Revolutionising Digital Experience: A Year of Xperience by Kentico and What's Next

Kentico Xperience has been around for some time now and the latest generation, Xperience by Kentico, was revealed at their yearly Connection event in 2022. We work closely with Kentico to understand the ins and outs of this latest platform, exploring new features and getting to know what will soon be Kentico’s flagship product.

As a Kentico Most Valuable Professional (MVP), I’m lucky enough to be able to work with Kentico at the very forefront of the product. Over the past year I’ve been testing some of the platform’s new features as they have been released and provided feedback to improve the product before Connection 2023 in October.

In this blog, I’ll be running through some of these new features and breaking down exactly what they mean.

Time to market

Building websites quickly and efficiently is always a priority for companies who are looking to get their sites to market fast. This concept is nothing new to Kentico, who are well known for their speedy website builds. So, it’s no surprise that Xperience by Kentico continues to embrace that concept.

One sure-fire way to increase the development time of a new website build is to have every page and component coded by developers to bring your site over the finish line.  Xperience by Kentico minimises the development effort by offering numerous low-code/no-code tools that allow marketing teams to build landing pages and campaigns without having to rely on a tech team to create those tools.

Many other products or platforms available require more budget to bring your site to life, with a far more complex build. Through Kentico Xperience, brands are empowered to create websites that deliver great user experiences at speed and are manageable in-house, saving both time and money.

Software as a service 

Kentico have always created Digital Experience Platforms (DXP). Their latest iteration of Xperience takes a new approach and is a cloud native DXP. What does this mean? In simple terms, there’s the option to utilise a new SaaS subscription that works in harmony with DXP functionality.  

For those who choose to go down the SaaS route, you can leverage a Microsoft Azure infrastructure with advanced CI/CD tools, best of breed email distribution, authentication and analytics services.   

Acknowledging the need to adapt their platform to the constantly evolving digital world, and the requirement for faster deployment, offering SaaS within the Xperience platform is a sensible move from Kentico. The brand noted that:

‘In general, cloud offers faster performance, responsiveness, and greater agility, without having to operate a server infrastructure. At the same time, a usage-based subscription service model provides greater flexibility when it comes to scaling business.’  

We’re excited to see how SaaS can offer our clients day one value – as soon as a subscription license is purchased, content modelling and content entry can be started almost immediately. 

Content Hub 

We’ve always used structured content when building Kentico websites. The process of separating content from the presentation layer means that content editors are storing quality, reusable content that developers love to work with.  

Previously this would be done using content-only page types in the page tree, but with Xperience by Kentico you can make use of the Content Hub. The Content Hub is a dedicated application separate to the page tree, which allows for centralised content to be created, managed and published across multiple channels. 

Once again, Kentico demonstrates that they are taking steps to create a platform that can be easily used without the need for developer or external support, putting you firmly back in the driver’s seat.  

Hybrid Headless 

With the introduction of the Content Hub and an accompanying GraphQL API, Xperience by Kentico can be seen as a Hybrid Headless DXP.  It is still the DXP you love, but now comes with additional omnichannel capabilities! 

In the past, Kentico has been primarily aimed at the web channel, but with Hybrid Headless you can publish content anywhere – for example you might want to create additional SPAs (single-page applications), build some microsites for marketing campaigns, add content to a mobile app, push notifications to social media platforms, or even more imaginative channels like integrating with smart speakers.  

Previously, I have spent some time investigating setting up a GraphQL API for Kentico Xperience 13 websites, you can read about it here, so it’s great news that Xperience by Kentico has this working out of the box.  

The future of Kentico 

The public roadmap for Xperience by Kentico highlights many new features that are on the way including taxonomy improvements, eCommerce functionality and omni-channel developments.   

Kentico have also announced that the Kentico Connection 2023 event will be taking place later this year from 18-19th October in the EMEA region, hosted in Brno. We are eagerly anticipating the marketing insights and announcements that will take place at this year’s event and look forward to sharing the news with you…  

IDHL and Kentico  

We’re no strangers to working with Kentico, utilising their platforms capabilities to provide world class websites for our clients, such as Ryobi and Everbuild. If you want to know more about migrating from Kentico Xperience 13 to Xperience by Kentico, get in touch with our team of experts to learn why this move could be right for your business.