What Is Sitecore, Anyway?

Have you heard about Sitecore? Most people don’t know much about it, what it is and how it can benefit your brand. So what is Sitecore?

Most people don’t know whether Sitecore is a CMS tool or a digital marketing system (DMS). Read on below to better understand Sitecore and the benefits it can offer your organization.

What Is Sitecore?

Sitecore is a customer experience platform (CXP) used by numerous brands worldwide to create a seamless and personalized digital experience. It’s considered the leading digital experience software by most organizations. Sitecore is more than just a content management system (CMS).

The Key product of Sitecore is its Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) which helps combine the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB) with the Experience manager to offer a powerful digital management solution.

Sitecore is an ever-evolving software with each new update offering brands innovative tools to handle their digital solutions. As a digital experience platform, most people don’t know what Sitecore is. So is it an xDB or a CMS or more?

Understanding the Sitecore CMS

Sitecore was launched in 2001 and used the .NET platform from the start of the language. Sitecore’s popularity has continued to grow in the past few years, opening business leaders to the possibility of an all-inclusive digital solution.

Sitecore is a leading content management system (CMS) tool that developers built on ASP.NET. It enables digital marketers and web content editors to control all the aspects of running a website. This includes social media integration, advanced personalization, blogging, and eCommerce.

Currently, Sitecore is on its 7th major version, and it runs on the .NET 2.0/4.0. The core of this new version has been developed from scratch to ensure that the software takes advantage of all the updates of the ASP.NET 4.5.

The CMS is the heart of all the websites powered by Sitecore. Today, it’s a favorite CMS platform because it takes advantage of the scalability, security, and flexibility offered by the .NET framework. Sitecore CMS is used by leading organizations such as Canon, Toshiba, Experian, and Nestle.

The CMS integrates a dominant desktop interface controlled by a role-based and customizable system. The desktop interface looks like the windows desktop with multiple applications. You can use these apps for editing content, monitoring marketing campaigns, and managing your users.

Understanding the Sitecore API

The Sitecore API is quite powerful. You can search for different Sitecore items using several technologies. This technology includes the standard .NET web forms that use MVC and XSLT.

You can also query Sitecore items using other methods. That’s because the software has two query languages, which include the Sitecore Fast Query and Sitecore Query. This is quite similar to the Xpath.

On the other hand, you can also query Sitecore items using Linq, which allows you to filter down your search using the ‘where’ clause. Sitecore API uses Lucene to index and crawl the content on the website. This is further enhanced by the Advanced Database Crawler, which is an open-source package.

The package further extends the Lucene functionality to index GUIDs. This gives developers advanced search capabilities allowing them to search by template types and folders. It also adds flexibility, retains speed, and maintains performance when indexing and searching for items using Lucene.

What Is Sitecore Used For?

Sitecore is a well-connected and fully-featured customer experience software. However, it allows you to do much more than managing your online content. Below are other uses of Sitecore:

• Tracking and analyzing data
• Personalization of your website
• Building and launching marketing campaigns
• Optimization of content for your digital marketing strategies
• Understanding your customers better
• Self-service for customers and online users

Using Sitecore can help you create, optimize and deliver an end-to-end customer experience. The experience spans nurturing, acquisition, retention, and advocacy of the customers.

How to Know if You Need Sitecore

Have you read and understood the above Sitecore tutorial? Are you wondering whether it’s time to ditch your old CMS software and settle for Sitecore? If you’re unsure whether you need Sitecore, check the below requirements:

• You need one CMS software to help you manage your multiple brands, websites, and landing pages
• You need a CMS that leverages reusable modules, layouts, and content across all your sites
• You need a site that localizes your content based on country-specific currency and photography
• You are looking to nature customer relations using your CMS platform
• You want to retain your brand standards across all your sites and pages
• You need a platform that allows you to engage with your audience based on their languages
• You have to follow information security best practices and comply with state and federal guidelines

The right CMS tool for your brand should minimize your technical debt. It should also have easy-to-integrate APIs and foster great customer relationships. If you decide to jump ship, ensure you are careful when choosing a Sitecore partner.

Sitecore Is a Flexible Solution

One of the major advantages of using Sitecore CMS is the great flexibility it offers brands. The CMS can be extended and customized based on your needs. The software is also quite easy to override.

Sitecore is built on dependency injection. This means that the web.config allows you to replace specific classes, rewrite and extend how the default functionality of the software works.

You can also export the customized functionality from the Sitecore to another package, then import it to another project. This gives you the freedom to share or reuse code on Sitecore’s open-source package-sharing site. The importation allows you to install and manage the package containing Sitecore templates, DLLs, CSS, and web controls on the desktop view.

What Is Sitecore? Now You Know

The main question on most people’s minds is often what is Sitecore? While people think that Sitecore is a simple CMS tool, it’s more than that. It integrates an experienced database, personalized customer data, engagement analytics, and xConnect to offer businesses a more customized experience.

Sitecore is designed to help your business sell more, retain customers, and analyze essential data. Use the above Sitecore guide to help you better understand more about the platform.

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