SitecoreAI

SitecoreAI is a cloud-native, SaaS, hybrid headless CMS. It helps businesses create and deliver relevant, personalized, multi-channel experiences on their websites and apps.

  • Cloud-native: a secure, reliable, scalable and enterprise-ready system built for the cloud.

  • SaaS: Sitecore hosts, maintains and updates SitecoreAI regularly, saving you costly installations and complex upgrades, while you enjoy the benefits of new product releases and up-to-date technologies.

  • Hybrid headless: combines the flexibility of a headless CMS with authoring tools that empower content authors and designers. The headless aspect means the content and presentation (front-end) are kept separate; while WYSIWYG builders, like the Page builder, enable content authors by visualizing their changes in real time with no need for developer intervention for routine changes, balancing developer agility with marketer control.

With SitecoreAI, developers can rapidly build and manage tailored web experiences by modeling content with data templates, designing layouts and reusable components, and assigning content to components through data sources. You can use the Content SDK and modern front-end frameworks to create rich, interactive sites, integrate with SitecoreAI ’s visual editing interfaces and RESTful APIs, and deliver content globally via Experience Edge’s scalable GraphQL endpoints. Extend your solution further with ready-to-use or custom apps from the Sitecore Marketplace, and accelerate content creation using advanced AI capabilities for automated content generation and brand-aware optimization directly within your site-building workflow.

This topic describes key functionality in SitecoreAI.

To find information about recent product releases, visit the changelog.

SaaS environment updates

SitecoreAI is made up of many interfaces, including Portal, Deploy, Page builder, Explorer, Forms, Analytics, and others. Sitecore regularly updates these interfaces with new features, enhancements, and fixes. In addition, the content you create is stored and run on a unique Content Management (CM) instance in a base image.

Sitecore updates your SitecoreAI base images in the following scenarios:  

  • Routine automatic updates - approximately a week after Microsoft releases a new Windows image, we update the base image. This ensures that you have the latest version and features.

  • Microsoft critical security fixes - whenever Microsoft releases a critical security fix for their Windows base image, to maintain the security of the platform and protect your environments.

  • Sitecore security fixes - Sitecore regularly applies updates to maintain the security of the platform.

Apart from these scenarios, we regularly release new SitecoreAI images. However, we don't automatically update your environment for every release. You get these updates in the following ways:

  • Every time you deploy, the CM instance is updated to the latest version.

    Note

    You can enable auto deployments in the environment settings by turning on Trigger deployment on commit to branch, so that whenever you commit to your code repository you get the latest base image.

  • The up.ps1 script always fetches the latest base image, and you can use it in local development scenarios. If you develop locally, this ensures that you have access to the most recent version of the base image for testing and development purposes.

By following these update procedures, you can be sure that you have access to the latest features, security enhancements, and bug fixes.

SitecoreAI tools and apps

SitecoreAI includes many tools, features, and interfaces for managing and provisioning your websites, creating content, integrating with downstream applications, and publishing to your front end. The following overview diagram shows the many different parts of SitecoreAI:

Overview diagram of the tools, interfaces, and extendable capabilities in SitecoreAI

Access

After deploying a project and environment, the environment is shown as an SitecoreAI app in the Sitecore Cloud Portal. From the portal, you can open SitecoreAI and manage user access. After users are onboarded, they can access the various apps by entering their direct URL, such as the Deploy app, the Sites dashboard, and Components.

Interfaces

Here are the main user interfaces for working with SitecoreAI:

  • Dashboard - the main entry point from which you edit sites, launch different tools, and manage site settings.

  • Pages - a WYSIWYG editor for building the layout and content of your site pages, used for creating page designs and templates, adding components, and personalizing the user experience.

  • Components - a visual grid-based builder with built-in styles and versioning capabilities that also supports using data sources and bringing your own React components (BYOC).

  • Explorer - an editing tool that lets you work with content items independent of presentation.

  • Forms - a dedicated interface to create and design forms, which you add to your site pages using Pages. Forms capture user interactions and send them to a third-party system using webhooks.

  • Content Editor - a powerful interface, familiar to on-prem Sitecore XP users, that allows you to model and create content, create page and partial designs, create workflows, and work with tags.

  • Experience Editor - a legacy WYSIWYG interface that allows you to edit items directly on the page canvas.

Developer tools

SitecoreAI includes a rich offering of developer tools for setting up and integrating your websites.

  • Deploy app - a convenient user interface where you create, manage, and deploy projects and environments, configure source control and hosting providers, manage credentials', and check the system status.

  • APIs - you can use the various APIs to query the SitecoreAI database, perform admin operations, and manage your content. The GraphQL APIs are supplemented by an easy-to-use IDE that includes built-in documentation and validation:

  • Marketplace - build and use applications that extend your implementation by adding new capabilities:

  • SDKs:

    • The Content SDK provides a starter Next.js application, bootstrapped with all the necessary functionality for visualizing content in interfaces such as the Page builder. It supports personalization, tracking, analytics, localization, and multi-sites, analytics, and event tracking.

    • The open-source ASP.NET Core SDK lets developers integrate SitecoreAI content or Sitecore XM/XP content into their ASP.NET Core applications.

    • The Sitecore Cloud SDK lets developers easily integrate capabilities from various Sitecore digital experience platform (DXP) products into JSS Next.js and JSS Angular web applications connected to SitecoreAI.

  • Webhooks - integrate SitecoreAI with other applications with real-time information using webhooks that are triggered when a publishing job finishes, or when entities change.

  • Sitecore CLI - robust command line interface that supports all core SitecoreAI functions using commands, subcommands, and options. Use the CLI to create settings, items, configurations, data modelling, and more; test and verify content, and monitor your implementation.

  • Serialization - Sitecore applies a standard for organizing and formatting data stored in the Sitecore content management system (CMS) and database. This allows safely extracting, migrating, moving, and sharing content while maintaining its integrity.

Delivery

In SitecoreAI, you publish your content to Experience Edge. It's a GraphQL API-based service that allows you to retrieve layout and content, distributed through a CDN, and hosted by Sitecore. Experience Edge is the publishing target of different Sitecore products: XM, SitecoreAI, Content Hub, and Content Hub One. You can build your solution in any language and pull the content you need to power it with GraphQL.

Front-end hosting

SitecoreAI decouples the front-end presentation from delivery, while giving marketers the freedom to design the user experience with intuitive page layout editors. With SitecoreAI, you can build and host with any front-end technology that is supported by JSS, allowing developers to take advantage of popular front-end frameworks to rapidly build new digital experiences. The solution includes built-in integrations with Vercel and Netlify, and supports integrations with other front-end hosting providers.

Composable add-ons

SitecoreAI is part of Sitecore's composable offering. You can upgrade your solution to include Sitecore Search, enhanced Personalization, and content management capabilities from the Content Hub suite. Sitecore Connect allows a smooth integration between the various elements in your ecosystem, both Sitecore and non-Sitecore.

Client applications with your preferred technology

You can use any front-end stack to build client applications if the technology you choose can:

  • Consume JSON-formatted layout and content data.

  • Use libraries for interacting with the Edge Delivery GraphQL endpoint.

This includes frameworks such as Blazor, ASP.NET Core, JavaScript, and more.

If you choose JavaScript, we recommend building client solutions with the Next.js Sitecore JavaScript Rendering SDK (JSS).

The Next.js SDK provides the best support for integrating with Experience Editor and Pages and ensures the best compatibility with upcoming features, such as SXA Headless components. A foundation template is currently available that includes an SitecoreAI instance and a JSS Next.js application configured to render data from an SitecoreAI instance. You can use the foundation template to set up a local development environment and perform an initial deployment.

The Sitecore Cloud Portal is the central hub to access all Sitecore digital experience platform (DXP) products. You manage your organization and users in the portal, and manage access to apps such as SitecoreAI and the Deploy app. Access the Cloud Portal at https://portal.sitecorecloud.io.

The Deploy app is a user interface for managing environments and deploying projects. It includes a walkthrough for creating a project, a detailed log of every step of the deployment process, a status page, and a centralized location to manage your projects and environments. After you successfully complete the project creation flow, the app runs the following processes to complete the project creation:

  • Provision

  • Build

  • Deploy

At the heart of your environment is a Content Management (CM) instance. The CM instance is where you create, store, and edit site content; and manage publishing, content modelling, versioning, workflows, translations, rules, and permissions. A content management instance includes your page layouts, components, data source configurations, localization, and personalization settings. You deliver the data from the CM instance to Experience Edge, using GraphQL.

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