Kentico Connection 2020: What's next for Kentico Xperience?

Kentico Connection is Kentico Xperience’s annual conference. This year’s event was 100% virtual and spread out over 2 days, filled with interesting keynotes and technical/business sessions. 

Here are our key take-aways! 

THE LAUNCH OF KENTICO XPERIENCE 13

Remember when we talked about Kentico Phoenix? Kentico launched their latest version as Xperience 13. This version includes: 

·       The introduction of .NET Core development

·       Redesigned marketing automation possibilities

·       Kentico Toolkit for third-party platforms designed to speed up development and empower marketers using Kentico Xperience

·       Integrations with voice assistants Amazon Alexa and Google Home to control the administration interface

The new interface looks good and is very user friendly, as we expect from Kentico:

MARKETING AUTOMATION

In terms of marketing automation, I can say I really like the possibilities here. Kentico Connection had some dedicated sessions about the marketing automation tool.

It’s now possible to save the marketing automation plan as a template to be used when creating new processes:

Kentico now included time-based triggers, to define the occurrence when the plan should kick off:

The embedded email editor makes it possible to edit the email template or create a new one right away within the marketing automation tool, which is really a nice feature of the all-in-one solution that Kentico Xperience is:

From within the marketing automation plan, you can navigate to the analytics of specific steps with just one click:

THE NEXT-GENERATION DXP, GOING SAAS

With the support for .NET Core development for Xperience 13, Kentico is going full in on the newest technology. However, the mothership platform’s current version, and Kentico Xperience 13, are still on older .NET WebForms technology.

Kentico is very ambitious and presented the plans to rebuild the platform fully to .NET Core and introduce a cloud-first strategy, which means they want to offer Kentico Xperience as SaaS. Next to SaaS, it will be possible to install on PaaS or IaaS and even your own datacenters as well. The architecture will run on containers to have cross-platform support.

All the functionalities of Kentico Xperience will still be available in the next-gen platform:

The plan is to release the Next-Gen DXP by the end of 2021, but in parallel keep building innovations on Kentico Xperience 13 and have regular releases, called “Refreshes”.

Interested how Kentico can elevate your business?

Blastic is a Kentico Gold Partner with extensive knowledge about all Kentico solutions.