Nishtech Sitecore Symposium Recap 2024

Nishtech was honored to be part of this year's Sitecore Symposium where we were able to reconnect with the Sitecore community and share ideas with Sitecore clients, users and other partners. There were some big announcements and messaging that came out of the Sitecore camp. Let's break down what we heard and what we can look forward to on the technology roadmap and our #PowerToBuild engaging and captivating experiences.

Nishtech's Top 5 Highlights from Sitecore Symposium 2024

HIPPA Compliance

It's well known that Nishtech is a leader in the Healthcare Digital Patience Experience space, especially when it comes to Sitecore as our platform of choice. So, let's start with the big one for us. Sitecore has officially announced that XM Cloud, Content Hub, Customer Data Platform, and Personalize are now Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA) ready following attestation from an independent auditor.

Read the official press release: https://www.sitecore.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/2024/10/sitecoreannounces-

hipaa-readiness-for-digital-experience-platforms-content-and-experience-solutions

Renewed commitment to XP/XM

For the past few years we've seen a huge push in the DXP space towards pure SaaS products. There's a lot of benefit to this architecture and hosting model. Nishtech knows working on our roadmaps with our clients, it's not always the right fit for everyone. That's ok. Sitecore agrees. We're excited to see a robust roadmap supporting those clients who are on XP/XM today. This includes a refreshed UI with ongoing usability improvements, improved tooling for developers, codeless schema extension and an integration with Sitecore's new Stream AI.

Sitecore Stream

Stream is not just bolt on Generative AI like everyone else is doing as an afterthought. Stream, built in partnership with Microsoft, is a native integration that leverages GenAI, based on your data, your brand, your workflows to be a co-pilot to help streamline your creativity and content. Our key take-away from the Stream announcement. Of course, with Nishtech being in the Healthcare space, it's data privacy. Stream does not use your data to train it's global models, it's isolated to you, with enterprise-grade security. Rest assured, your content and data is safe and not being used for broader uses outside of your implementation

Read more about stream: https://www.sitecore.com/products/sitecore-stream

Migrations to XM Cloud

We've recently been guiding longtime Sitecore users and clients from XP/XM into XM Cloud. At Symposium, we had an opportunity to re-enforce our strategy and roadmapping with our clients. We shared our insights, best practices and thoughts for a successful streamlined roadmap. It was great to hear perspectives from Sitecore and other partners on how well they've been migrating into the SaaS based XM Cloud platform and what they've been seeing in the broader community. Three key takeaways. 

1. Migration Tools are coming - We saw hints at the roadmap from Sitecore that tooling and automatic migration tools, possibly assisted by AI, will help accelerate the migration to XM Cloud

2. Success stories and insights from the Sitecore.com team themselves and how they aligned with best practices for a cloud migration. The cobbler's children are no longer barefoot!

3. Nishtech has some tricks up our sleeves that we shared with Sitecore and will be collaborating in the future for enhanced XM Cloud accelerators, automation processes and improved testing and validation techniques. So stay tuned!

Expanded Tooling for Headless and XM Cloud

Being early adopters of XM Cloud and Headless, Nishtech has always aligned our tech stack to the "preferred" tech stack of Sitecore. This has always been NextJS with Vercel hosting. This didn't always work for our clients, our talent, our client needs and for some (most) our client budgets. We were overly pleased to see a renewed roadmap of tooling support including leaner modern starting kits built on .net core and angular, and coming kits for many other front-end frameworks. We also saw many demonstrations leveraging Netlify and other front-end hosting platforms that made it feel not-so Vercel exclusive. At Nishtech we appreciate all our partner platforms, but our clients love options, so we do to. On the developer side, we saw improved JSS Semantic Versioning, where minor version updates didn't break your entire FE integration. Whew!

Excited for the Future? We Are Too!

There was certainly a lot more. Announcement of the XMC Marketplace, new features, improvements all around. Nishtech is excited to be part of it! We can bring you and your digital experience up to speed!