This year’s Tridion Expert Summit all-digital event was organized by RWS (formerly SDL) and features technology experts participating from across the world, sharing their knowledge, innovations, favorite CMS features, roadmaps, and a number of engaging demos.

Welcome & Keynote — RWS Technology & Innovation

The event opened with Azad Ootman (CTO, RWS) introducing the broader RWS portfolio, which included:

• How and where Tridion fits in
• Where it touches on other RWS technologies
• The ways Tridion customers can integrate it
• Language technology
• Machine translation
• Evolving linguistic AI technologies

It was then Nuno Linhares’ (Senior Manager, Cloud Engineering, RWS) turn to take center stage where he announced the 2021 MVP award winners. This award celebrates the partners, customers, and developers who’ve regularly shared their knowledge and experiences openly to help others in the Tridion community. 

Tridion Product Roadmap

Arno van Nijnatten (Senior Product Manager, RWS) presented on Tridion’s product roadmap and Tridion Sites 9.5’s new exciting features such as:

• Tridion Integration Framework
• Access management using different Identity providers
• Connectors (Aprimo, Salesforce, Pool Part, Brightcove, SiteImprove)
• The new publishing model which does not require additional component templates and allows granular field-based publishing for a component,
• The extensible Search features
• More flexible license deployment model

Building a Website with Semantic Content Models: A Development Experience

Venu Ireddy (Principal Architect, RWS) walked us through his demo; a feature on new website development with Semantic Content Models. He explained the evolution of the publishing models, making sure to include high priority items like:

• The benefits of the new content model
• The live example of the content model from a content manager’s perspective
• How to retrieve data using Graph QL API

Tridion Architecture Runway

Likhan Siddiquee (Principle Developer, RWS)  presented on:

• The publishing architecture from Dreamweaver
• Templating to DXA and DD4T
• Publishing JSON based architecture to DXA Model Service architecture. 

Version 9.5 has enabled publishing the pure component and data page-based architecture. With this, you no longer need templating to publish data, thus providing a headless implementation.

The new architecture gives us semantic data modeling, and allows Out-of-box Search capability which doesn’t require third party components. You can now enjoy a shorter time to market due to publishing moving at quicker rates.

Another interesting topic included the Architecture of Tridon Integration Framework based on Taxonomy which can be built once and deployed everywhere.

Core service is rest based which is now built on Open API specification, and token-based authentication, including the UI for the service using the self-descriptive API Specification.

Access Management now enables Google ID connect, OAuth based identification, SAML based, Azure AD, Windows and LDAP authentication.

Future Improvements

Siddiquee goes on to explain future plans and improvements like:

• Where to implement contextual metadata in the page
• Resolving the exact delta re-publishing needed
• Predicting publishing times
• Tree shaking to minimize the duplicate items publishing
• Granular tracking for specific published version
• Switching logger to NLog
• All libraries to .Net Standard
• Switching all services to core service.REST
• Dedicated publisher for template-less publishing (C# /Assembly templates might be supported)

Semantic Search Using Poolparty

Rajesh Kumar (Principle Architect, RWS) demoed the importance of Semantic tagging using the pool party connector and its benefits and breaks down the ways semantic tags can be configured in the Tridion Sites.

Embargo to Control Publishing

Mohan Kushwaha (Senior Technical Consultant, RWS) spoke about the feature to control the publishing with the Embargo tag. This allows us to control the publishing with accidental publishing.

He presented the security mechanism to control publishing of content before the launch. (Note: this only allows approved content to be published.) 

How does it work? There is a keyword and launch date attached to a components metadata tag that then compares the date with the Global date and approval status before publishing, ensuring only approved content is pushed to live.

That’s a wrap!

If you’re interested in learning more about these latest features and how they can improve your business model, we can help.