Sitefinity 14.2: What’s New and Why It Matters

Sitefinity 14.2 is here to offer improved quality of life for practitioners, increased stability, and tighter security, alongside some new functionality in content curation and enhancements to both Sitefinity Insight and Sitefinity Cloud.

Well, that’s the short of it. A neat, customer-focused package that thoughtfully builds upon the previous two Sitefinity releases. Filling in the blanks, putting in the right touches, adding some extra balance and comfort. Sitefinity 14.2 continues the evolution of the Sitefinity V14  family line.

Now, that statement is not impervious to misinterpretation, so let’s put things in perspective.

It is the season of easy living but by no means easy times to live in. The way we work, have fun, connect, share, do business and communicate is being transformed. Legacy solutions and old, inflexible architectures are struggling to keep up. Change is propelled by technology is propelled by change.

We’re witnessing, experiencing and taking part in all manners of tech evolution. Our gadgets have shapeshifted from desktop to handheld, our communication takes place both on and off-line, we’ve moved on from strictly web to multichannel, we do as much business in-store as we do digitally.

Evolution is a non-finite concept. It’s best observed and rationalized from the distance of time. But then again, things don’t seem to move as fast when looked at from a distance.

The Digital Experience (R)evolution

So, for everyone involved, the digital transformation is hard to quite put a finger on. We’re not bystanders, we’re taking it in stride. That’s the thing with evolution when you are not an observer but a participant. And it doesn’t help that somebody’s playing with the fast-forward button.

Change can be scary; the unknown makes us uncomfortable. The challenges of digital transformation are not unlike the challenges of life. Survival of the fittest is the convenient but ruthless way of looking at it.

Plus, the fittest aren’t necessarily the biggest and meanest, and there’re still enough fossils lying around to drive the point home. To evolve is to adapt. Size matters—but the ability to adjust and scale proves more valuable in the long run.

We believe that digital transformation can be accomplished one step at a time—at your own pace and scale. And we believe we have the platform to enable that. Sitefinity is extensible, affordable, connected and secure, and continues to add to a robust set of capabilities for organizations looking to:

• Drive Experiences with Content
• Tailor Experiences with Data
• Add Value through Integrations
• Build and Scale in the Cloud

We have just added more capabilities to the toolset to help both new adopters and upgraders to successfully orchestrate >> personalize >> integrate >> scale. Before we get to the rundown though, let’s quickly review the Sitefinity line and what it offers.

A Digital Experience Platform that Scales at Your Pace

Sitefinity is a platform for those who not only want to adopt technology that powers their products and services but develop and execute a long-term digital strategy built around integration, composability and interoperability.

Here’s a summary of how the Sitefinity product line has built upon the traditionally powerful web content management with more digital experience capabilities and richer integrations.

Headless Content Management to deliver personalized experiences on key channels beyond web.

Simplified Low-code Integrations to automate marketing operations by connecting your most critical systems and processes

Content at Scale to bring more services to more destinations faster than ever with enhanced content governance in a multisite, multilingual context.

Data-Driven Marketing employing AI-assisted audience analysis and segmentation, enhanced by premium connectivity.

.NET 6 for building your frontend and delivering high performance and scalable cross-platform experiences.

Digital Asset Management to organize, optimize, and deliver digital assets across channels through enterprise-ready integrations with leading DAM solutions.

Advanced Search Capabilities for enhanced content discovery and customizable, personalized experience augmented by AI.

On top of what you get out of the box, there’s the potential to integrate with other Progress solutions and product offerings, into a truly composable enterprise platform.

Compliant and Secure File Transfer: Tight integration with Progress MOVEit for PCI-certified file storage and transfer.

Chatbot Integration: AI chat integrated with content, to personalize conversations and shape the journey to accelerate pipeline. By Progress NativeChat

Digital Decisioning: Accelerated decision automation for transformative, personalized and scalable digital experiences by Progress Corticon.

Sitefinity 14.2: What’s New

As usual, we have the release at a glance on the What’s New page and you may’ve noticed already that the novelties are broken down by solution. While there’s nothing wrong with space efficiency, it wasn’t our main driver here. You see, this breakdown is the makeup of a flexible platform that can meet your needs now and is ready to accommodate growth. Create >> personalize >> integrate >> scale, remember? This is not a mantra—this is how digital transformation works. And it’s what Sitefinity does, in simple terms.

Content management is a given, but it now serves multiple channels, beyond web. Experiences driven by content, Sitefinity checks that box. Sitefinity Insight handles customer analytics and personalization, so you can tailor the experience. Scale when ready and build a global presence on a true PaaS infrastructure. That’s where Sitefinity Cloud comes in.

Let’s look closer at the standout novelties in each department.

Sitefinity

As of Sitefinity 14.1, .NET Core (.NET 6.0) is the officially supported framework for building cross-platform experiences with Sitefinity. The 14.2 release extends the functionality to allow risk-free adoption and ease of use. Personalizable search and results widgets are available out-of-the-box, while the REST API backward compatibility allows seamless migration and short time to the multiple benefits of decoupled presentation and cross-platform frontend development.

A number of stability and usability enhancements to SiteSync boost operational efficiency, marketer self-service and cross-team productivity. Queued content sync enables editors to independently synchronize multiple content items while maintaining website integrity. Enhanced SiteSync troubleshooting options enables website administrators to quickly resolve potential issues and failed content sync attempts.

Sitefinity 14.2 introduces improved content lifecycle management, allowing the editorial teams to serve evergreen content and keep target audiences informed and engaged. You can set page expiration periods and receive Content Expiration Notifications to update or unpublish outdated content.

Sitefinity Insight

The Top Pages Report for audience segments allows a closer Look at content performance, enabling you to fine-tune your content strategy and focus efforts where you can yield the highest ROI. Make informed, data-driven decisions about your content and how it supports your marketing goals. Personalize your top-performing pages and remove or update the underperforming content.

The improved segment discovery boasts new tools and a refined processing algorithm. Make the most of your frequently visited content to drive conversions and efficiently engage your visitors.

The tighter integration with Ucommerce lets you capture Ucommerce events in Sitefinity Insight to make the most of your digital commerce and boost revenue through personalization. Leverage audience segmentation to drive conversion rates and average order value up.

Sitefinity Cloud

Security Information and Event Management provides real-time monitoring, threat detection, event analysis and incident management. SIEM is now available out of the box across all tiers, with a premium option for organizations needing to meet higher security and compliance requirements. Leveraging Microsoft Sentinel, Sitefinity Cloud offers an extra AI-augmented security layer to make threat detection smarter and faster.

Automated Workflows boost connectivity and integration. Using Azure Logic Apps, Sitefinity Cloud enables adopters to streamline content and admin workflows, connect diverse data sources and achieve automation with no code and easy-to-use tools.

Wrap-up

So, there goes the latest Sitefinity release and the next installment of reliable, easy-to-use tools to build and ship content-driven experiences.

Sitefinity has always been a platform with a gentle learning curve. With each new version though, we try to make it friendlier and provide simple solutions for complex problems. That’s what technology is for in the first place, right?

Create, adapt, elevate, grow. There’s a platform that can grow with you.

Get Started with Sitefinity 14.2