'Sitecore 9.3: What's new'

During this year's Sitecore Symposium it became clear that it’s not only important to deliver experiences but what’s most important is to bring value to your customers. Sitecore’s purpose is to provide human connections in order to deliver this value.

As we all know by now, personalization is the technique to deliver the right message at the right time to deliver value to the customer. What we also know is that we need the data to provide these personalized messages. But what’s most important is to have the content that needs to be provided.

Gartner says that by 2020, 90% of brands will practice at least one form of marketing personalization. However, content – not data – will be the bottleneck and primary cause of failure.

This is what is meant with the content crisis. Sitecore has included the Sitecore Content Hub in their portfolio which is now the full platform to solve your content crisis:

During the Sitecore Symposium, of course some new features have been announced – here’s a recap with my takeaways, including:

Please not that this article contains pictures i took with my phone, so quality isn't always great. Also, some material from Pieter Brinkman's presentation is included.

WHAT’S NEW IN SITECORE 9.3?

Sitecore revealed version 9.3 of their Experience Platform with a bunch of new features. I’m highlighting a few of them: The long-awaited new content editing experience (also known as Horizon), enhanced EXM templates and Sitecore AI.

Horizon: the next generation editing environment

Horizon’s philosophy to have everything one click away and can be installed as a module on Sitecore 9.3 and includes simple page editing, analytical insights (overview of page performance) and a preview in simulator (different device types and date selection).

Finally, we have a first version of Horizon available with basic functionalities. I hope additional functionalities will become available soon (including Zenith and the marketing toolbox dashboard interface).

EXM: Enhanced template management

Yes! The out of the box available email templates have been modernized. New templates have been released: Announcement, Alternating Columns and Call To Action Focus including out of the box components to be used in your EXM email messages.

Marketing Automation: Scheduled plan enrollment

A new feature for marketing automation plans is the enrollment of contacts in a segmented list based on a schedule: a certain time of the day, a certain day of the week or at a given date.