Almost one year ago #Sitecore released Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud (aka XM Cloud) to the public. The most important part was that the product is now offered as a SaaS solution with seamless upgrades, which made developers happier. But what about digital marketers who create content, campaigns and personalization? You'll find out in this blog post 😊!
🛸 XM? XP? X-what?
If you're working with content, you probably don't know all these developer abbreviations, but important thing here is that you've likely worked with Sitecore XP (Experience Platform) before, and cloud version is XM (Experience Manager), which essentially means you won't find (in their old place and form):
- A/B tests
- Personalization
- Forms
- Email Campaigns
- Analytics Campaigns
- Analytics Reports
👻 But where did it go?
Since Sitecore platform is now 'composable', most of these features are parts of the different products now, with XM Cloud being the content management platform (with native integrations to some products).
So, Personalize handles A/B tests and all kinds of personalization / analytics, and Sitecore Send (I have an article about it) is for emails as well as forms.
There is still Content Hub for your assets, and it is also tightly integrated into the platform.
🆕 Same, but new
So if I was to characterize it one sentence - I'd say - "It is the same as Sitecore XM used to be, with some extra features and lots of integrations on top of it".
You will still find the good old Content Editor, Experience Editor, as well as Desktop interface. There are basically 3 new items at the launchpad:
- Pages
- Components
- Explorer
You can think of Pages as of what 'Horizon' used to be - the UI that was intended to replace Experience Editor, but never got as mature.
Pages has the same mission, and should be used for visually editing pages by default, unless there is a bug or something is not compatible with Pages (i.e. custom Sitecore modules).
It definitely feels quicker than Experience Editor 👍 and overall is a good tool for building new layouts, but don't expect it to handle all field types, like drop lists / trees, at least as of writing this post. Some time ago the date & time fields were not editable too, so keep the Content Editor as a fallback.
Components is a completely new product which deserves its own blog post (and I'll write it later) that allows you (digital marketer) to create your own custom components visually and map them to the data templates. It is hard to say how useful it will be, but whereas you're allowed to go that extra mile and add some creativity - you'll be able to do it.
Explorer is also a new tool, which looks like a modern version of Content Editor, but I've found it too limited in terms of field types support, and I can't see how it would replace it in my daily job. Maybe it is there for 'exploring' the site, or better usability on iPad / mobile devices, but I haven't found a use case for it yet.
One other item worth mentioning is the new 'Sites' UI. It is basically a nicer version of the previous "New Site" dialog in Sitecore Experience Accelerator and might be useful if you often create campaign sub-sites.
📰The good news?
If you have experience with Sitecore editing interfaces (even back from Sitecore 6 or above) you will not have to re-learn much to edit content and create new pages. It took me less than a day to learn the new tools that XM Cloud has to offer. But keep in mind, Sitecore platform now consists of multiple products so you'll likely have to learn a few of them to be able to help your client.
I will try to cover each of these products in the future posts, feel free to share your feedback and suggest the topics for future posts 😉!
🤝Just so... you know
If you are planning a new project on XM Cloud, or need help with any of Sitecore's products (composable or good old) - the author of this blog post is looking for a job! Part-time or full-time, on-site in Ottawa/Kanata or remotely anywhere in the world! Simply DM me on LinkedIn to get in touch.