Sitecore is a world leading digital experience platform with powerful marketing tools. It’s used by thousands of multi-site and multi-language businesses across the globe. The ability to cater for multiple websites and internationalisation is one of the key motives for choosing the Sitecore.

Sitecore places no constraints around what is presented to the visitor. It allows the creation of diverse experiences and engaging designs for visitors across all platforms and devices.

The key differentiators that make Sitecore a leading digital experience platform are:

• A single platform, built from the ground up

• Publishes content across any site and any channel

• Advanced personalisation with AI capabilities

• Powerful features and marketing tools.NET and Microsoft Azure

• Integration capabilities

A single platform, built from the ground up

Sitecore is in continual evolution. Annual updates and releases provide regular, incremental additions to the solution.

Updated features are built from the ground up. They share a common code base and a shared application programming interface (API). This helps code management and quality, and reduces the learning curve for developers.

Similarly, the Sitecore user interface (UI) is standardised across all the various features of the Sitecore Experience Platform (XP). This makes learning its features and tools is a lot easier as it enables users to get the most from the whole platform.

The feature set is available from one user friendly interface. This increases the chances of adoption as there’s no need to log in and out of multiple systems.

Use content across any site and any channel

From the very first versions of Sitecore, the CMS has been headless i.e. separating content from presentation.

A headless CMS has many benefits. The most significant being that content can be repurposed across different sites and across different channels. The same content can be formatted to suit the channel in which it is being consumed. For example web, mobile, social, or app.

Sitecore uses content components within a page; a page being made up of a set of reusable content items.

Content components can be re-used across many pages and across many sites within the same Sitecore solution. They can be also personalised and/or tested by content editors and marketers.

Building pages is easy. The Experience Editor allows content editors to create new page layouts based on the available components in a simple WYSIWYG interface.

Content editors can also see at which stage in content approval each component is in. This helps ensure that all content elements are released when needed.

Advanced personalisation

Tailoring content to visitors is now a staple part of digital strategy. Sitecore XP helps marketers achieve ROI objectives by delivering content to the target audience based on a variety of conditions like location, campaigns etc.

Sitecore’s advanced out-of-the-box personalisation rules can also be further extended with bespoke rules unique to your business.

As AI technology advances, so does Sitecore's offerings. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Auto Personalisation, will become a standard feature of Sitecore 10. It will make it easier for marketers to get started with personalisation - saving time and money.

Powerful features

Sitecore’s suite of powerful out-of-the-box and supplementary features enable digital marketers to deliver measurable customer experiences. Features include:

• Creating and tracking campaigns and goals

• Creating profiles and personas and tagging content to better understand visitor behaviour

• Using the Path Analyser to create paths and funnels to analyse the paths visitors take through your website

• AI Personalisation

• Moderating content via Workflows

• Testing content

• Creating and tracking forms

• Creating events and taxonomies

• Building marketing automation plans

• Sending email campaigns with Email Experience Manager (EXM)

• Single customer view

• Generate quality PDFs with Print Experience Manager

• Building storefronts with Sitecore Commerce

• Managing vast amounts of content with Content Hub

.NET and Microsoft Azure

Architecturally, Sitecore has been built using the .NET platform since its initial releases. Its extensive API increases the opportunities for flexible, extensible, and scalable integration with external systems such as ERP and CRM.

Sitecore and Microsoft are working together to expand the Azure offerings like machine learning for personalised visitor journey building.

Integrations capabilities

Sitecore is so flexible it can integrate with many third-party systems. It has out-of-the-box connectors for Dynamics CRM and Dynamics 365 and Salesforce Marketing Cloud as well as an Active Directory module. These modules allow for customisation to fit specific business needs in a usable, consistent, maintainable, and upgradeable manner.

It also integrates with:

• Coveo and SOLR (search)  

• Smartling, Lionbridge (language transitioning)

• Ooyala, Brightcove (video)

• Verint - previously Telligent (community)

• Twitter, Facebook, Klout (social)

• And more...

For digital asset management (DAM), Sitecore has a built-in media library. This can be configured to store assets in a content database, Azure blob storage, or a file system. Sitecore also has Content Hub for a more extensive feature set for digital asset management and asset creation. This unifies content planning, production, collaboration, and management with a single, integrated solution.

Assets in the Media Library can be faceted and indexed by search. It has built-in search functions, including searching by facet or taxonomy. Usage rights can be controlled in the same granular role/user method as that applied to content. It should be noted that Sitecore also integrates with third party DAM systems such as Digizuite.

To sum up, Sitecore is the ideal platform of choice for your business, whatever your industry.

Composability

Sitecore's SaaS DXP uses composable architecture in the cloud. It allows you to build websites with 'modular' products based on your business needs.

The Composable DXP is fully scalable. It connects to your system via APIs. This enables you to add off-the-shelf products to your website.

XM Cloud for instance, which is part of Sitecore’s Content Cloud composable architecture, is a fast, highly scalable system with powerful multichannel capabilities.

Working with Codehouse

Codehouse has designed, built, and currently supports, many multi-site, multi-language Sitecore solutions. We also have experience in integrating Sitecore with CRM or ERP systems such as Dynamics or Salesforce.

If you'd like to learn more about Sitecore and what it could do to revolutionise your business, just get in touch.