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On July 12th, 2022 Sitecore announced the release of their new flagship product:

Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud (XM Cloud) – the ‘no-compromise’ Enterprise CMS.

XM Cloud is Sitecore’s cloud-native, modern CMS empowering brands to create, manage, and deliver relevant content at lightning-fast speeds. XM Cloud offers a fully managed self-service deployment platform for developers and marketers to efficiently launch engaging omnichannel experiences in the Cloud using Sitecore’s Headless CMS.

Developer & Marketer agility

XM Cloud combines the advantages for both developer agility as well as for marketer agility. Building new web experiences based on headless architecture using modern frontend frameworks for a faster time to market. But still giving marketers the freedom to design the frontend experience utilizing the page layouting functionalities.

Sitecore is the first non-cloud-native company that has been able to make the transition of their core CMS solution to a modern cloud architecture (SaaS) and I am beyond excited to start developing on top of it.

In this blogpost I will give you a general overview of what it offers and in future blog posts I’ll explore various pieces of it. Since the release of XM Cloud offers so much I’ve decided to split it up into 2 parts.

Let’s go with part 1!

1. Headless CMS

The most important piece in my opinion of XM Coud is the offering of a Sitecore Headless CMS. XM Cloud provides a headless CMS based upon the Enterprise awarded Experience Manager, and allows you to create, manage, and publish content to your various channels, such as websites, apps etc…

2. Cloud Portal

To be able to create environments in XM Cloud and in the end create content, launch websites, and deliver stunning experiences we have the XM Cloud portal available to us.

Sitecore XM Cloud portal

In order to get access access to the XM Cloud portal you have to belong to an ‘Organization’ (your account at Sitecore). Once you’re able to get access on that ‘Organization’ account, you can then start managing your users, provision projects and provision various environments for those projects. The XM Cloud portal is the way to go for easily launching solutions across the Composable DXP (Digital Experience Platform) either as a Sitecore Partner or a Sitecore Customer.

When you login to the XM Cloud portal you go through a ‘new’ Identity Management system.

Identity Management

In the traditional Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) we have Identity Management run through IdentityServer. For Sitecore XM Cloud Sitecore has completely revamped Identity Management by introducing a Sitecore Unified Identity system based upon AuthO. Sitecore offers Single Sign-On (SSO) across all applications of the Composable DXP.

3. Site Builder

XM Cloud offers a completely new visual Site Builder, it’s a game-changing visual editor that composes pixel-perfect front-end experiences from multiple content sources.

Pages & Components

The powerful visual builder allows us not only to author content, but also to create and compose amazing experiences. Sitecore has processed the learnings from building Horizon and rebuild it as a native cloud experience (Horizon for SaaS), the result: an intuitive, powerful and responsive visual authoring environment.

The build-in Component Builder allows you to build functional UI components from scratch and connect these components to a wide variety of data sources and power them by with data from one or many 3rd party content providers, such as other headless CMSs’ (Contentful, Kontent.ai).

Embedded Personalization

XM Cloud comes with Embedded Personalization. We can set-up Experience Targeting by selection one of the 20 out-of-box condition templates.

We can combine one or more conditions to form an audience and then the audience could be saved to a certain page variant, so you can offer real-time personalisation for your blazing-fast experiences.

Sitecore Personalize can be added as an add-on to even more enhance the personalization.

Embedded Analytics

sitecore-xmcloud-introduction-embedded-analytics

Embedded analytics in XM Cloud will give us real-time insights about how a certain personalization strategy is executing. All from with-in the Horizon for SaaS visual editor.

And that concludes part 1 of the Sitecore XM Cloud introduction.

In the next blog-post I’ll be looking more on the technicals behind XM Cloud, what it comes with and what it means.

Happy Sitecore-ing!

–Robbert