What you missed @SUGCON

/

On the 18th and 19th of May the Sitecore User Group Conference (SUGCON) was held in Amsterdam and it was awesome!

At SUGCON I got the chance to catch up with old friends and past colleagues, meet my Sitecore peers, interact with the people that built the tools that I am using on my Sitecore solution and to see what is new and how can I improve my solution. Two things really stood out for me at this year's SUGCON: the ease of integration of new technologies with Sitecore and the Sitecore's community care. 

  • Ease of integration of new technologies with Sitecore

This year, SUGCON cooked for us some delightful surprises ranging from the latest and greatest a.k.a Helix to Sitecore's goal to release a headless CMS to ease the integration with other technologies or devices.

Sitecore's Co-Founder, Lars Nielson, confirmed Sitecore's plan to focus on delivering and maintaining high quality Sitecore solutions by focusing on Helix from now on. More emphasis should be seen from both Sitecore and implementation partners to standardize Sitecore Implementations. This will help their clients to benefit from all the features acquired during an upgrade at a faster rate. Sitecore is from now on releasing all SXA (Sitecore Experience Accelerator) modules as Helix compliant ones.

Have you ever dreamed of having your house tailored to your emotions, the length of your work days and have a version of Iron Man's Jarvis at home? Sitecore wants to make this possible. Its goal is to release a headless CMS that will allow a full integration and personalization in our day-to-day life. This was confirmed by a series of demos presented by Pieter Brinkman, Rob Habraken, Bas Lijten, Robbert Hock. They showcased the possibility of the integration of Sitecore and its features with Home Automation systems such as Alexa, Bots, Hololens and IoT such as a Raspberry Pi, to build a Smart robot which for example can tell a joke depending on your emotion. Can't wait to see this!

  • Sitecore's community care

Apart from being a tech conference, at SUGCON Sitecore showed that they care about their community. Pieter Brinkman, the Sitecore's marketing department and other Sitecore members, took their time to listen to the community leaders/owners from all over the world, ranging from long established Sitecore User Groups such as the User group from Chicago to the youngest one from Dubai UAE. The main subject was "How to create and grow your Sitecore User Group Community".  Hearing all these different experiences and methodologies was really interesting. The communities were able to exchange and learn from the various ways in which they are sharing their passion; through meetups, online streaming, and association of Sitecore talks with other technology user groups such as Azure and Microsoft.

  • All in all..

Whether you are a Sitecore user or just tech curious, SUGCON has a lot to offer: seeing the Sitecore integration opportunities, amazing speakers, great sessions and a huge showcase on Sitecore's vision. I consider this year's SUGCON a success and it showed to me once again that Sitecore deserves the title of leader of the Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management.

If you did not get the chance to attend this SUGCON, go to www.sugcon.eu to see all videos. They should be available 3 weeks after the conference.

See you at the next SUGCON.