Sitecore is a headless CMS service that creates intuitive digital experiences. This leading content management system is built on the ASP.NET technology and can help you bring compelling customer experiences to your website visitors. Sitecore CMS is a headless content management system that helps you present web content in many ways.

A traditional CMS puts content, images, HTML and CSS into one bucket, along with the code, and this makes it hard to separate back-end functions like content creation, backend and storage from front-end functions like design and presentation. With a headless CMS, you separate the body from the head or the design layer and you can deploy content across any frontend you want.

What is interesting is that Sitecore, which has always been a back-end focused platform, brought in front-end focused capabilities in 2019 with Sitecore JSS, while maintaining its native headless functionalities. Sitecore’s integrated CMS platform makes it one of the most sought-after tools for websites and digital marketing. Its design helps developers manage and deploy a huge amount of code across websites, instantly. In fact, the Sitecore xDB collates all your customer experience data, links them and mines them for insight. You can also visualize each customer’s unique journey, all in the same data repository.

When you talk to developers and marketers about CMS systems, they always mention Sitecore’s extensive Support and maintenance capabilities. After all, a website is a crucial touchpoint for customers and target audiences. Sitecore offers a lot of support to build, upgrade, maintain and enhance websites over time. Its multilingual and multi-device support make it stand out among CMS software. Sitecore uses rich data and important customer insight to deliver superior customer experiences.

Sitecore CMS is unique for so many reasons. It is built on a single platform. It offers advanced personalization and AI capabilities. It also promises power-packed marketing tools that add value to enterprise-level organizations looking for a powerful digital platform.

Important Sitecore CMS features that make it a highly favored CMS among developers and marketers alike

It has end-to-end digital experience package: Sitecore is not just a CMS but more of a digital experience platform. It gives you the opportunity to understand various touchpoints across multiple customer journeys and pathways so that you can personalize content. With Sitecore, you can combine customer data, AI, and business analytics to offer the best in customer service.

Centralized content creation and key integrations: All your information and content is stored in a single place. Anyone from the team or the department has access to it and there is a shared, centralized visibility. You can leverage AI to identify patterns, tags and groups across content and customer profiles, helping you build data-backed and incisive marketing campaigns.

The power of data: The reason why Sitecore CMS is more of a digital experience platform instead of simply a content management system is because it makes the most of Sitecore’s data capabilities, with access to real-time data from all departments and channels. 

Client interface: Sitecore’s client interface is seamless and easy for customers to use, which largely drives the success of marketing campaigns and initiatives. You do not have to be a coder to put the interface together. The support that Sitecore gives to both developers and creators is so strong that you can create interfaces using Sitecore’s online support and knowledge bases.  

Developer and content author support: Sitecore users who manage content are called content authors. They need a fair amount of training given how specialized Sitecore is as a platform and how much it can be customized. Sitecore content author support is a much requested feature and usually pertains to problems like customizations for a multisite environment, enhancing user experience, and making sure content loads on all browsers.

Sitecore significantly supports content authors to resolve workflow issues and to improve the web visitor experience. In fact, Sitecore support extends to tools like the Experience Editor, which helps content authors update many content items simultaneously. Another challenge that content authors grapple with is that they spend a lot of time and energy looking for items, in spite of advanced search options. Sitecore support for content authors offers practical tips on automation, naming items for SEO, sorting out a slow loading Sitecore tree and streamlining the media library, among various other tasks. 

Fixing outages and resolving system vulnerabilities: According to the Open Web Application Security project, a common reason for a website outage is an injection flaw, which is a vulnerability that leads to malicious code that causes security breaches and system vulnerabilities. Injection flaws can jeopardize backend and interconnected systems. Sitecore’s support and maintenance systems can help teams to understand the website build and to resolve this problem immediately. 

Sitecore in-house and third party integrations: If you want to integrate Sitecore with third party solutions like Salesforce, there is ample support for these integrations. After all, they can boost Sitecore’s power and efficiency. Customizing your platform to accommodate third party builds can be tricky and when not done properly, can lead to bugs.

Debugging tools: When investigating a support case that involves bugs, Sitecore will help you in identifying the root cause of the issue and offers different solutions. Apart from supporting companies that run into technical snags, Sitecore’s Support and Self-Service Portal is very useful in helping you check the status of your complaints and problems. 

Sitecore has many debugging tools that can help solve these problems quickly. Code enhancement tools also help developers complete their work quickly.

With Sitecore CMS, support and maintenance service become doubly important because the benefits of Sitecore do not end with deployment. Content editors and marketers prefer Sitecore because they have complete control over their website, integrations and content and this extends to support and maintenance. When you opt for Sitecore maintenance agreements and subscriptions, you have access to standard support and the 24X7 premium support. If you are an active Sitecore Software subscriber, you will get access to a rich ecosystem of open-source support, professional expert services and a knowledge base of online communities. Developers in particular find Sitecore’s support services to be excellent and helpful, with the community offering solutions to technical issues. Sitecore Support also offers training, technical consulting, insights and business optimization services.

Here’s why you need Sitecore CMS support and maintenance services

Sitecore CMS helps you create unique digital experiences and one of its biggest benefits is that it provides 24X7 support as well as support in terms of infrastructure and development. This constantly evolving and progressive CMS platform brings in new iterations and updates, which can make it complex for developers. Luckily, Sitecore has excellent resources, maintenance and support for developers. The Sitecore User Interface, for instance, is easy to operate for those who are new to the platform.

Sitecore’s extensive support system consists of communities, knowledge bases and support systems, among other things. Apart from the support and maintenance provided by Sitecore itself, you can either hire an in-house or external team to mine its rich features and capabilities to get round the clock support. Here are the different layers of support and maintenance that are available to you if you choose Sitecore CMS.

Open source-support

Sitecore’s open-source support begins with its extensive Knowledge Base, which gives you information and access to articles, posts, technical write-ups, security bulletins and support information published by Sitecore. Whether it is information on Sitecore’s Experience Platform or its Support and Self-Service Portal, the 22,000 + developers in Sitecore’s open source support center and community offer a lot of resources and tips to maintain, troubleshoot and optimize the platform.   .

The documentation library and community are great ways for developers to identify solutions collectively, brainstorm, reach out to other developers around the world for answers, and to share experiences with different Sitecore toolsets and use cases. Sitecore’s community platform is one of the most active support groups for developers and DevOps engineers to come together and share best practices.  

From updates and articles on how to configure the SSL certificate in Sitecore with containers to complaints about Experience Editor not working or problems with Sitecore Publish, the community gives you great resources and firsthand tips on how to adhere to Sitecore best standards. The community is more than just a group of people but the collective wisdom of Sitecore experts who help with problems and give excellent diagnostic advice. Apart from official Sitecore communities, the CMS has a tremendous unofficial support system across platforms, including a Slack workspace for Sitecore with channels divided by topics. You also have GitHub and Stack Exchange channels too. In short, Sitecore has world-class developer documentation.

Issue diagnosis, migration, and cloud support

Sitecore helps you investigate and resolve problems relating to the platform’s products, services, and documentation. This also extends to the products that Sitecore supports during the platform installation.

If you are migrating or upgrading to the latest Sitecore product versions, Sitecore offers you the full spectrum of support services. In case you use products that are phased out and cannot be accommodated by Sitecore’s Mainstream Support Phase, Sitecore will give you the Extended Support Phase, ensuring that your products remain secure before phasing out. If you are using products that are not eligible for the Extended Support Phase, then Sitecore provides the Sustaining Support Phase; but this is only a temporary solution. To whatever extent possible, Sitecore supports with production issues and online documentation. 

When migrating from one platform to the other or building on existing solutions, Sitecore helps you in choosing the best development practices and technologies to make the best of the code management process. 

You can improve development quality by tapping into the common code base. With the UI being standard across platform features, you can collect workflow management, content creation, automation and testing in one single place. 

Multilingual support

Sitecore makes managing a multilingual and multicultural website easy. Not only can you create sites in different languages but every language has its own version history. Language support includes content on channels provided through Sitecore, metadata, and headings. With the Translation Services Connector, you can even enable multi-language translation for your website.

You can also mark every field on a template as unique to a particular language and when it comes to a logo, which is universal, you can mark it as common across all languages. With the right implementation, you do not need software changes to align with new languages. In case you have different websites in different languages and cultures, Sitecore’s extensible API can support you with a solution.

Multi-site and multi-device support 

Sitecore’s multi-site and multi-device support is useful to solve any business requirement, with its content and information architecture offering many choices. With the multi-site support, it becomes easy for you to set up multisite in Sitecore with a single Sitecore installation. The benefits are many, including a single set of user access credentials and easier sharing access between sites. Sitecore also offers multi-device support. For Sitecore 9.0 onwards, Sitecore Device Detection is available and you can use several device configuration options on your installation. You can set up a device layout and employ more than 500 device parameters so that you can identify devices that visit your site. With customer journeys and multiple touch points happening across many devices, you can customize your device layout settings. Configuring the Sitecore Experience Platform is easy. This is because it only has 12 of the most frequently used rules and one generic rule.

Multi-site support enables you to share content across affiliate networks and franchises, helping you create consistent customer experiences.

Sitecore’s support features help you improve performance of your product and solution. Did you know for instance that you can use performance thresholds to identify and test underperforming pages? You can even identify presentation components that are not working in favor of the page. Sitecore allows you to configure your prefetch caches so that you can increase performance and tune size limits for caches. You also have many configuration options and this truly helps companies scale their solutions significantly. With Sitecore’s support system, you can separate the production content management environment from the content delivery environment.

You can use the Sitecore Log Analyzer to explore large amount of log data and fix bugs. You can check performance counters and get a visual representation of website downtime. Sitecore Log Analyzer is the perfect tool to monitor and fix Sitecore applications at large.  Sitecore’s Debug mode even helps you to check if all components are working to their full capacity. Sitecore’s extensive trace report can tell you why some components do not work or load as quickly as others. This is a great way to better component load times, thereby contributing to the performance of the page.

Sitecore maintenance subscriptions can be charged additionally and while premium support costs more and is billed annually, Sitecore support is extensive. It also helps marketers who use it to lower technical dependency. Sitecore CMS has many advanced features and benefits. This means that it does not require a large team to operate the software, making it comparatively cost-effective.  

With the Sitecore Experience Database, you can collect customer data from various sources and channels and speed up time to market. Today, Sitecore is more than just a CMS but a digital experience and marketing platform that helps you create and optimize end-to-end content. With Sitecore’s extensive support system, you can test, personalize, and automate content and customer experiences. Sitecore’s Contextual Intelligence helps you identify prospective visitors, collect customer data and create a richer, watertight system that understands and serves customers better every day. 

The post What are the Support and Maintenance Services offered by Sitecore CMS? appeared first on Suyati Technologies.