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Introduction to Sitecore – A tour of what’s in the box

Sitecore is THE BEST Web Content Management System (WCM) available on the market. If you in the midst of an RFP (Request for Proposal) for a WCM, I bet you have Sitecore as one of the finalists. I am not surprised! You may want to check the Gartner’s magic quadrant for WCM 2014, Sitecore positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management[1]

This blog post is for all those who want have glimpse of what Sitecore is all about. I have worked with 6.5 and 7.0 versions of Sitecore. All the following information is relevant to Sitecore 7.0. Please note that, Sitecore have major enhancements to versions 7.5 and the current version 8.0 (beta at the time of writing of this post). Describing these enhancements is out of scope of this blog post.

If you are starting off a new project with Sitecore, I would highly recommend to go with versions 7.5 and above. Sitecore has invested a lot of time and effort to build a highly scalable, high performance web content management system. And upgrading from version 7.5 to 8.0 is a lot more easier that upgrading from 7.0 or less to 8.0.

Lets get started, following is the overall view of what Sitecore 7.0 offers as products.

SiteCore Overview – Products offered

Sitecore Overview – Products offered

Sitecore is not all about just publishing content onto your websites. Its does a lot more and is packaged with lot of great products and intelligence. Sitecore is built on .NET framework and I am sure Microsoft cannot be more prouder than this, having the best WCM built on their framework.

Following is  the high level summary of these products.  I will try to add more posts on explaining these products in detail.

  • WCM (Web content management): This is the core functionality which does the publishing of the content. and this is best among the products offered.
  • CEP (Customer Engagement Platform):  This platform is dedicated to provide an elegant, integrated solutions that connects channels, engagement automation, and engagement analytics, with external tools and databases
  • DMS (Digital Marketing Suite): The best suite available in the market for advanced online marketing capabilities like Campaign Management, web analytics, visitor profiling etc
  • Solution Accelerators:  These are pre-built extensions for Sitecore like E-Commerce, Intranet platform etc to accelerate your implementation.
  • AppCenter :  This is a portal to sign up for various apps like email delivery etc., spam detect etc

References:

[1] 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management