Sitecore Roadmap after Crestone Part 1

I was really happy when Sitecore announced Crestone early last year. We were part of the beta program and we were certainly ecstatic about the future of Crestone. Now that it's in full version 6 and us implementing about 4 of these, our clients and us know how much better the product has become. The In-Line editing is just amazing and then couple with the Grid and Page Designers give non-technical folks much more control of "their" site. Of course, there's the much-awaited switch to using the .NET security framework which made security development and integration so much easier. It really opened integration with other systems a much easier and cheaper process. Our clients love that.

So, what's next with Sitecore after Crestone? According to the published Core roadmap, Sitecore is gathering input regarding this, particularly in the user-experience (UX) domain, codenamed the "Everest" release. The release aims to achieve the following:

• Integrated analytics
• Profiling and personalization
• Embedded Social computing and "WOM" capabilities
• Integrated faceted navigation and guided search
• Content orchestration and delivery tools
• Reporting and customization engine

Just to make sure, I don't work for Sitecore and I have no idea at this point what exactly all these are going to be. I haven't spoken to a Sitecore employee regarding these features. I'd like to just share my thoughts on what would be "cool" to have within these features and some other ones in my head. Since that's a lot of bullet points, I'll talk about these in two parts. Click here to see Part 2.

Is Integrated Analytics and boosted version of the StatCenter? I hope not. StatCenter has its strength when it comes to CMS usage and such but not necessarily on site usage. That's why when we implement a site, we normally use either one of the commercial services like Omniture, or products like WebTrends or Urchin, or even the free Google Analytics. All these companies are improving their analysis engine but do not yet fully deliver a Web 2.0 analysis. My guess is that the Sitecore one will be similar to the Telligent Harvest reporting server, which gives Community Server owners detailed information about their community. If this is the case, then that's great. I'm glad Sitecore is not thinking of competing with Web analytics packages since most companies already have heavily invested in them especially those who even outsource their SEO.

In a way, Sitecore always had profiling and personalization because of the built-in user-profiles. Now that Sitecore uses the .NET 2.0 security mechanism, it's even easier to do this. However, "easier" is a relative term. This may already exist but I'm hoping that Sitecore is not just creating a bunch of templates that hold more profile and personalization information or even make it easier to extend. I'm hoping to see the peripheral applications that make a profile powerful which I assume will be in th embedded social computing features. One thing I'd like to see is being able to use or combine existing profiles from other systems such as Facebook but I'm sure we can always create a custom-developed interface for that.

Well, that's it for now. Read the second part of this article on another post.