Recently, Sagittarius supported a leading residential development industry client with its upgrade to Sitecore 10.2.
The client is one of the UK’s leading housing charities and developers, established in the 1960s to tackle homelessness. As a regulated charitable housing association, all profits are reinvested into new and existing homes, creating thriving communities and providing services for its residents. It is now one of the UK’s most successful independent social businesses, with over 250,000 homes across the North West and South East of England.
Sitecore 10.2 focuses on increasing performance and stability while helping reduce costs so organisations can deliver hyper-personalised digital experiences that convert. Features of Sitecore 10.2 include headless support, improvements to Sitecore Experience Edge, simple upgrades, Horizon editor boost, new developer tools and email marketing enhancements.
The Sagittarius customer knew its digital roadmap to a headless architecture would require an upgrade of its existing MarTech stack with the capability and flexibility for a headless set-up for front-end development. With the 10.2 release, Sitecore extended the number of frameworks for this set-up to work and continues to grow the flexibility of development resources and open up the power of Sitecore to a broader group. Sitecore Experience Edge provides a way to cache front-end content within Sitecore. This results in accelerated performance and lowered costs as it can replace a content delivery network (CDN). Sitecore 10.2 replaced Azure Search with Solr, which the client is now using to power onsite search experiences to make products and services more accessible and reduce the time spent locating information.
The improvements with the 10.2 upgrade mean that Horizon is a viable alternative for the Experience Editor and can be used to edit headless sites whilst supporting the SXA (Sitecore Accelerator) product, which opens up the possibility of broader use. These new features, for example, Content Explorer, will facilitate finding and organising items for the housing charity’s content teams. Additional functionality within Email Experience Manager (EXM) will help facilitate the client’s marketing team with campaign creation. Enhancements to EXM include creating a dashboard, presenting more sorting options to view information about email campaigns, and sending emails from a dedicated despatch server.
Overall, Sitecore continues to move forward on its headless and composable journey, modernising martech for future use. The upgrade to 10.2 has provided our client with changes that offer greater functionality and improvements to the user experience.
Our Chief Experience Officer, Natalie Waite, will speak about Modernising the MarTech stack at the upcoming DX Europe in London. During this session, Natalie will break down the composable conundrum to help you accelerate the evolution of your MarTech stack in a way that makes sense for your business. This session will help explore routes and reasons to headless and their power when combined with the right content distribution streams, data sets, and insight-led strategies. To find out more about DX Europe in London and to sign up for free, see here.
Sagittarius is a certified Sitecore Platinum Partner with several brands globally. If you have any questions about the upgrade or want to learn more about Sitecore and how it could support your team, please email hello@sagittarius.agency.
Find out more about our Sagittarius’ Sitecore accreditations, such as the Content Hub Specialisation Badge.
Sagittarius is an award-winning digital agency that helps brands create high-converting digital experiences. Established in the UK with over 40 years of experience, we’re a multinational team of innovators, visionaries, strategists, and problem solvers who will optimise your web experience and use data-led decisions to power up your CRO, content, and UX. We take a marketing-first approach to our development, baking in performance and measurement to deliver impressive ROI on your technology investment. We specialise in Sitecore as a complete or composable DXP platform and have our own Sitecore Optimisation Consultancy and training academy to empower your people.
