An opportunity to learn, a place to meet your tech-heroes or MVPs, and a chance to enjoy a fun place like Orlando where every kid wants to go – including me. This year’s Symposium marked a great personal satisfaction. Having the opportunity to attend and being my first time, made me feel this is the place where to be if you are part of the community. There are quite some anecdotes and stories to tell, so let’s just start with my takeaways before this gets too long.

Sitecore Saas was one of the biggest news during the event. It is well-known how this architecture approach is having more and more importance on Internet nowadays. It is a clever and obvious move from Sitecore to jump now and start planing to try to get a new market. Mid-market customers will probably don’t need the full capabilities of Sitecore XP that’s why SaaS might make sense for these companies since the initial version will only include the foundation capabilities of CMS. For this reason, it is just not possible to think Sitecore On-Premise will be discontinued simply because this new approach will be too young and so, we will at least, see official support in the next 3-5 years to the On-Premise version. Let’s start the discussion for now and wait for summer of 2020 when this will be released.

Sitecore AI, the second hottest topic of Symposium and possibly most waited from a content author perspective. Basically, this feature will allow auto-personalization out of the box based on Sitecore’s algorithms using Machine Learning by selecting the best content for each customer. We know Sitecore started with the idea couple of years ago bringing to Cortex to the table, and now this is the second step is better at personalization. Is this the end of Marketers? No, the system will still need to know how to measure the data is correct or what are the inputs where Marketers and content authors will play an important role.

Sitecore 9.3 was announced and is now available from dev.sitecore.net to download. The initial release doesn’t include the new and long waited editor experience called Horizon, but I might probably be later added in an update. Obviously the introduction of the new content editor will not replace the current one until it gets mature enough, but it has many people excited because of its big features like auto-save or undo and redo. The new version of the platform comes with a new tool for installing called SIA (Sitecore Installation Assistance) which tries to reduce the amount of steps and complexity of installing a new instance On-Premise.

Honorable mentions:

Platon’ Keynote: His photos are not only award-winning but its stories behind them and the reasons why there were taken were the reason why I follow and admire Platon now.

O Solr mio! – Jeremy Davis: A technical workshop very well explained of how to install, configure and maintain SOLR On-Premise or Cloud.

Trends in Sitecore development – Ivan Lieckens, Alin Marius: My personal favorite session which showed what are the most common mistakes during Sitecore development and what future looks like for us.