This blog post is about summarizing the rumours on the web and could act as a starting point when you want to now more about this upcoming major release of Sitecore CMS.
What to expect in Sitecore 7
The main difference that will impact users. marketers and developers is the support for a huge amount of items. This is called Large Scale Item Storage.The development title was Sitecore Item Buckets, and it was first presented on the 2012 Dreamcore conferences by Timothy Ward. Adding Item Buckets to Sitecore 7 makes it worth a major release. Read more about this below. But adding tons of functionality for searching and indexing is the biggest part of this update if you ask me.
Further more the Sitecore Interface will change. We all know the Content Editor, the Page Editor and the Sitecore Desktop. In Sitecore 7, SPEAK will be standard for new applications.
SPEAK stands for: Sitecore Process Enablement & Acceleration Kit.
From my point of view, these are the most eye catching changes, but there is more!
How about changes to the workflow. For as far as i understand they are presenting them graphically. What it will look like is not known at the moment but working with the workbox will become more easy!
Since Sitecore keeps moving towards the marketing site, i mean: DMS is getting so very important these days, Sitecore also announced Engagement Intelligence. Probably Sitecore comes with a OLAP Cube and can be connected to any modern BI Tool. For example the one from Targit. These updates enable Engagement Intelligence.
With Sitecore 7 the path is cleared to make changes to DMS, so it will be Azure/Cloud ready. Using DMs is getting more and more easy, mainly due to the powerful Page Editor. But when sites need to be on Azure, using DMS was still not supported. With Sitecore 7 This is about to change.
And then here some more news, specially for the developer community:
- Sitecore 7 is based on .Net 4.5, making use of the newest features for speed and reliability.- Datasources now support Guids, so that renderings don’t break when items are moved. This is wired in to the LinkManager, so you will get a warning if you delete an item referenced in a datasource field.
and gues what, you can insert a query to act as a datasource,.. brilliant!
- The used 3th party components have been updated (Lucene, NewtonSoft, HTML Agility Pack)
- Extended pipelines, ie for search, buckets and content tree rendering.
- All ASP.Net config settings are now in the web.config file. and all Sitecore config settings are in seperate include files!
So whats the impact from a business point of view:
- Sitecore is no longer a restriction when it comes to the amount of data to be stored. I hear rumours of Sitecore 7 storing millions of items and indexing them within 10 minutes!- For marketers and content editors the UI will change to be more task driven. for example: create a mailing first and decide on the audience later (instead of ECM 1.3,.. create a target audience first, and after that the mailing..)
- The new system for large scale items is 'enterprise ready'. Sitecore 7 supports massive amounts of items and indexing/searching it can be done on different servers due to it's scalability. - Search is provided by Lucene and can be extended with SOLR.
Tagging items comes as a default and is in line with the search and index mindset of this release.
To come to a conclusion
Sitecore 7 is about to be released as a Technical Preview on SDN. Since Sitecore changed the version it is no longer needed to wait for it to become a 'recommended version'. As soon as the 'Version Update' is available it is tested and supported by Sitecore. When the TP will be available is still a wild guess.
It is for sure that the first versions of Sitecore 7 have been distributed among the Sitecore MVP's at the beginning of march 2013.
Even Sitecore John is exited about this upcoming release:
"I am truly excited about this release and what it enables in terms of functionality, performance, and scalability." (Source)
Sitecore 7 is a very big step forward,... from a technical point of view. When looking at it from a business point of view the changes are littel less eye catching. I think big changes on this subject can be expected when the BI tooling is ready and Sitecore is fully Azure compatible.
I will end with a list of further reading:
and some further reading on the Sitecore Roadmap including ECM 2.0 and Engagement Intelligence (great read!)
And if you happen to be from Germany, here is a native read about Sitecore 7
To close this list i'll add references to some excellent Sitecore 7 Read by MVP's or Sitecore employees:
A peek at Sitecore 7 by San Solovay
The New England User Group devoted a session on the topic by Jeff Cram
And here a list of Sitecore's John West, who we all thank for his passion and dedication to getting us up to date!
- Sitecore 7: Introduction
- New field types in Sitecore 7
- About new standard template fields
- A post on new security access Rights in Sitecore 7
- New Pipelines
- More on searching Sitecore 7
- A post on the Insert from Template Diagram
- New events in Sitecore 7
- Output caching by Index
- Pipeline updates (extension to previous post on pipelines)
- Read more on Indexing tools
- and (for now last) computed index fields
These observations are based on what i read on the internet, blogs, forums and other sources. Besides these digital channels i have aslo attended Dreamcore 2011 (London) and the Sitecore Symopsium 2012 (Amsterdam). I have been talking to people about this subject and have written it down here. Al this is written without actual hands on experience with Sitecore 7 :)
Do you know when the next version of Sitecore might be released? Will it be version 8? many thanks
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