The Sitecore User Group Conference Europe is Europe’s biggest Sitecore community event. It was held at the Budapest Congress Center on March 24-25, after being canceled in 2020. It was a special conference for a few reasons.

After 2 years of lockdown, this was the first time the Sitecore community could meet in person. The last SUGCON Europe was in London in 2019, 3 years ago. Many people arrived in Budapest from different continents and countries, such as Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Canada, the U.S., and India. Many delegates also arrived from other European countries and from all around the world.

Day 1

The first day always starts with a morning registration. During this time, it’s also possible to take Sitecore certification exams. And we’re delighted that six ALLWIN software developers passed their exams. Congrats!

After lunch, Steve Tzikakis (Sitecore CEO) and Dave O’Flanagan (Sitecore CPO) opened the conference, presenting on the future of Sitecore and welcoming the community to the conference. It was clear that Sitecore is shifting to become part of the Composable DXP world. And the main direction is to provide different services for unique needs – CMS, Commerce, Personalization, AI-based search, etc. Sitecore wants to cover a wider range of needs with these products, and clients can choose what’s best for them – although clients can choose services from different vendors for the same problem. The biggest advantage of using only Sitecore products is that they are easy to connect because Sitecore provides examples and support about how to connect these products together.

After the keynote sessions, another great session was given by Andy Cohen about a future product, called XM Cloud, which offers Sitecore XM hosted by Sitecore in the cloud. This is a cool concept because partners can fully focus on delivering features instead of creating, maintaining and upgrading Sitecore environments.

In 2021 December, Sitecore StackExchange moved from beta to public, which means the Sitecore community was active enough to achieve this goal. Mark Cassidy, Richard Seal and Kamruz Jaman talked about this journey and left everyone with a good vibe for the rest of the day.

After the first sessions in the Plenary Room, the sessions started in 4 rooms. I would like to just mention a few topics which were popular on Day 1, these are: Composable DXP, Sitecore CDP, DevOps, Sitecore upgrades, Content Hub, Sitecore Forms and Marketing.

The first day was full of interesting topics and was closed with a dinner followed by the Sitecore Hackathon 2022 award ceremony.

Day 2

After a short breakfast, Pieter Brinkman and Jason St-Ctyr started with a presentation about migration to SaaS, which was highly informative and again amplified that Sitecore is going on the SaaS and CaaS path.

With the support of the A/V crew, it was possible to have Jason virtually on the screen. After that, I became a room captain. George Chang presented about the Sitecore GraphQL and compared it with the good old Sitecore Item Service. The next session was held by Mark Cassidy about containerization. This session was an introduction to containerization and showed all pros and cons. The biggest pro is that it ensures every developer has the same solution running on their machine. And this has a big advantage when more than 1 person is working on a project (which is usually the case on a Sitecore project :)), or in the case of a Sitecore upgrade, or onboarding new developers. The biggest con is that developers need to understand how containers work and how to troubleshoot – but come on, we are developers, and we like to learn recent technologies!

After the 45-minute sessions, the lightning talks started which are limited to 15 minutes. We tried this session format the first time. These sessions needed to be on point and fit all information in 15 minutes, which is tough, but it gave a nice spin after the long sessions.

During the lunch break, we had some time for networking. The food was delicious and showed a bit from the Hungarian kitchen. It was nice to meet most of the Sitecore friends from all around the world. Everyone I talked with was very friendly and it was nice to see people’s faces at an in-person event. This year many Sitecore employees came to SUGCON Europe which was good to see and understand how they are involved in the community. We also had a lot of sessions from Sitecore employees – as a lot of new products are on the way it was best to hear it from them, so it all made sense.

After lunch, there were only a few sessions left and the closing keynote. I would like to highlight the presentation by Marc Ramer about Sitecore Discover, which is an AI-based commerce search engine that could be used together with Sitecore OrderCloud later. The product is still in development, but it was good to see a demo of how it will work.

The closing keynote sessions were held by Jake Hookom and Roger Connoly, where they talked about the future of the Sitecore products. There was a big “Wow!” moment when they showed a screenshot about a component builder which can integrate different headless CMSs as a data source, such as Contentful, Kentico.

Summary

SUGCON Europe 2022 was closed by Tamás Varga from Sitecore who helped us a lot with organizing this conference! I would like to thank to all speakers, attendees, A/V crew, and fellow organizers, this was an unforgettable event!