code into your own where you're consuming it. One of the things we talked about was customizing URLs, right to then Sitecore we will do a custom link manager to do this. But I don't need that because the links are not generated by the CM. They're generated by the code consuming in the at the end. So there are if you're if you're going to customize and stop thinking again, do you really need to do really, really, really need to customize it? Or is there a better way of doing this?

Akshay Sura 

Yeah. And then final topic for today is migration. And one thing before we get into migration, just to remind you of the headless CMS is they are decoupled right, like by definition headless in a composable space. What you do as content is decoupled from the UI, which is a lot different than how we're used to in traditional Sitecore instances that we that we have dealt with. So every use case would be different depending on your current install, how many customizations you have, the path to getting into XM cloud can be easy or super difficult. And we'll get into a deep dive on this in another topic, but I'm gonna bring up a point Kamruz made and let him talk for the rest of this is. Migration isn't just about data. It's a lot more than data. So Kamruz, can you expand upon that?

Kamruz Jaman 

Yeah, so we typically think of migrations as very technical projects, right. So I need to migrate my content from one instance to another instance, I need to migrate the templates and the layout and renderings and I need to migrate the code and my friend Insights is rendered. But that's not the only thing that you need to migrate. You also need to migrate all of your users and the content authors. And you need to migrate the way they worked from system x to system y. And I think that is an important part, if you're be using if your content authors have been using Sitecore for a long time. They know how the system works, they know how it's structured, they know how the workflow works, you know, how the users are set up and the permissions are set up? And how to add components onto a page as a publish etc, etc, etc. So one of the one of the things was XM is an XM cloud is, you know, the, the content editor is exactly the same as XM content answer pages is different as a newer version, but the process is the same, right? You would go in you would add a component, you would select the data source, etc, etc. So I think there is a lot to be said for Mike, the migration of the content author for the content authors and the experience that they will face. Yeah.

Akshay Sura 

And as usual, questions, we might not have answers to all your questions. We're here to help. If you have questions, ping us on Slack, Slack the easiest way to get to us. There's people there's a specific channel for XM cloud in there. If you start to work with XM cloud and you have like an error or you're working with something and you don't know what's happening and if you think that this piece of information is useful to others, post a question in Sitecore stackexchange useful to other people and doesn't just get answered and forgotten. So we are here. ping us if you have any questions. I hope you found this useful. We will come up with detailed videos for the each of the topics to take a deeper dive thank you so much for watching. Thank you.