I am just returning from Sugcon in Amsterdam. It been a few fantastic days. Thanks to everybody who made it possible - Sponsors, Organizers, Sitecore and of course all you Sitecore devs you there.
I saw a lot of fantastic talks. I want to share some information about the ones I found to be the most interesting.
Sitecore Integration with Microsoft Cognitive
There were a few talks on using Microsoft Cognitive Services. But the one that blew me away was the one Mark Stiles did on Sitecore Integration with Microsoft Cognitive Services. Mark has started an amazing framework for integrating Microsoft Cognitive Services into Sitecore. He demoed two appliances 1. An extended Medialibrary where images are tagged up with properties of what is on the image fx. Age, is the person(s) male or female, Is it outside. How amazing it that you will be able to search your Media library for an image of a female age around age 23. Instead of “I think it was called Jennifer.jpg and it might be located in the peoples folder”
- The second application af the services was a chat window where you’re able to “talk” to Sitecore to get stuff done. I mean how cool it is that you can ask Sitecore to publish /content/sitecore/Home/about/My/Company by writing it into a command window. Try to do that fast in Sitecores UI.
I would sugest that you check out what Mark has done at his GitHub Repo. If you think it cool give him a shout out or better yet help him out
Sitecore Publishing
Steven Pope and his team has re-thought publishing in Sitecore. By extracting the publishing API into a new micro service they’ve been able to decrease publising from “eh - we can’t republish our entire site like EVER” to a matter of minutes. The whole idea of breaking up Sitecore into standalone microservices (Very Helix I might add) is brilliant. I sure hope that Sitecore decides to try to do the same for other components as well. That would make the whole product very scale out friendly
Sitecore PaaS
Sitecore in close relation with a team of Azuze Ninjas has been working on getting Sitecore into Azure as Platform as a Service. The things they demoed looks very promissing. The prospect of being able to Blue-Green deploy you application in Azure very nice. And being able to leverage on the Azure scale out functionality is indeed needed in some cases. The only thing still to be known is the pricing strategy. I hope this will not break the deal
All in all it has been amazing. There are so many other talks I didn’t have time to attend. I take that as a seal of quality for the conference.
I hope to see you all next year as well