Sitecore Symposium 2020

Recommendations from TBG's Own Sitecore MVP and Symposium Featured Speaker, Shelley Benhoff

2020 has been challenging in many ways. I will very much miss attending Symposium in-person and walking the halls with my Sitecore friends from all over the globe. However, I am excited for a virtual Symposium this year because I will be able to watch more sessions! Here’s a rundown of what I’m looking forward to at Sitecore Symposium 2020.

Day 1 – October 27, 2020

• General Session: Marketing in every moment – Paige O’Neill (CMO, Sitecore) will have a chat with Aaron Watkins (Senior Director, Johns Hopkins Medicine) and they will discuss how the healthcare leader quickly pivoted its digital efforts to meet new expectations as the pandemic emerged. Johns Hopkins Medicine is a client of TBG, and I have had the pleasure of working with Aaron over the past few years. We are very proud of our team led by TBG CEO John Berndt and everything we have accomplished this year as the COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in our website traffic. You can view the site at https://hopkinsmedicine.org/health.
• General Session: Sitecore business update with CEO Steve Tzikakis – I always look forward to the CEO update every year at Symposium. It’s a look forward into the future to see what Sitecore is planning and it excites me to see what is coming next.
• Serialize your way to success – Charlie Turano (Product Manager, Sitecore) will talk about how to use Sitecore 10’s new serialization features to improve the developer experience. I’m a fan of both Unicorn and TDS for serialization and I’m looking forward to diving into the latest features available.
• Sitecore at Sitecore: Content Hub edition - Zarnaz Arlia (VP Corporate Marketing, Sitecore) is planning to discuss how to get the most out of Content Hub. TBG is investing a lot of time in training and specialization in Content Hub and I am interested in learning more about how Content Hub will help our clients with their content crises.
• Containers & AKS: Taking Sitecore 10 to the next level - Bart Plasmeijer (Senior Software Architect, Sitecore) and Rob Earlam (Technical Evangelist, Sitecore) will discuss running Sitecore in Containers from development through to production in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). I’m working hard to get caught up on Docker and I will admit I know very little about k8s. These are the main skills I’m studying right now in order to incorporate them into my Unofficial Sitecore Curriculum on Pluralsight.
• Insufficient facts always invite danger, Captain! - Neil Killen (Technical Director, Valtech) will explore industry-standard tools and techniques to demonstrate how you can implement a containerized monitoring platform. I’m interested to learn how to monitor containers to ensure they are performing as they should.

Day 2  - October 28, 2020

• General session: Creating the ultimate moment: A panel with Sitecore Ultimate Experience Award winners – Paige O’Neill will be presenting the Ultimate Experience Awards this year and I will enjoy seeing what sites win this prestigious award. TBG is very proud that the Johns Hopkins website we have worked so hard on recently won a Sitecore Experience Award! I look forward to congratulating the Ultimate Experience Award winners.
• How to develop with the new ASP.NET Core rendering SDK - Nick Wesselman (PM, Developer Experience, Sitecore) and Oleg Jytnik (Technical Lead, Sitecore) will show you how to get started with this new SDK and dive into its features. We have been discussing ASP.NET Core for a while now and it’s nice to see it’s finally being incorporated, and developers will be able to leverage it for  routing, field rendering, placeholder rendering, localization, Experience Editor support, and Tracking support.
• Content Orchestration: A symphony between Content HUB and Sitecore XP using Content Hub Connector – Akshay Sura (Lead Platform Architect, Konabos Consulting) and Sumith Damodaran (Sr. Product Manager, Sitecore) will talk about the future of Content Hub Connector and explore its features. I have learned so much from Akshay over the years and I am really looking forward to learning more about the Content Hub connector in the year of the DAM.

I am happy to be a first-time presenter this year at Symposium representing TBG! You can view my session on Day 2, October 28^th, 2020 at 1:30 pm CDT. I will discuss Choosing the right options for building your Helix solutions with a focus on setting up your Visual Studio projects by building Helix scaffolding from scratch and using the best tools available including the Yeoman Helix Generator and the Sitecore Helix Templates Visual Studio Extension. This will be a featured session and I will do a short Q&A afterward. I hope to see you there!

There are also many on-demand sessions that I am looking forward to including AMPlify your SXA with Una Verhoeven, Best practices in SXA with Adam Najmanowicz and Mark van Aalst, Contain yourself: Why Kubernetes with Jimmy Rudley and Kelly Rusk, and Get cracking with Content Hub with Deepthi Katta and Richard Leiva.

Even though we can’t be together in-person this year, we have the opportunity to learn so much more through on-demand content for Sitecore Symposium. I will watch more sessions than I have listed here but I only have so much space in a blog post to list them all. I hope you enjoy this year’s Sitecore Symposium, I’ll see you there!

Shelley Benhoff

I'm a Sitecore MVP, Lead  Developer at TBG with over 16 years of experience, and a Pluralsight Author. I have a passion for technology, gaming, and general nerdery.