A new version of the Sitecore platform is always exciting for consumers to adopt since it lives up to its promises. Sitecore 10.2 upgradation is available and marketers are drawn to the variety of enhancements and new features. You may invest with confidence if you are one of those marketers as Sitecore continuously expands its capabilities. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the Sitecore 10.2 features introduced and how they will impact the marketing and development teams.
Headless improved
The development of the composable digital experience platform (DXP) includes headless publishing by default and is expected to continue Sitecore’s long-running headless trajectory. Sitecore has increased the number of frameworks available in the 10.2 release, including React, Angular and Vue.js. These frameworks can be utilized by Sitecore in a headless setup for front-end development. This not only helps to increase development flexibility, but also makes Sitecore available to a wider audience.
Experience Edge
Experience Edge offers a means for Sitecore to cache your front-end content. It brings the potential to speed up performance while cutting costs as it can take the place of a content delivery network (CDN). Experience Edge offers an edge over some other CDN solutions as its specifically built for data-intensive components like Sitecore personalization.
Horizon editor
The enhancements made in 10.2 make the Horizon a competitive replacement for the Experience Editor. The brand-new “content explorer” enables users to browse their content tree and conduct advanced searches to locate required material without leaving the Horizon experience. Now that Horizon supports the SXA (Sitecore Accelerator) solution, it also opens the prospect of wider use, allowing you to use Horizon to edit headless sites.
Easy upgrades
The 10.2 release includes yet another minor improvement to simplify upgrading. It has relocated several upgrade components into a new database, making it possible to update without affecting your content data. This reduces the risk associated with upgrades and enables headless publishing setups and the composable DXP paradigm.
Sitecore Forms
Sitecore Forms now support changing the delimiter. This minor update may not seem exciting, but it was previously less practical to export data from Sitecore Forms into a CSV file. Now, you can change the delimiter to a comma and download CSV.
Developer tools
A few new developer tools and features are included in 10.2. These include methods to simplify deployments, creating search indexes and setting up developer environments. Additionally, there is a method for serializing user and role data that makes publishing data to a live environment simpler. For instance, your established new users and roles in the testing environment can now transfer to production without recreating them.
Email marketing enhancements
Some updates to the Email Experience Manager, which is a product of Sitecore, will be welcomed by users. These include the option to design your dashboard, giving you options for categorizing the data you want to see about your email campaigns. Moreover, instead of emails, the 10.2 release also introduces the capability of sending emails from a dedicated dispatch server, a step that will enable a containerization strategy.
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA)
In this update, SXA receives a few nice additions that increase its value for users. These include support for Bootstrap 5.0 grids, the ability to use the Horizon Editor and the capability to add close captions to embedded YouTube or Vimeo movies.
Sitecore analytics enhancements
With statistics displaying the number of individual goals that can truly be ascribed to your customization efforts, you can now see the impact of personalization on individual goals defined within Sitecore. This will be especially helpful for teams that are starting with Sitecore personalization and want to identify, report, or test the effects of various personalization initiatives. The ability to export any list report in Sitecore Analytics as a CSV file has also been added. Additionally, Analytics’ list reporting has undergone several upgrades.
Azure Search: Deprecated
The use of Azure Search for Sitecore has now been deprecated, an unlikely loss. Sitecore employs several indexes for searching, and the number of indexes in use affects Azure Search fees, effectively pricing this out as a feasible choice.
Here is a summary of highlights that will give you an idea of what to expect in Sitecore 10.2:
- Improved authoring user experience for headless sites
- Headless rendering hosts can now utilize the Horizon editor
- Publish XM content to a globally distributed delivery platform to power a highly scalable headless solution
- Jam-packed with features to support automation and items as resource support
- Renderings are now searchable by content authors
- Component creation is more intuitive
- The right sized 10.2 and modernized to prepare for the Cloud journey
- Bundled with Edge, now benefit from the increased site and page performance vs. traditionally CD delivered experiences
- Reduced TCO with the elimination of Content Delivery nodes for headless
Final thoughts about Sitecore 10.2
Overall, Sitecore 10.2 is a thorough update that includes improvements for both designers and programmers as well as the development of fresh features like the Horizon Editor. Additionally, Sitecore is still making progress on its headless and composable path. Please get in touch with Softweb Solutions, if you have any queries about the upgrade or would like to discuss what it implies for your Sitecore instance.
