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XM Cloud series: what you need to know about XM Cloud

By Derk Hudepol on 10/31/2022

Introduction

One of my customer was able to get into the XM Cloud early access program and running with XM Cloud was a major success. It brings value to both business and developers which you cannot say of every new release of DXP software out there.

Even though it was a big success there were a number of items that are of interest when migration to/upgrading to XM Cloud. in this blog post I will dive into the most important ones. Both important benefits

What does XM Cloud bring to the table?

To start with the important items when we talk on what XM Cloud brings for the customer. Why would you decide to embrace XM Cloud ?

No more Sitecore hosting concerns

Because XM Cloud is a SaaS offering, it means that the customer (or their partner) is no longer concerned with hosting Sitecore or executing updates/patches on the Sitecore systems. For a lot of Sitecore customers this has been a very costly engagement so no longer needing to be concerned with this is a major boon.

So what will Sitecore do for you with XM Cloud? it is the following:

  • Hosting & infrastructure rollout: as it is Software as a service, Sitecore will take care of your Content editor and API environment. The only thing a customer needs to do is click "Create environment" and Sitecore will take care of the rest

  • Patching & updates: Sitecore will take of feature and version updates. So no more effort put into upgrading an environment to a newer version or patching issues. The only part in the customer domain to maintain is the website application itself which is headlessly connected to XM Cloud

  • Infrastructure support: All Sitecore specific infrastructure support is taken care of by Sitecore. So the only infrastructure the customer needs to support is the parts that are not a Sitecore system. Per example : the website itself.

New editor/marketing tools

With XM Cloud come the next generation editing tools. Whilst the content editor and experience editor have served us well they are outdated at this point in time where useability and simplicity are key. XM Cloud comes with 1 incredibly important tool, which is Sitecore Pages.

Sitecore Pages is here to replace the Experience editor and is based on Sitecore Horizon. Pages will only be available on XM Cloud and with Horizon no longer being available as of Sitecore 10.3 it is a key selling feature of XM Cloud. Pages is a next gen WYSIWYG editor with greatly eases the use of the CMS in creating and composing content whilst also greatly increasing the performance of WYSIWYG editing.

Embedded personalization & Analytics

With XM Cloud also comes embedded personalization & analytics and these bring the power of light weight personalization into a very intuitive interface, making it extremely easy to personalize pages. The personalization features are now available directly in Sitecore pages making Sitecore pags the one-stop shop for content editors. At the same time from a developers point of view it is easy to install because it is just a piece of middleware Sitecore makes available on GitHub.

The embedded analytics are also part of Sitecore pages, bringing analytics directly into the Pages editor where the content lives. This makes it very convenient to work with light weight analytics.

Modern architecture

Because XM Cloud is headless only it brings the modern headless architecture in play. This architecture, especially when embracing JAMStack, brings a lot of benefits like:

  • Optimized developer workflow and hence a faster time to market

  • Very high performance: Core Web Vitals scores well in the green and Google pagespeed scores of above 90

  • Higher security, by leveraging modern architecture principles you are able to lessen the surface area for security penetration attacks

What you should know before making your decision to adopt XM Cloud

Although I am very enthusiastic about this Sitecore release, there are some points you do need to consider before making the decision on (when) to adopt XM Cloud.

No more out of the box search

Although the out of the box search that comes with Sitecore XM/XP was never groundbreaking it did tend to be enough for a lot of Sitecore customers requiring simple search functionalities. XM Cloud has no search out of the box. This means customers will need to adopt a separate solution from search. There are several options out there like:

  • Sitecore Search: offcourse there is Sitecores own search solution which will be released soon. Sitecore Search provides both Site search and content search with its own AI functionalities and analytics to improve your search results.

  • Algolia: Algolia is a more lightweight search engine, primarily focussed on search through buckets of content rather than a full-blown site crawler/search. Allthough there is a add-on providing a Site crawler if required.

  • Coveo: Coveo is a well known name in the Sitecore space. Coveo has been offering an enterprise search engine that integrates with Sitecore for years. It offers both content and full site search with advanced AI functionalities. Coveo is however also one of the more expensive options.

  • SearchStax: SearchStax provides hosted SOLR with additional tooling to work with it. IF you require very simple search and some simple Site search effort SearchStax might be a very good fit.

No Sitecore forms(yet)

Currently XM Cloud comes without Sitecore Forms. Sitecore is working on building a full headless version of Sitecore Forms but that won't be ready before the 2nd half of next year(likely). This means that if Forms are important for your business you will need to find either a intermediary solution or a full alternative:

  • Depending on you migration scenario you could still leverage your old Sitecore environment for Forms until the XM Cloud version becomes available

  • Most CRM System offering marketing features also offer Forms functionalities. Examples of these are Dynamics CRM, Salesforce or HubSpot

  • A dedicated forms solution like TypeForm might be a good fit for your organization if you require complex forms and are willing to make the investment.

Upgrade path

When wanting to upgrade to XM Cloud it might be a very steep upgrade path if your current website is currently not built leveraging JSS you will be facing a full rebuilt of your current platform into JSS and if you want to leverage all functionalities (like personalization & analytics) at this point in time NextJS/ReactJS is also required. Off course this does need to be a major issue and there is multiple scenarios to this:

  • If your platform is old and you are already considering a rebuilt to enable new business benefits and upgrading technology it would be a perfect opportunity to do just that.

  • Before migrating to XM CLoud you can make step in between and first upgrade to Sitecore 10.3 and then leverage the JSS MVC conversion functionalities to gradually adopt the next architecture instead of making a direct rebuilt investment

  • Decide to rip of the bandaid in one go and accept the cost for building a future proof platform.

Summary

All said and done there are a lot of benefits to XM Cloud but it does not come without a (small) cost. For most of our customers it is worth the effort of migration and our first implementation led to a lot of positive outcomes:

  • A highly increased time-to-market

  • Much happier content editors: launching a new page went from a day of work to less then an hour

  • Highly increased performance : Google Pagespeed mobile score went from 26 to 98 which has a large impact to customer experience

For every case a balance needs to be made between cost and benefits but for any greenfield or current JSS Sitecore implementation out there I would heavily recommend adopting XM Cloud because it brings more benefits than any of the other Sitecore releases in the past years.