My 2 cents on The Virtual Edition
Note that I'm being optimistic and wrote "The" virtual edition instead of the "First" virtual symposium. Not that this virtual experience was all bad - certainly not. I saw some inspiring presentations, had a few good chats and I even found some benefits as well - no overlap in sessions making it easier to watch them all and... you can easily sneak out of the room if the session is not what you actually expected :) I didn't get to enlarge my collections though:
This post is not an overview of the big announcements this year. Nor a list of highlights and most remarkable moments. I can safely make the assumptions that those will be covered already by others - Sitecore themselves, Adam Seabridge and others. I will just share some screenshots to show how the Sitecore interface might look like in the (near) future:
Still here? Good.. as I did want to write a small post about my 2020 Symposium experience. First of all, I did miss.. you! Yes, you. And you, and all the other members of our great Sitecore community. Before each symposium we take a look at the agenda and dream away when we read session titles that promise us great knowledge. But what we usually remember from each symposium are the moments outside the sessions - not just the fun (ok, yes, there is some fun..) but also the people. Getting to know the people within the Sitecore community and/or company. People who you might have helped already, or who you might help in their future Sitecore endeavors. And if you get stuck, they will probably help you as well.
Luckily we had some chats.. on Slack, on some virtual chat platform.. and on the second day we even found a breakfast Teams chat session with Sitecorians and a bunch of eager developers. And in these times, anything is better than nothing - it was good to hear other people thoughts on the announcements and evolutions.
Was it all so bad? No, it wasn't even bad! I'm glad I joined virtual Sym. And I did see some good sessions. Note that sessions are still available so you still have some time to catch up. Of course you have the keynotes, the sessions on containers with CaaS, Content Hubs and rendering hosts that you should (have) see(n) but we also got a lot of on-demand sessions to fill the rainy lockdown days.
If you have an interest in SXA, you should watch the best practices session by Adam & Mark. And after that got you warmed up, continue by watching Una -always good for an interesting session- amplifying her SXA. As I skipped the marketing, business and commerce sessions I can't tell you about hidden gems in those areas but I do remember some nice stuff on Content Hub, on Web push notifications and I learned a few extra things on Solr, Azure and EXM. I'm not going to share more details or screenshots - I'm just giving ideas, you should watch them yourself ;)
Creating shorter sessions was a good idea - I really liked the 30' format and the on-demand sessions are usually even shorter.
Symposium 2020 did deliver what I expected - I did learn some new things and got to interact a bit. The shorter sessions and on-demand videos to watch afterwards are good ideas and might also work in a non-virtual edition. We might evolve to a combination - take the best of both experiences, let people interact live and give some content for those whom can't travel. But nobody knows.. lets just hope we can all meet in Vegas next year 🤗
