Sitecore User Group Conference (SUGCON) 2019 - Recap

SUGCON is one of the biggest events for the Sitecore community and this year it took place a couple of days ago (April 4th and 5th) in London. This conference is the place were a lot of developers gather to gain knowledge and network with the Sitecore community from around the world. This was my first SUGCON ever and I couldn't have enjoyed it more!

In this post, I will summarize what I think were the most important aspects of the conferences I attended to:

• Sitecore is giving a lot of importance to the microservices architecture. At SUGCON they talked a lot about Sitecore Host, which is basically a common platform used by some of the new Sitecore services (.NET Core 2.1 is required - which means cross platform, yes!). Sitecore Host can be used by developers to create plugins that can be installed on a Sitecore instance without having to recompile the code base. Currently, xConnect, Identity Service and Publishing services run on Sitecore Host and more services will be migrated to Host in future releases.

• JSS was one of the main topics. Starting with Sitecore 9.2, JSS will support SXA and Forms. Sitecore keeps embracing the headless CMS paradigm. 

• Sitecore 9.2 will be released this quarter (no specific date was given). One of the main things for developers is that Sitecore serialization will use YAML, and this will be supported by TDS as well. Lucene is OFICIALLY OBSOLETE and Azure Search will be improved. The reporting dashboard got updated, it will now give marketers more insight on personalized components. Robot detection got updated, the detection and filtering of malicious bots have been improved.

• Universal Tracker was also discussed (online discussions about this have been taking place for a while now), basically UT allows to track online and offline interactions from different channels (mobile apps, IoT, etc). Something interesting Konabos did was, they gave every attendant a plastic card, which allowed them to track the entrance of the users to some conferences, each one of the cards had different labels (unicorn, elephant, etc), so once an attendant went into a conference room they knew how many "elephants", "unicorns", etc were there, just a simple and concise example of offline tracking.

A few pictures of the event: