Inside Sitecore Symposium 2024: Shaping the future of connected experiences

Sitecore Symposium 2024 in Nashville TN was a whirlwind of sessions, activities, and product news. Our Horizontal team left excited about several updates that will positively impact our work and our clients. Here’s a recap of some of our favorite moments from the event. 

Introducing Sitecore Stream 

One of this year’s blockbuster Symposium announcements was the official introduction of Sitecore Stream. Horizontal will be experimenting with Stream’s brand-aware AI that grounds outputs to client brand guidelines, with the ability to orchestrate workflows across multiple Sitecore composable products. Its GenAI copilot assistant chat also helps client stakeholders inside the product itself without resorting to outside models/tools.  

Our position on the Sitecore Partner Advisory Council gives the Horizontal team a great vantage point from which to observe updates in this space and become an early adopter.

For more info about Stream, check out this recent article by Jennifer Johnson, Associate Director of Platform Strategy at Horizontal.

Improved HIPAA compliance 

On behalf of our many clients in the Healthcare and Medical vertical, we’re thrilled that Sitecore continues to strive for excellence in HIPAA (and other data privacy) compliance. Prior to Symposium, Sitecore had already achieved HIPAA compliance readiness in Personalize, CDP, and XM Cloud. It's great that Content Hub was officially added to the list of HIPAA compliant products just prior to Symposium.

We’re pleased that Sitecore announced at Symposium that OrderCloud and Search are the next products on the HIPAA roadmap and emphasized their ability to execute Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) covering products that are already HIPAA compliant on a case-by-case basis.

For more info about Sitecore HIPAA compliance, check out this recent article by Scott Denham, Senior Client Partner who works with top clients across the healthcare industry.

Shure customer showcase 

In our customer showcase with Shure, Amy Betty, EVP of Client Experience at Horizontal and Roger Villanueva, Director of Global Web Marketing at Shure, discussed how we’ve architected both a data-driven digital strategy and technical stack “backstage” that enables more advanced “onstage” experiences.

This project includes launching five redesigned and modernized websites in 2024 and 15 global language sites on deck for launch in early 2025, all using XM Cloud headless Next.js hosted on Vercel with integrations to Salesforce, Shure’s commerce system, automated translations through Shure’s translation provider (XTM), and much more. We’re lucky to have amazing clients like Shure and we’ll be sure to continually innovate together. Read the full story.

Pet Supplies Plus Sitecore Experience Award 

Owen Schott, Commerce Strategist at Horizontal and Sara Ranson, VP of Marketing at Pet Supplies Plus, co-presented a session at Symposium about how we’re unleashing growth with a replatform and modernization of Pet Supplies Plus’s web properties. We're extremely proud that Sitecore announced this work has won Pet Supplies Plus and Horizontal the 2024 Sitecore Experience Award for Most Powerful Tech Stack Integration.

To replace an old XP and XC implementation that was suffering from tech debt and inefficiency, this project composes a seamless connected experience using XM Cloud, OrderCloud, Search (including merchandising functionality merged into Sitecore Search from Sitecore Discover), and over a dozen secure integrations to various data sources and targets. With these new technologies, Pet Supplies Plus can reduce maintenance costs and improve security to minimize risk.  

We’re fortunate that such an outstanding brand and client stakeholder team has entrusted us with this type of large digital transformation, and we look forward to even more improvements together.  

Horizontal client dinner & HZTL PRTY  

 It was fantastic to hang out and share delicious BBQ with so many of our clients at one of Nashville’s most iconic venues: The Grand Ole Opry Studio A. It was fun to see new and old connections in an easygoing atmosphere. The evening capped off with some line dancing and excellent live music by Krista Dudley and her band. Thank you for another amazing year of locking arms and working together. 

We’re well known for throwing great parties, and Symposium 2024 was no exception. This year we brought clients, prospects, colleagues, and partners together for food, refreshments, and fun at Friends In Low Places Bar and Honky Tonk on Broadway in downtown Nashville. Incredible live music by Miles Connor and Josh Ross amped up the crowd and capped off the day with positive energy. We even had a custom concert merch booth with free goodies for attendees.  

Sitecore product roadmap updates 

AI took center stage at this year’s Sitecore Symposium, highlighted by several new advancements, such as... 

• The introduction of "Gensights" for CDP leverages AI to reveal usage patterns and suggest optimizations directly within a dashboard, simplifying data analysis.  
  
  
• Content Hub also received AI-powered semantic and visual search, making asset discovery and organization easier without the need for manual tagging.  
  
  

• Additionally, Sitecore teased upcoming generative AI capabilities for creating XM Cloud components beyond only Sitecore Stream. 
  
  

Partner and client sessions demonstrated AI applications, like the “AI-powered Sitecore CDP data analysis” session by Kiran Patil and Sheetal Jain from Horizontal. This session showcased how CDP data, when integrated with Microsoft Fabric and Copilot, enables advanced analysis, automated actions, and visual insights via Power BI—a complete toolkit for data-driven decision-making. 

Other exciting updates included a new Mission Control dashboard with publishing status for XM Cloud, upcoming circular commerce capabilities in OrderCloud, and more complex campaign journeys in Personalize. Content Hub now offers search recommendations that include templates and campaigns. XM Cloud also introduced support for site collections, SEO insights, enhanced analytics UI, and forthcoming features like A/B testing and component-level personalization. 

Sitecore also announced a return of a quality-controlled add-on marketplace, providing developers a way to build customizations that don’t interfere with SaaS upgrades. 

Our team left with the impression that Sitecore is listening and addressing common requests from recent real-world projects, which we’re happy to see in action.