It was a great week of learning in Sitecore MVP Summit + Sitecore DX + SUGCON NA in Minneapolis from October 2nd to October 6th. There were no announcements of new acquisitions or new products. It looks like Sitecore is fully embracing the composable architecture approach and is now concentrating on refining its existing products. Sitecore already provides the key components required for a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) implementation. The current emphasis is on ensuring these components work together smoothly without compromising the principles of composable architecture.
I was interested to learn what’s happening with Sitecore OrderCloud. In last year’s Symposium and MVP Summit, we learned that Sitecore would work on Project Affinity. I wrote an article about that. The following slide shows what Sitecore’s plan was to build in Project Affinity.
At this year’s MVP Summit and Sitecore Developer Experience (DX), there was no update on Project Affinity. It’s possible that the project was a bit too bold to pursue. However, it doesn’t seem like Sitecore has completely scrapped the ideas from Project Affinity. Rather, it appears their focus has moved towards offering additional resources and enhanced support for developers. Let’s dive into the latest developments.
OrderCloud is Part of the Sitecore Portal
Until now OrderCloud had its own portal. Sitecore has integrated OrderCloud in the Sitecore Portal. You need to work with partner support to add the OrderCloud Portal to your Sitecore Cloud Portal. It will show up in the Apps section.
If you already have have OrderCloud instance in portal.ordercloud.io, you can keep using that.
With the new portal, you have a more granular way to establish API access, the ability to create custom roles, a much enhanced API Console for filtering and sorting, and Index Tools to rebuild products and orders index.
OrderCloud Javascript SDK
What I am most excited about is the release of OrderCloud Javascript SDK. It’s a daunting task to work with Rest API when building a website using a Frontend Framework. As a developer, I want to focus on the feature development. Working with APIs directly unnecessarily adds repeated code to my projects. An SDK also mandates the development team to follow the same pattern for development. OrderCloud Javascript SDK works both on the browser and node.js. This means I can use the same SDK for Client Side Rendering (CSR) and Server Side Rendering (SSR). This is especially useful for building applications using Next.js. The SDK comes with built-in Typescript support, no additional types package is necessary.
React based Headstart Admin
The Headstart Starter Kit is now available in React. The earlier Headstart was based on Angular and it was not very easy to work with. This version of Headstart uses the OrderCloud Javascript SDK. This is only the starter kit for the admin portal; it does not include a buyer portal. While Project Affinity had the ambition to deliver a Universal Commerce Management Backoffice, which hasn’t materialized, the availability of this starter kit for developing an Admin Portal is a step forward. It’s quite rare for a commerce platform not to offer an out-of-the-box Admin Portal, considering such a feature typically doesn’t vary much from one customer to another.
In future releases, Sitecore is planning to add Headstart Buyer Portal, integration with Sitecore Discover for product search and product recommendations, example solution for connecting Sitecore OrderCloud with Content Hub One and XM Cloud.
Delivery Configuration
Sitecore took the approach of using Pub/Sub pattern for delivering data or messages. In this approach, you define a target and subscribe to get the data delivered to the target. For example, you want the order notification to be sent to Sitecore Send so that email notifications can be sent to customers. Delivery targets can be Sitecore’s internal targets (Send, Discover) or external targets (Kafka, HTTP endpoint, Event Hub). This approach can be used for Product Synchronization, Order Synchronization, and more.
New Features
Last year I wrote about Product Collection and mentioned that it was not complete. Sitecore made significant enhancements to the Product Collection feature this year. It seems to be ready for the mainstream use.
The brand new feature introduced this year is Product Bundles or Kits we say sometimes. Product Bundles are unique SKUs created by combining various products. OrderCloud offers a suite of APIs that enable the creation of these bundles, their assignment to catalogs, the application of promotions to them, and the ability to set pricing either for the bundle as a whole or for individual items within it. Functionally, bundles are treated like individual products, meaning they can be searched for and placed into the shopping cart just like any single product.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ashley Wilson, Commerce Product Manager at Sitecore for sharing the PowerPoint slides of her presentation at the MVP Summit. Some images used in this article are taken from her presentation.
Himadri's Technical Blog 