You will probably see a lot of blogs about the new release. I wanted to highlight some of the things that pertain to clients and content authors that I know makes this release exciting and will have clients wanting to upgrade based on my experience.

Content Editor

One of things I know is big with our client is accessibility. Not only for a website, but for content entry as well. The content editor gets some great exciting new updates:

• Easier expand items on the content tree.
• Content area selecting fields is easier.
• W3C ARIA Authoring Practices Guide, enabling users to seamlessly navigate with a keyboard through ribbons, the content tree, and various field types.
• Able to listen to information about UI elements through assistive technology.

Example of an item that the tab stop has landed on:

Tabbing example:

SaaS Product Integration

Many clients are not ready to go full XM Cloud. However now you can have the best of both worlds.

• A new migration tool that can be used to migrate content, media and users from an XM instance to an XM Cloud instance.
• A new migration tool to transfer xDB to CDP. This can include contact facets for CDP, Personalize and also Sitecore Connect to external systems. Having this in place will help make the jump to a full SaaS environment when a company is read.

Miscellaneous Updates (copied from the release notes)

• Added audit logging for Sitecore logins via Identity Server.
• Added audit logging when unlocking an item in the Content Editor Review tab – My Items.
• Added a new module called Codeless Schema Extension, enabling business users to extend the xConnect schema without requiring code development.
• You can now target specific audiences more effectively by adding custom languages, combining any ISO language code with a country/region code. This includes the ability to use nonstandard country/region codes, such en-EU.
• Added the ability to create a custom or regional language directly in the Content Editor, such as en-EU, which extends beyond those ISO language formats that are registered in .NET.

More Information

There are a lot of major/minor changes with this release. To find out more and how to download the latest version of Sitecore follow this link.