After a good nights sleep and a good breakfast at the Sitecore MVP Summit location: Le Meridien, Day 3 of the MVP Summit started.
Nate Barad took the stage together with Jeppe Grue and Ryan Donovan on the Sitecore Roadmap for the future. Nate started with his marketing talk on Sitecore in General. Context is everything. Sitecore uses the contextual information to help you know your customer, to beter shape the experience they have with you. Using the past context in order to serve the client better in the future.
Jeppe Grue then walked us through the Roadmap themes and the upcoming overall investments and gave us an insight in the the future version of the Sitecore Experience Platform, which can’t be shared with the public unfortunately.
Again, just like yesterday, a lot of questions for Ryan Donovan and Jeppe Grue on certain area’s that Sitecore is investing in. Secret stuff like always.
Platform Evolution, Update vNext Last Year
What a great session by Stephen Pope. Wow what was shared really will transition the way you develop with Sitecore for the upcoming future. It will be revolutionary. This session was highly classified so nothing can be shared.
Everybody was looking for this session and Stephen delivered as always. What an energy, what a demo and what a great insight we got. Makes it really special to be an MVP and to have this insight on what Sitecore is doing to the future of the platform.
Commerce Evolution & integration – Ryan Donovan & Kerry Havas
Ryan kicked off the Commerce Server session by giving us an insight in key new features of Sitecore Commerce powered by Commerce Server version 8.1, like Simple installation and configuration, Azure PaaS support, Commerce specific reports and gave us an insight into Sitecore Commerce powered by Microsoft Dynamics new features from 8.1 on.
Kerry then took the word and talked about the future development insights of Commerce within the Sitecore Experience platform, which was a classified session. He first talked about a fictional business case (or it might be a real business case), and then showed the power of what Commerce Server could do with that business case and what is coming in the next version or versions.
Nice presentation, Commerce Server is not really my area of development, although as a certified Active Commerce certified developer and uCommerce Rockstar (after following the uCommerce Sitecore Remote Master Class back in June 2015), it of course has my interest.
Roundtable Sessions
I started on the roundtable sessions with Pieter Brinkman and Mark van Aalst. Great interesting discussions on the MVP program, User Groups & SUGCON.
Hopefully we can align the SUGCON conferences more, get more support from Sitecore in terms of support for the User Groups, etc…so more content is produced that can be placed online. We talked about facilitating formula’s, so expect SUGCON to continue for the future! We also talked about the MVP Program, the Sitecore Hackathon and how we looked at it.
I then walked to the SPEAK roundtable, where Brandon Hubbard took notes of our requests. Especially Brian Pedersen’s remarks were so recognisable. Hopefully Brandon sends our request to the team of Kerry Belerose and Jakob Christensen. Expect an update also soon from Sitecore Rocks to support SPEAK 2.0 that’s coming in the near future.
Lessons Learned – Sitecore 8
Lars Pedersen then took the stage, in which he take us on a journey into the Xccelerate program. He walked us through the different stages and again told us about the Nutricia platform. A great case for Sitecore and a successfull customer that made the transformation to the digital world. Like I said yesterday, kinda nice to see that a project that I’ve been working on is mentioned, and that some MVP’s go like: ah, wow!
Make sure you have a look at Connect the Experience, where you can find a calculation of What is your ROI from Implementing a Connected Platform.
Sitecore Experience Extractor for Sitecore 8: Lars Pedersen told us about the Experience Extractor which currently only works with OnPremise hosted Sitecore 8 platform. It allows to extract data and export it to Excel. For more info: Sitecore Marketplace.
Lars also told about Jump8, which is focused to help Sitecore partners and customers that utilize the Experience Analytics and Experience Marketing capabilities of the Sitecore Experience Platform 8.
More info can be found here.
Q&A Executive Staff
Then it was question time, the whole product team, marketing team and excutive team stood on stage. Always one of my favorite sessions at the MVP Summit. Good questions from the MVP’s, that haven’t been asked yet.
Again great insights and it was also nice to hear from each person what they are looking forward too and are most excited about in the upcoming releases of Sitecore.
And then the Summit was over……
Many thanks to the whole Sitecore team that organised these 3 amazing days. So looking forward to the next Summit.
The Sitecore future looks bright….
