Sitecore recently held their annual partner conference, Dreamcore 2010, in Copenhagen, Denmark, and a delegation from Codehouse attended the event. After two days of pleasant Sitecore dreams in Copenhagen – packed with speakers from Sitecore partners and customers from both Denmark and abroad – we have put together a boiled-down resume of the most interesting take-homes from Dreamcore 2010. They are being distributed with two different perspectives on the event.
From a developers perspective.
Building Maintainable Sitecore solutions and Team Development.
Hedgehog Development and Pentia showed off their approach to developing
Sitecore solutions in both small and large project teams. Hedgehog’s product Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) is an add-in for Visual Studio and a web service for Sitecore enabling you to put Sitecore items under version control by using Sitecore’s serialization feature whereby you can save items as files on the disk. Additionally, Version 2 enables deployment of item-updates directly from within Visual Studio and build servers which makes deployment more controlled and automated.
Massive release.
The next big Sitecore version, codenamed “Massive”, will introduce a lot of new exciting features across the entire data model. Sitecore will be leaving the “tree structure” and its inherent limitations in order to introduce a “Graph” data structure. The “
Graph” data structure enables even larger amounts of data than today and performs even better too. Additionally, Sitecore will add transaction-based updates (Unit of Work) and publishing. Another long awaited feature is “pluggable cache” which enables you to configure Sitecore to run with a distributed cache, i.e. caching distributed on multiple servers in a web farm.
Until now Sitecore hasn’t revealed which new features they have to offer editors and administrators in the UI – but our guess is that something will happen.
From a marketing perspective.
The Keynotes.
Dreamcore was introduced with two keynotes that both tried to create a framework for these days with Sitecore by establishing a more abstract context for Sitecore’s role in the future. Sitecore CEO Michael Seifert delivered a vision about the future of online business which, in his view, will focus on more intimate interaction with customers. The scope for businesses will thus be to meet the customers with personalized, individual content (read: use the features in
Sitecore OMS). Tim Walters from Forrester subsequently made it clear that “WCM is dead!” but the term lives on. It is no longer about “Content Management” but about creating and stimulating the relationship with your customers across different platforms with different goals.
Thanks to John West, CTO of Sitecore USA, the experienced Sitecore users could add additional finger combinations to the palette of keyboard shortcuts in Sitecore and get insight into some of the lesser known features.
Sitecore’s Vice President of Marketing, Paul Markun, unveiled the success stories from Sitecore’s own online marketing (again, read: OMS is really, really good) as well as what they have planned for the near future. One of the main things Sitecore is working on is ways to improve the sharing of knowledge between partners and developers. As part of this strategy Sitecore will re-launch the Sitecore Developer Network with a new blog section.
Manchester City FC on Sitecore.
Manchester City FC’s new website is built on Sitecore CMS and it is the online manifestation of the club’s goal to create the world’s leading entertainment website and the technical implementation of that goal by British agency Aqueduct. The result is an online universe which more than anything else includes the fans by letting them comment and contribute, follow live feeds from matches and, of course, purchase tickets and merchandise online.
The new website for Manchester FC is a stunning example of how Sitecore CMS can support a modern online entertainment platform which includes every contemporary communications channel: from video and audio to a shop and integration of social media.
Bonus info.
As a bit of bonus info we can point your attention to the fact that if you are a non-technical marketer/communications person you chose wisely by not attending the presentation “Sitecore’s hidden secrets” by Lars Fløe Nielsen, Vice President of Technical Marketing with Sitecore. That experience primarily contained slides filled with lines of code, technical references and other really techy terms – which to the ears of the uninitiated, non-techy quickly transformed into completely incomprehensive, persistent static. But to Sitecore developers was no doubt fascinating stuff!
PowerPoints, code and videos from Dreamcore 2010 in Copenhagen will be available on
Sitecore’s Developer Network.
If you want to know more about Sitecore and how you can leverage all the fantastic features of the Sitecore CMS and adapt them to your business then
call Codehouse. We are ready and very keen to help.