From Gothenburg to San Diego - My take on Opticon 2023

This was my first time attending Opticon in person and it was a blast! Stendahls sent me and a colleague to Opticon in San Diego, and it was great meeting so many fellow Optimizely engaged people and discovering that the community is just as nice in person as in the ”digital (Optimizely) world”. The travel getting there was long but for anyone reading this and thinking about going next year I can only recommend it! The amount of sessions available and all the people from all around the world coming together was truly inspirational for me. And San Diego was nice too!

Started day 1 at Partner Forum. Got an intro and also a sneak peak on what was going to be announced during this year’s Opticon. I think that was great since it gave some time for reflection before diving in to the new features/releases the following days.

Day 2 and 3 were jammed with interesting sessions and inspirational key notes. Having most experience working with CMS, getting to dig more into the Optimizely suite was really interesting and I spent a lot of time in the Optimizely’s booths to try to get as much information as possible. So anyone I bothered with all my question’s reading this, thanks for your help and insights :)

Optimizely One / Opal

Optimizely One was the main announcement at Opticon. Presented as the world’s first operating system for marketing, creating a seamless experience for marketers from start to finish. The key is the composable structure enhanced with Optimizely’s AI that got the name Opal, to empower and accelerate every step of the workflow. Some examples are automatic content generation, automatic translations and as a co-pilot. 

Saas Core CMS

Personally I got really excited about the release that is an addition to the traditional CMS, the new Saas Core CMS. This opens up for new possibilities and opportunities creating a headless CMS with a streamlined start-up and with the flexible option of the head to fit both developers and clients wants and needs. It is valuable in being version-less with no need for developers to run updates to be able to access the latest features. Planned release is in H1 2024. The Visual Builder was also presented to be a useful tool to not miss out on the visual editorial experience if you choose to go headless.

Optimizely Graph

The Optimizely Content Graph, now named Optimizely Graph based on GraphQL, was presented as the way forward retrieving content in a headless state. And regarding the new Saas Core CMS it is the only way to retrieve data from the CMS. A huge topic was also semantic search in Optimizely Graph. With Graph’s AI you’ll get a smarter search that can understand context and give answers based on what is similar to what you searched for. At the time being, semantic search in Optimizely Graph is only available in English. Optimizely Graph can be used stand alone or as a compliment to Search & Navigation for Paas CMS solutions. It is available for CMS customers in DXP but good to know is that there are a few features not yet available. For example tracking, best bets and personalised search. It will also be possible to import data from other sources into the Graph which is powerful since it can combine data cross-application / cross-platform in to one singular point to query. There were many talks and discussions about the Optimizely Graph during Opticon, and I believe it will truly enhance the headless offer and the search capabilities.

To sum up, it was a truly inspiring couple of days, with many new announcements. I can’t wait to get started trying out the new Saas Core CMS. It Is currently in a closed beta, sign up for the waitlist here. Also a big thanks to everyone I got to meet, for the fun discussions (and parties) and for giving me such a warm and friendly welcome, traveling all the way from Sweden.