Timing is everything

In our increasingly demanding world, ‘time to market’ has become an issue that marketers, designers and developers have to strive to reduce.

Sitecore realised this and addressed it with an enhancement called the Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA). No doubt a huge sigh of relief filtered through the Sitecore fraternity because what the SXA does is to allow marketers to initiate agile marketing techniques a lot quicker, thereby ensuring their digital marketing programmes are put to market in a timelier fashion.

Sitecore 8.2 has gone even further that its predecessors by introducing extra features

The SXA

The SXA has a robust drag-and-drop feature enabling marketers to quickly create web and mobile experiences with an advanced toolset of more than 80 pre-built components. Pretty nifty…What’s more, web designers can also get in on the act as they can easily create styling themes for projects – without a great deal of previous Sitecore experience. The promise of SXA is an exciting one. We look forward to taking it for a spin.

The Experience Editor in Sitecore 8.2 has more features
The Experience Editor is more powerful

Express Migration Tool

Sitecore 8.2 has a time-reducing feature called Express Migration Tool. This enables existing Sitecore customers running version 7.2 or later, to migrate data from previous Sitecore versions during the upgrade process. This does look promising (assuming that you are already on 7.2 or above).

What else does Sitecore 8.2 offer?

The impressive Experience Editor has also had a make-over.

Now, all page components with associated content (data sources) are highlighted in green. Another highly useful enhancement is the visibility of a data source’s workflow state and the number of pages the component features on; all displayed in the familiar floating toolbar. This feature enables content authors to see all content items associated with each page, and any workflow state of associated content items may be in. Staying with workflow states, in Sitecore 8.2, data sources move through their respective workflow states with the page they are associated with.

There are also notifications in the Experience Editor. These notifications have been introduced to stop content authors publishing incomplete pages. All this, combined with the features that allow for versioning of layouts, personalisation and testing, makes the Experience Editor a slick and comprehensive interface for quickly building adaptable pages.

Summary of features:

  • Sitecore Experience Accelerator
  • Express Migration Tool
  • Publishing enhancements
  • Experience Editor enhancements
  • Improved analytics reporting and charting

We're looking forward to getting our teeth into Sitecore XP 8.2, to take advantage of its rich feature set, and to help our customers leverage its diverse functionality.

If you'd like help getting under the skin of Sitecore, then get in touch with us. We'd love to hear from you.