2011 Dreamcore Conference Recap

The Dreamcore 2011 Conference, hosted by Sitecore, took place on April 19-20th in Boston and featured several presentations and demonstrations for customers, partners, and developers. Michael Seifert the Sitecore CEO, delivered a keynote address and Carl Franklin of Microsoft and .NET Rocks Radio spoke as well. As a Certified Gold Sitecore partner, Boston Interactive sent two of our Developers, Nina and Lew, to gain a first-hand perspective on all of the new features and functions for the content management system.

If I were to sum up Dreamcore 2011 in one word, it would be 'usability.' To me, usability means not having to think about the tool I'm using. I want to think about my project, about the particular goal I'm trying to accomplish. The best tools are the ones that you can pick up and wield without being encumbered by unintuitive requirements or bulky workflows.

Usability was at the core of all the features demoed by Sitecore at Dreamcore this year. To make Sitecore more user friendly for developers, there's Sitecore Rocks, a Visual Studio plug-in that will let us focus on code without switching back and forth between different tools and mindsets. For the end users, webmasters and content authors there's a greatly improved Page Editor. The new Page Editor is one of the closest things I've seen to a true WYSIWYG experience, allowing content authors to update pages, insert new controls and personalize content in the context of the page.

Dreamcore 2011 was fantastic. Not only did we enjoy the opportunity to share thoughts, ideas and knowledge with other passionate Sitecore users by attending case studies and workshops, but we also learned about many exciting features coming to future versions of Sitecore by attending product demos and sneak peeks of future releases. One of the features which I thought was particularly interesting was the ability to do inline personalization of a Sitecore item on a per item basis, (without the need for a complicated ruleset), simply one or more conditions (or triggers) and then defining resulting behavior. I can see great potential in this feature, and I think our clients will benefit greatly by taking advantage of this upcoming functionality.