The Sitecore 10.4 Platform will live on!

With the coming of Sitecore’s latest SaaS offering, Cloud XM, many customers may be concerned that Sitecore is abandoning the traditional Sitecore platform. However, Sitecore has recently promised that they will continue to evolve and transform the Sitecore Platform to grow with the emerging technologies that keep the product relevant and useful for its customers. In keeping with that promise, they recently released the 10.4 XM/XP platform that contains hundreds of enhancements and resolutions.

The Digital Experience Platform (DXP) seems to be at the forefront of their priorities with this release. Even though their own site states that a cloud-native, SaaS CMS is critical to fully embrace a composable future, they seem adamant on proving that a traditional CMS can also provide a strong foundation for building out a DXP solution. With new integrations into other composable products such as Sitecore Connect, Sitecore CDP, Sitecore Personalize, Sitecore Content Hub and Power BI to name a few, the traditional Sitecore platform can now feed seamlessly into these other products providing maximum flexibility with what you can do with your customer data that you are collecting in your traditional CMS platform.

Marketing is also a major focus with this release as several of the integrations serve the purpose of collecting and combining your marketing data for analytics and personalization, but several changes to the platform itself also lends to helping you create a user experience that is like no other. With the ability to trigger campaigns and goals based on rules, you now have greater control over what is being shown to your users and when. A new bulk assignment for marketing definitions allows you to more easily associate marketing campaigns to multiple content items at the same time. Additionally, a planned Codeless Schema Extension module is being worked on that will allow business users to extend the xConnect schema without requiring code development.

On top of these focus areas, Sitecore is showing its commitment to the platform through various updates and enhancements that are sure to improve your experience with the CMS. This includes new accessibility improvements for the content editor, creation of a new Sitecore Client Content Reader role that grants access to content tree items in the content editor and media library by default, and the ability to add custom languages that extends beyond those ISO language formats that are registered in .NET. It also includes many different performance improvements that are likely to have a dramatic impact on your solution such as soft commits for Solr, rebuilding indexes, and management of links in the LinkDatabase.

If you are looking to make a move towards XM Cloud, XCentium can accelerate the process with our XMC Accelerator. This tool helps streamline migration, saving you time and resources while providing you with the latest in digital experience management.

Sitecore is proving why they are an industry powerhouse with this latest release and that the traditional Sitecore Platform will continue to be a competitive and powerful CMS as you move towards the future with the ever-changing landscape of technologies available for marketing and content-driven websites.

If you’re still deciding on whether to upgrade to Sitecore 10.4 or migrate to Sitecore XM Cloud, XCentium is offering a free comprehensive assessment to guide your decision. Contact us for a free consultation.

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