Editorial
CHICAGO — Sitecore, a digital experience management software company, is in the spotlight this week in the Windy City for its Sitecore Symposium 2022 annual conference at the McCormick Place Convention Center Chicago.
The company certainly has made waves in the acquisition department in recent years. The acquired companies brought different products to Sitecore's set of tools. They were rebranded and integrated using a modern approach based on microservices and open APIs. Its acquisition game has been successful.
However, some of the acquired products provide different solutions for features that were already available in Sitecore, such as personalization, media management, A/B testing, etc.
One common element, though, is the fact that these are all SaaS-based products. Different from the traditional and monolithic Sitecore XP, these are cloud-hosted solutions that do not require any on-prem installation. Despite that, Sitecore XP is still available and getting installed on on-premises servers.
Sitecore ensures at least eight years of support from the general availability date of its products. Sitecore 10.2 was launched in November 2021; therefore it will have support until 2029 (see table below).
| Product | Initial Release Date | Mainstream Support End Date | Extended Support End Date | Sustaining Support End Date |
| Sitecore 10.2 | Nov 2021 | 31-Dec-2024 | 31-Dec-2027 | 31-Dec-2029 |
The following table explains what it means in the Sitecore support ecosystem to be under mainstream, extended or sustaining support:
| Support Type | Mainstream Support Phase | Extended Support Phase | Sustaining Support Phase |
| Sitecore online documentation, knowledge base, and discussion forums access | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Assistance with product version upgrades | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Assistance with production incidents | ✓ | ✓ | $ |
| Security updates and fixes | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Assistance with errors or unexpected behavior during installation or development | ✓ | $ | — |
| Addressing product defects as hotfixes or patches | ✓ | $ | — |
| Compatibility fixes for supported technology platforms | ✓ | — | — |
| Timeline for each support phase, counted from the product's general availability date | 3 years | 6 years | 8 years |
Legend:
| ✓ | Included |
| $ | Contact regional office for support options |
| — | Not available |
What About Sitecore XM?
Sitecore XM is basically Sitecore XP without its digital marketing features (it doesn’t have, for example, personalization, A/B testing, etc.). It is available for on-premises install as well as a cloud-based application. The interface is very familiar to anyone who used to work with Sitecore in its previous versions.
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What About Content Hub?
Content Hub is a SaaS-based platform that includes Digital Asset Management (DAM), Content Marketing Platform (CMP), Product Content Management (PCM) and Marketing Resource Management (MRM).
During Sitecore’s 2022 Symposium, it was announced that Content Hub 1.0 will include Content Management features. To be honest, this is something already in place if you take into consideration the CMP portion that allows for basic content management for different content types. It is also possible to have these integrated with XM and have content pushed back to Sitecore's main CMS.
With that in mind, the question is whether it would replace XM or not. And this is not something that is going to be answered in the short term. Why? There are many more advanced features for content management in XM than currently available in Content Hub.
However, for simpler and smaller content sites, it does provide an option for those that don’t need everything already baked into the most traditional and core elements of Sitecore.
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