Opticon 2024 - highlights

I went to Opticon in Stockholm and here are my brief highlights based on the demos, presentations and roadmaps 

• Optimizely CMS SaaS
  will start to gain traction over time, especially for customers looking for a platform that is easy to maintain. New features will appear in this platform first and then be moved to the PaaS version. It will be an interesting alternative for customers that are mainly focused on content rather than custom integrations vs external systems. A bit more limited in customization than the PaaS version of course. 
• CMS 13
  release in 2025 Q2. It's finally time for a major release again after the amazing and massive CMS 12 release based on the new dotnet 5 framework. 
• The new Visual Builder
  for CMS 13 and SaaS definitely makes it easier to work as an editor. The current problem of editing blocks where you can get lost in tree structure won't be an issue anymore. I like it!
  It's a little more limited than current solution where nesting blocks in blocks won't be possible but that is seriously a good thing. Being able to easily affect the layout with Visual Builder and store it as presets (blueprints) and edit anything in an easy way with minimal amount of clicks and context switching looks perfect. I think the editor experience will be much easier and better with Visual Builder. 
• The new Optimizely Graph with AI capable search
  will be much better in CMS 13. Although possible to replace Search and navigation (former Episerver Find) in 12 with Graph, it's not a full feature replacement so I would personally want to stick with Search and navigation in CMS 12 but switch to Graph for CMS 13 solutions. There will be minor breaking changes to move Graph in CMS 12 to CMS 13 so expect a little work there if choosing to go with Graph in CMS 12.
• The new Personalization product
  is interesting. Since my customers is in Sweden though, it's not relevant until data can be stored within the EU. 
• The AI content generation tool in CMP
  looks sweet. I haven't used the CMP myself but looks like a great tool for marketing. When is the AI content generation OOTB coming to CMS? If anyone knows, leave answer in comments below.
• The option to bring-your-own-AI
  is interesting since I have quite a few customers that are very protective of their data and being able to run a separate Llama 3 or similar local LLM is nice. 
• Building a CMS 12 today or wait?
  Knowing that I would like to have the new Visual Builder for new project as well as the new Graph for 13, it does pose a question when building new websites at this moment. Do I build a CMS 12 and upgrade it or wait until 13 is released. There is no easy answer there. If possible I guess building a CMS 12 site with the current limited Graph and then upgrade it when CMS 13 is released is the best bet.
• Upgrade to 13 from 12
  should be much easier than the 11=>12 upgrade. I'm still impressed about the amount of work to rewrite everything to dotnet 5+ for CMS 12. Graph and Visual Builder will need some work when upgrading though. Graph underlying schema in 13 is different and improved I heard.
• Microfrontends
  Seeing the first steps to simplify running CMS combined with microfrontends is interesting for larger projects with multiple teams to allow independent stream aligned teams. Not something that is useful for 90% of the websites but for some larger ones it's an interesting option.
• Digital Assets Management
  I got to check out the DAM in some more details. Looks like it has support for the features I need in a DAM including some automatic image scaling according to predefined settings, AI support for cropping with automatic focal point etc. Should be used more.

All in all Optimizely is still my number 1 choice of tool to use for building larger web solutions. It has great products to support the whole customer journey. The products can be used in a composable architecture way which is important to me as someone who worries about long term solution life cycle and phasing components in and out. Do you need a great CMS solution? Then by all means start with only the CMS and skip the rest. Already have a DAM that you are happy with? Great, use that one! No? Optimizely has a solution for that.