10 Things I Love and 10 I Hate (Dislike) about Sitecore 10

Sitecore 10 is here with containers, Horizon editing, ASP.NET core and more! Here are the top 10 things I love and hate (hate is too strong of word, but more dislike) about Sitecore 10.

10 Things I Love About Sitecore 10

Containers: No more complex templates for deployments, but rather the flexibility containers have for deployment (assuming a role per container)

SIF: SIF is still available for when organizations aren’t ready to adopt containers or want bare metal Sitecore

.NET Core: Faster, lighter, and can run headless via the ASP.NET Rendering SDK

JSS: While not so much Sitecore JSS changes, the changes in Sitecore 10 enhance those using Sitecore JSS. New to JSS? Check out: https://jss.sitecore.com/

Horizon: Several updates to Horizon including Content Hub integration and keyboard shortcuts (my favorite)

XM with Personalization: For those not needing the full xConnect, you can use some basic personalization. Check out the following for what is available: https://doc.sitecore.com/users/100/sitecore-experience-platform/en/the-personalization-conditions.html

Sitecore Command Line Interface (CLI): The Sitecore CLI allows a direction inner-operation with a Sitecore instance: https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/100/developer-tools/en/sitecore-command-line-interface.html

Better xConnect Data Loading: Marketing Automation has been reworked to allow for more efficient loading of xConnect data

Session State Improvements: Session State has been optimized, promising a 10-15% faster response time for Content Delivery Servers

Updated SalesForce Connector: xDB information can be more easily sent to SalesForce. Check out the SalesForce connector at: https://www.sitecore.com/products/connectors/salesforce

10 Things I Hate (Dislike, Hate is a little strong…) About Sitecore 10

Sitecore Commerce 10: Commerce has always been a struggle given its large complexities and somewhat disconnect from the base Sitecore platform. Looking forward to the day when it is better integrated… and easier to deploy

SIF: While I use a lot of SIF, the templates for scaled builds require a lot of JSON modification (ex. what if you need a 2 CD setup instead of one… or load balanced xConnect?…. time to modify a ton of JSON)

Azure SQL Deployments from SIF: As it stands, you still can’t deploy to Azure SQL from SIF. There are workarounds such as installing the databases first and then use a skip in the SIF JSON to not deploy databases

xConnect Templates: xConnect is an awesome, but somewhat intimidating service layer. Having xConnect “templates” in the CMS or elsewhere to quick start users would be a huge win

Geo Distributed Architectures: If I run a global company, I can’t just setup a CD in another region and connect it due to latency

Centralized xConnect: Akin to the previous point, there is massive latency if I have a global setup where I can’t have one region host xConnect and others connect to it

Disaster Recovery: While containers may help address this and Azure already has some great tools like Traffic Manager and Azure Geo-replication, DR setups require some runbooks for execution

Content Migration: While tools like Razl and Unicorn Sync exist, I would love to see a built in migration/sync tool for keeping databases across environments (Prod/UAT/Dev) up to date as needed

Hotfixes: If only we had an interface for available hotfixes wtih an easy apply akin to updating WordPress instead of hunting around Sitecore docs and wondering which roles the hotfix may or may not apply to

Upgrades: Sitecore upgrades remain a sacred profession and I just don’t trust in place upgrades yet given years of previous upgrade pain… Perhaps that will change in Sitecore 10

Conclusion

As with any platform release there will be some victories and some setbacks, but its clear Sitecore continues to expand its base capabilities for the wide demands of both developers and marketers. Learn more via these two great posts from Jason St-Cyr:

Sitecore 10 benefits for Developers, DevOps and IT: https://jasonstcyr.com/2020/08/05/sitecore-10-developer-benefits/

Sitecore 10 benefits for Content Strategists and Digital Marketers: https://jasonstcyr.com/2020/08/05/sitecore-10-marketer-benefits/