Sitecore 9.2 – Innovation Highlights

Every release contains several innovations. I want to focus on 3 innovations for different target audiences. I will cover something for the front-end developers, something for the back-end developers, and finally something for anyone who regularly uses the Sitecore editing tools.

Sitecore JSS

Sitecore JSS has been one of our major innovations in the past release and we continue to invest and innovate in the headless space.

With 9.2; JSS and SXA will work seamlessly together, with options like:

Multisite enabled data source management,
Reuse presentation across pages and sites, and
Enterprise level app governance, management and scaffolding.

In short, your JSS apps will now be able to benefit from all the platform enhancements that SXA offers. This will enable you to build JSS apps alongside one or multiple SXA sites all in the same platform instance.

Support for Sitecore Forms

With the 9.2 release, you can now display forms that were designed in the Sitecore Forms module within JSS applications. You can submit the forms data and trigger appropriate automation for each form. And of course, like all JSS features, we’re making sure that the Full Platform capabilities are preserved.

Sitecore Host

As mentioned during Sitecore Symposium 2018, we’ve been looking to standardize the way we’re handling common activities in all of our new microservices.

We’ve built a series of assemblies that handle these activities, these are things like logging, configuration, plugin management etc.

Last year at Sitecore Symposium 2018 we introduced the concept of the Sitecore Host. Sitecore Host standardizes the microservices architecture that will be at the core of all these common functionalities within the platform. This is great because it means that we’ll have uniformity across the platform, one approach to logging, one approach to configuration, and so on. This means that you don’t have to learn different technologies and approaches for each of the microservices, making your lives much simpler.

Sitecore Host updates

After Symposium we continued our efforts on Sitecore Host. Not only have we updated to the latest versions of 3^rd party libraries including .NET Core. We’ve also been working to improve the services that we have built against the host.

Sitecore Identity service improvements

The Sitecore Identity service was the first service that we launched running on Sitecore Host, back in 9.1 and we’ve got a few new improvements for 9.2. We’ve implemented single-sign out , so if you log out of one of our systems then you’ll be logged out of all of them. We have implemented token invalidation to ensure that access tokens will expire when users log out.

Finally, we’ve also added persistent storage of users and access tokens to ensure that users aren’t logged out if the Identity service is restarted.

Migration of existing Microservices

But that’s not all! We’ve mentioned how not only future services will run against the Host, but also that we want to move our existing Microservices over to the Host as well and that’s what we’re doing.

As of 9.2 the publishing engine will also be based on the Host. This means that it greatly improves installation and maintenance of this service moving forwards. Also, this better aligns the service with the rest of the platform.

All great news for the for our microservices-based future!

Horizon

Moving to the last innovation for the end-users. Horizon is the next generation experience for web content management.

So where are we with Horizon? We did multiple previews with partners, MVPs and UX research teams. We’ve received honest feedback and very positive feedback that confirms that we’re on the right path.

With 9.2 it’s time for the next phase. We’ll focus on adding new features, functions and improvements based on your input.

We also extended Horizon with;