Sitefinity 14.1—Create, Connect and Scale! Go!

With the release of Sitefinity 14, we wanted to provide our customers with a platform that would readily accommodate anticipated changes in the marketplace while maintaining the ease of use and flexibility that have thrilled our customers for years.

Here is a quick refresh of what we packaged in Sitefinity 14:

• Better support for creating multichannel experiences, simplified system integration with low-code to help you connect all those critical systems that have been sitting in silos for years.
• Compliant and secure file upload and transfer through a tight integration with Progress MOVEit.
• Powerful chatbot integration was added to the mix, enabling marketers to stir greater recipes for success, shape the customer journeys and ultimately—accelerate pipelines.

And while even Gartner mentioned some of these enhancements as differentiators in their Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXP report, we still look at them as enablers.

We Created Sitefinity with You in Mind

As we continuously add capabilities for all levels of practitioners, we are expecting Sitefinity 14.1 to be an important release that will significantly impact you as we move forward with that earnest, customer-focused pledge.

We have summarized the release on the what’s new and the Sitefinity release notes pages, but here is a recap for those of you who cannot wait to try it.

Sitefinity 14.1 builds on top of what is already a flexible, connected and scalable platform in addition to providing developers and marketers with:

• .NET Core page and form building experience.
• Digital Asset Management partner Integrations with Cloudinary and Frontify.
• Advanced Search Capabilities augmented by AI through Azure Cognitive Search.
• Audience Analysis, Segmentation and Targeting.

New Page Creation, Content Management and Form Building Experience Powered by .NET Core

.NET Core is the successor to the .NET Framework, delivering a future-proof framework for building your frontend to enable you to build scalable cross-platform experiences. Besides offering the performance and productivity benefits of a modern framework, Sitefinity creates a new paradigm for developers and provides marketers with a new page and form builder for unsurpassed ease of use.

As of Sitefinity 14.1, .NET Core (.NET 6.0) is the officially supported framework for building cross-platform experiences with Sitefinity.

Your existing WebForms project will continue to run even when you upgrade to Sitefinity 14.1. Still, there are many benefits of adopting .NET Core for your next project or website refresh.

If you need a flexible platform architecture that enables you to shift and scale as needed, speed up frontend development, supports cross-platform deployment, simultaneously offers true WYSIWYG page creating and streamlined content editing UX, you should consider an upgrade and benefit from a long term-support from reputable vendors.

Sign up for our upcoming release webinar to learn more or contact us for a live demo.

Digital Asset Management Platform (DAM) Integration

First things first: What is DAM and why is efficient digital media management becoming increasingly important?

DAM is both a business process and an information management technology, which creates a centralized system for organizations and provides critical capabilities to store, access, optimize and deliver digital assets across various channels such as marketing campaigns, email, social and web.

Sitefinity 14.1 introduces partner integrations with Cloudinary and Frontify to bring powerful DAM capabilities closer to the content creators and enable organizations to centrally manage their entire library of product and brand assets.

We chose to offer these integrations in order to alleviate frequently heard pain points below:

• Managing a growing media library across multiple departments and siloed systems is inefficient and difficult to support.
• Assets quickly become out of sync across channels, such as public facing websites, marketing campaigns, social media and offline collateral.
• Multiple round trips to the design team lead to inefficiency and added cost.
• Lost or misplaced work must be recreated.
• Consistency across marketing channels suffers with no central control.

Tapping into Cloudinary and Frontify integrations promptly enables end users who have outgrown Sitefinity’s built-in capabilities to get access to powerful tools for asset organization, image, video and document processing.

Bringing these tools closer to the end-user is a true gift to marketers like you and me, but it also helps organizations seeking to maintain operational efficiency to benefit from improved agility, productivity and brand consistency.

And here is the best part: configuration takes minutes. You can scale up if needed and when needed without breaking the bank. Too good to be true? Sign up for a live demonstration—our sales engineers have an example or two up their sleeves.

Advanced Search Options with Azure Cognitive Search

Azure Cognitive Search is a cloud search service giving developers infrastructure, APIs and tools for building a rich search experience over private content in web, mobile and enterprise applications. With Sitefinity 14.1, we are enabling our self-hosted, on-premise and Sitefinity Cloud customers to expand their search capabilities through enhanced integration with Azure Cognitive Search.

Improving the search experience for your prospects is one of the best ways to convert them from passersby into super fans. Placing your most valuable content in front of their eyes can significantly shorten the path to conversion. However, the true benefit comes from the ability to customize and personalize the search results and turn those into compelling stories for customers.

Marketers will appreciate the opportunity to reorder, personalize and customize the search results and promote important content as they strive to deliver rich, scalable, AI-driven personalized search experiences to end-users.

Tighter integration with Azure Cognitive Search also ensures that developers can remove infrastructure bottlenecks and potential application performance penalties, protect sensitive content from being indexed and scale as needed to meet demand.

Audience Profiling, Personalization, and Enhanced Targeting

Analytics

If understanding your audience remains a priority on your 2022 agenda, Sitefinity Insight is here to help. Its core strength is in the power it gives to its primary customers—digital marketers and sales teams—to track user behavior, visualize data in meaningful reports, profile the audience to create impactful content and deliver personalized experiences.

With the latest set of enhancements, we strive to reduce the burden of manually creating audience segments by leveraging AI-driven segmentation based on content consumption. Discovering new opportunities for segmentations, using data-driven insights to shape the journey and optimizing your content strategy to help improve engagement and conversion is easier than ever before.

Personalization

If you are someone who bleeds marketing when cut, you already know that your prospects and customers have unique needs. Casting a big net is one way to fill the top of the funnel and will work for many of you. Coming back home with a story to tell may, on the other hand, require you to be accurate with your messaging and communication. Sitefinity Insight can help further optimize the user journey and increase engagement by promoting relevant content, products or services based on previous interactions, (micro) conversions such as form-fills, CTA interactions or content consumption.

With conversion-based personalization, you can have a significant impact on key digital web metrics, including time spent on site and user engagement, and drive successful cross-sell and upsell initiatives.

Now, this is something you can proudly hang on the wall.

Before We Wrap Up

Delivering captivating, personalized and consistent brand experiences that exceed consumer expectations while driving conversion rates continue to be top priorities for all marketing teams. Turning to Sitefinity can help you achieve these goals rather than having them stay aspirational.

By working with your IT, or one of select Progress Sitefinity Partners, your organization can leverage Sitefinity’s future proof technology to quickly create, deploy and scale your digital operations while reducing overhead and saving resources to dedicate to other mission-critical projects.

We have made it easier to not only build and scale your web presence, but also understand how your customers interact with your brand. To support developers, we have introduced a design framework—a collection of code snippets, patterns and examples—to speed up development and UI consistency. And if multichannel is your thing, the tighter integration between NativeChat and Sitefinity Insight will help your marketers connect the dots to paint a complete picture and understand how interacting with your web chatbot impacts your user journey.

It is a win-win for the entire organization whether your business goal is to grow revenue, retain customers, acquire new business or reduce project complexity to help optimize operational efficiency.

A wonderful journey awaits, and we are confident you will love it. Sitefinity 14.1 is out. And it is easy to get started.

Get Started with Sitefinity 14.1