Sitecore 10 upgrade has been the much-awaited version of Sitecore. The upgrade encompasses of new features to make the life of marketers and developers easier. Sitecore 10 upgrade focuses on making development process faster, providing more flexibility for content editing and delivering even better personalized customer experience.

In Sitecore 10 upgrade, a very useful has been introduced—sending automated birthday greetings/messages to customers, which takes personalization to altogether a next level.

The new features such sending automated birthday greetings/messages to customers and real-time integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud­­ allows marketers to create better omni channel engagement.

For developers, Sitecore 10 has announced full public support for containers which support rapid Infrastructure-as-code deployment and offer more efficient solution and team onboarding with modern Docker and Kubernetes technology.

Why Upgrade to Sitecore 10

Sitecore 10 upgrade has been launched specifically to meet the needs of developers and marketers. The section below gives details on the new features of Sitecore 10:

1. Sitecore container-

   Sitecore has provided public support for containers with Sitecore version 10 and with the introduction of Sitecore docker container repository, users can now officially instantiate Sitecore and other required services. Some of the benefits that can be achieved with Sitecore docker are:

   • Flexible development and Kubernetes for production
   • Fast onboarding process for new team members
   • Quick conflict resolving on local setups
   • Working on multiple projects simultaneously



2. Headless Experience with Asp.net core-

   Sitecore has launched headless development method with a new headless ASP.Net Core option and has extended the usage of ASP.Net Core by developing a JSS-based SDK for headless services. Some of the benefits are mentioned below:

   • Integration of Sitecore solution with latest .NET core technologies
   • Increased productivity, flexibility and building fast solution
   • Achieving low cost and high speed with multiple instances



3. Content Hub integration-

   Sitecore has released version 3.4 of Sitecore Content Hub that offers new robust, streamlined and scalable capabilities to help brands accelerate their digital transformations. Sitecore Experience Platform 10.0 has new features that help to integrate editing experience with Content Hub. Benefits of Content Hub integration are listed below:

   • Easy content management by aggregating media from CMP and DAM to a centralized source
   • Ease of use with an extended integration to third-party solutions
   • Improved workflows



4. Sitecore Experience Accelerator-

   With the release of Sitecore Experience Accelerator 10, it now supports running on an instance hosted in a Docker container. The benefits of this new feature are listed below:

   • Allows uploading theme assets from the command line without having to run the watching task
   • Language fallback has been enabled by default on all the out of the box data sources
   • Improvement in performance of the rendering placeholder wrappers



5. Email Experience Manager–

   In the earlier versions of Sitecore, we had EXM on the Launchpad. However, we do not have EXM in the launchpad of Sitecore 10.0, we will need licenses - EXM Delivery Cloud license and EXM Custom SMTP license to enable EXM module and send email campaigns.

   In Sitecore 9.3, Sitecore introduced three out of the box templates for running email campaigns. With the introduction of Sitecore 10.0, the following new template options for creating email campaigns have been added:

   • Image focus
   • Left Image Block
   • Right Image Block

   Following few templates are converted from webform to MVC:

   • Announcement
   • Alternating Columns
   • Call to Action Focus

   

6. Horizon-

   Horizon was released in version 9.3 and with the launch of Sitecore version 10, the extended version has been released. With this, users can edit meta data within the Horizon editing experience. A few benefits are listed below:

   • Content management without the presentation layer
   • Multi-site and multilingual environment
   • Creation of specific images and editing content in all fields on the website

   

7. Sitecore Command Line Interface (CLI) for serialization-

   The new feature of Command Line Interface (CLI) in Sitecore 10 offers new capabilities in terms of interacting with Sitecore instances. Now, there is no need of gulp and other configurations or TDS syncing. With CLI and Sitecore for visual studio, the scope of human errors will be minimized. Some of the top benefits of CLI for serialization are mentioned below:

   • Ability to login, publish and serialize via command line
   • Direct configuration and serialization from visual studio in a simplified way



8. Experience Analytics-

   In the earlier versions of Sitecore, we needed to make additional configurations to make filters visible inn reports when we selected ‘Use as Analytics’ filter. In Sitecore 10, this filter is available directly in analytics reports.

   

   

9. Marketing and personalization in Sitecore-

   • Now marketers will be able to utilize simple personalization on XMs
   • Rules such as session-based and device are also available in XM packages. These rules do not depend on tracker or other marketing definitions.



10. Editing Experience-

    This feature is amongst the most awaited ones where there is no need to clean content manually. Marketers and content editors will be able to paste plain content from MS word. The benefits include saving time and manual time of editing.

11. Marketing Automation-

    With new rules around marketing automation, its usability has been enhanced in version 10. Users can create customized new rules to trigger a marketing automation plan depending on the contact’s birth date. This will be helpful in case of automated promotional or other exciting mails triggers. With the help of ‘allow marketing’ checkbox present on Update consent settings, you can now remove contacts from marketing messages or all messages, depending on the requirement.

    

    

12. SFMC automation-

    Sitecore 10 has introduced many improvements for those who integrate Salesforce marketing with Sitecore. It can automatically sync real-time data between Sitecore and Salesforce marketing cloud. Thus, offering a 360 view of the customers and enabling personalization more effectively.

13. Features to support data privacy compliance journey-

    From the past releases, Sitecore is tremendously improving the privacy tools available to teams looking to meet the regulatory needs and customer privacy demands. Sitecore 10 comes with new support to help you on your journey. This version has simplified the removal and anonymization of personal data.

    With this launch, Sitecore Forms make it easier to erase the personal identifiable data that is saved via the out-of-the-box save data Submit action. This includes wiping out submission values, removing any associations to xDB connects and deleting any files uploaded by the visitor. This still allows marketing teams to interact with the reporting data while being anonymous.

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Conclusion

The features launched in Sitecore 10 are a blessing for developers, marketers and content editors as it saves them from time-taking manual processes and human errors. With convenient features added for Experience Editor, Experience Analytics, Horizon, EXM, Marketing Automation and much more, Sitecore 10 is winning the attention of the entire sitecore community.

Jagmeet Kaur Senior Associate

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