2sitecoreSitecore announced the availability of Sitecore 7 a few days ago, the newest release of the company’s unified software suite. The marketing solution offers the industry’s first search-based architecture, allowing CMOs and digital marketers to deliver a new level of relevant and personalized digital experiences to their audiences.

“Today’s prospects and customers expect and demand deep relevance in their digital interactions,” said Jeff Thomas, Sitecore Chief Marketing Officer. “To meet these needs, marketers must effectively manage a massive and ever-increasing amount of internal and externally generated content. Sitecore 7 takes multi-channel digital marketing and customer engagement to a whole new level, letting marketers harness the power of this content, deliver unique, highly personalized experiences and drive the meaningful interactions that win customers for life.”

Sitecore 7’s architecture gives marketers the flexibility to work with content using traditional and search-based methods. The added search-based capabilities allow marketers to precisely manage search facets, result boosting, and content tagging for delivering extremely relevant and immediate results. Marketers can also observe and learn from customer swipe-and-search behaviors, gaining valuable insights to customer Preferences and patterns.

Under the hood, the search-based architecture incorporates technology from Apache Lucene.net, a leading search engine optimized for applications built on the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Lucene.net provides high-performance search capabilities including:

• Ranked searching: best results returned first;

• Many powerful query types: phrase, wildcard, proximity, range and more;

• Fielded searching (i.e., title, author, contents);

• Sorting by any field;

• Multiple-index searching with merged results;

• Allows simultaneous update and searching;

• Flexible faceting, highlighting, joins and result grouping;

• Fast, memory-efficient and typo-tolerant suggestions;

• Pluggable ranking models.

Additionally, Sitecore 7 scales to virtually unlimited content volumes, enabling marketers to access tens of millions of pieces of content and fully leverage massive repositories of news or product info. The combination of unlimited content and greater control allows marketers to execute advanced targeting and merchandising techniques so they consistently deliver the experiences that matter most to prospects and customers.

“With Sitecore 7, there is no limit to the amount of content we can store,” said Chris Odom, Lead Developer at Mimio, a leading interactive education company and subsidiary of Newell Rubbermaid. “Additionally, content management will be easier and faster as a result of the advanced storing, indexing and retrieval options. Our marketers can be confident that they can deliver what customers want, without worrying about losing customer interest or revenues due to content that wasn’t robust enough, or relevant enough or recent enough.

“More and more people are using search methods to find what they are looking for,” said Darren Guarnaccia, Sitecore SVP of Product Marketing. “That applies to customers as well as marketers. With Sitecore 7, marketers have more power to control massive amounts of content – and more ability to serve up exactly the right item at the right time to the right person.”

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Search facets allow marketers to proactively enrich the customer search experience. The “Tags” list at the left shows the wide range of search facets available for the resorts a visitor is considering.

David Aponovich, Analyst at Forrester Research also sees the connections between the tremendous amount of content growth and being relevant to each individual customer. Thus, he aptly posted on his blog: “Today, what matters is what you do with that content and your digital channels. In 2013, digital experience (DX) is king, so it’s imperative that you deliver interactions that are personal, contextual, and multichannel.”

By MediaBUZZ