Discover what's new in Sitecore 9.2

Sitecore 9.2 brings a lot of improvements for marketers and developers: emails straight from Sitecore Forms, a better view of your personalization, JSS that works with SXA and Sitecore Forms, and a cleaner xDB. Here are the highlights.

Sending an EXM email from a form is now an out-of-the-box action in Sitecore Forms, instead of something a developer has to build.

This new default action lets marketers send personalized messages, triggered by a form submission, to both known and new contacts. Thanks to better support for custom tokens, these messages can use data from the form itself at the moment it's submitted.

Your form can include an email address field to send the email to, and a consent checkbox to record consent for marketing emails.

You configure the new "Send Email Campaign Message" action in Sitecore Forms: choose the email template, the form field with the email address and the consent field, and map form field values to tokens to use in the email.

Sitecore is a strong system to personalize your content on all channels, with the rule set in the platform. You can configure multivariate tests as well.

For multivariate tests, there were already overview pages showing which tests run where. Sitecore 9.2 adds overview pages to monitor where active personalization rules are configured.

The new "Active personalized experiences" list shows all personalized experiences on your sites: those that were tested and implemented, those implemented without testing, and those currently being tested.

Each row is one page with personalization. You can sort and filter the list, and search for a page by item name or display name. You see how many components on a page have personalization rules, and the total number of experiences you get by combining the variations of the different components.

The Effect in test field shows the effect of the best experience compared to the default. If the rules were implemented without testing, the field is empty.

One of the biggest announcements at SUGCON: in Sitecore 9.2, JSS is compatible with SXA.

Not the full toolbox, but when you build JSS sites, you can use all site management concepts of SXA: site tenants, sites, partial designs, page designs, shared and page-relative data sources, cross-site content sharing, cross-site presentation sharing, components reused across sites with tenant-scoped components, and cross-site linking.

You can create a JSS tenant and JSS sites, and configure which sites are shared:

Headless Sitecore Forms
Sitecore 9.2 supports Sitecore Forms in JSS, so you can use and render all Sitecore Forms features in your JSS app.

Sitecore 9.2 brings several changes to xDB. Some are small, but together they have a big impact.

Better robot detection
Robot detection has improved. That matters to filter out unwanted interactions from automated browsers and robots, and to keep your xDB statistics clean. Device detection still relies on the 51Degrees device database.

Faster web tracker
The web tracker tracks a contact's activity on your website. It stores information temporarily and, when the visit ends, sends the data to xConnect. Sitecore 9.2 reduces the calls to xConnect, which should improve performance and handle more calls at the same time. You can now also configure a dedicated server to process session expiration, which takes load off a Content Delivery server. You only need this on servers with a high load.

Data purging and grooming
Some of our clients who have used Sitecore for years have built up a lot of xDB data about their visitors. Before Sitecore 9.2, removing old data that's no longer relevant wasn't easy, unless you used a third-party integration. A new API lets you maintain and purge xDB data. That helps reduce the size of the xDB database and gives you more control over what you keep. You can build a custom tool to remove xDB data automatically, on a schedule.

YAML serialization
Serialization stores Sitecore items from the database as text files, to synchronize them between environments or developers. It was introduced back in Sitecore 6, and now there's a new file format: YAML. YAML serialization was already possible with Rainbow and Unicorn, but note that the formats of those files can and will differ. In a next major release, the old format will be deprecated and removed.

Publishing Service on Sitecore Host
More and more Sitecore services will run on Sitecore Host, the common, pluggable platform for services. A Sitecore service is a feature that runs separately from the main Content Management or Content Delivery role. Besides Sitecore Identity and the Universal Tracker, the Publishing Service now runs on Sitecore Host too. An expected improvement.

SSL offloading
Our clients often asked for SSL offloading. It was possible before Sitecore 9.2, but needed changes to several configuration files. Out-of-the-box support is welcome, especially for on-premises setups where load balancers handle HTTPS traffic.

Simpler installation
A few years ago, every developer used the Sitecore Instance Manager (SIM) for local installations, until Sitecore introduced the Sitecore Installation Framework (SIF). SIF installs Sitecore with PowerShell. It works well, but for newcomers or business people who want to try a version locally, the barrier is high, and there was no visual interface. The new Sitecore Install Assistant (SIA) solves this with a clear interface. Do check the prerequisites first!

Want to know what a new Sitecore version means for your platform? Get in touch.