No matter where you are in your digital maturity, engaging with your customers is still a top priority. It is important that you have the latest and greatest tools at your disposal to deliver personalized customer experiences across an evolving set of touchpoints.

If you are currently utilizing Sitecore version 8.x or older, you are missing out some key features now available on Sitecore version 9.3 that will gain your business improved time to market and key machine learning capabilities.

Connecting with your customers has never been easier. Sitecore's latest version gives you more opportunities to engage and enrich your audience with AI, new tools, analytics, and integrations.

• Editing Experience - Sitecore XP 9.3’s streamlined content editing environment provides an intuitive drag-and-drop design, device-specific previews, and analytics that provide real-time, contextual insight. It also includes newly designed forms purpose-built for digital marketers.

• Managed Cloud - Sitecore XP versions prior to 9.x are not supported on Managed Cloud. Upgrading to 9.3 allows you to take advantage of Sitecore on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform in a Managed Services environment, which translates into easy deployment, reduced infrastructure costs, greater flexibility and scalability, and high availability.

• Marketing & Personalization on Sitecore - Sitecore CMS 6.x does not support Sitecore Experience Database (xDB), which provides the ability to capture customer profile data for personalization at scale. And while versions 7.x and 8.x do support xDB, SitecoreXP 9.3 amplifies xDB’s power with support for headless personalization, omni-channel tracking, holistic cross-domain reporting, and ML-based suggestions.

• Content Hub Integration - Remove inefficiencies within your content production processes, gain control over the end-to-end content lifecycle, and optimize both content production and personalized delivery by integrating Sitecore Content Hub with Sitecore XP 9.3 to provide a seamless connection between your content planning, creation, collaboration,and management tools and your content delivery and customer data management capabilities.

• Sitecore Experience Accelerator Upgrade to Sitecore XP 9.3 to leverage all the capabilities of SXA out-of-the-box. The drag-and-drop framework empowers faster time to value, creative exchange to reduce dev cycles, headless delivery, and governance in multi-site, multilingual deployments.

• Sitecore JavaScript Services Upgrade to Sitecore XP 9.3 so your front-end developers can use modern JavaScript frameworks, such as Vue, React and Angular, to create full Sitecore solutions without needing any .NET Sitecore expertise. JSS also lets you build fully headless solutions that, when combined with the Universal Tracker introduced with Sitecore XP 9.1,retain full personalization capabilities so marketers can deliver personalized experiences on any device whilet racking engagement.

• Sitecore xConnect™ Sitecore xConnect requires Sitecore xDB, which is not supported in Sitecore CMS 6.x. And while versions 7.x and 8.x do support Siteecore xDB, they do not support xConnect, which enables you to connect xDB to any source of customer intelligence data, including out-of-the-box connectors for Salesforce Marketing Cloud,Salesforce CRM, and Microsoft Dynamics.

• Machine Learning (Sitecore Cortex™) Included as part of Sitecore 9.3, Sitecore Cortex can help you automate mundane tasks and process big data to surface important insights — such as patterns, complex relationships, recommendations, and outcomes basedon predictive scoring and other factors — to help marketing teams make better, more informed decisions that ultimately lead to better business outcomes.

• Sitecore Host & Micro-services framework In Sitecore 9.x, Sitecore introduced Sitecore Host, a new pluggable framework that standardizes several common pieces of base functionality for development. Importantly, Sitecore Host is the foundation on which Sitecore will continue to develop its microservices architecture, which will offer more flexibility and greater performance at a lower cost.

• Security/Reliability Upgrade to XP 9.3 for encryption at rest and over the wire, as well as enhanced authentication through single sign-on.

• Support Policy 2020 is the final year of Sustaining Support for 6.x, meaning the product will have reached its end of life and no further support services will be offered or available. Versions 7 and 7.1 enter Sustaining Support at the end of 2019, while versions 7.2 and 7.5 will enter Sustaining Support at the end of 2020. Once support is ended, you lose access to security and bug fixes, assistance with unexpected behavior during installation, and development and compatibility fixes — even if you’re willing to pay for those services.

• Subscription Model Subscription/Cloud provides predictable budgets over the term of your contract, with as many production and non-production installations as needed and the ability to add users without additional costs.

If your organization is ready to take advantage of what Sitecore 9.3 has to offer, reach out to our sales team at Sales today! We would be happy to walk through your goals and expectations, and discuss our experience and our most recent upgrade success with the City of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.