Today and yesterday have seen the Tridion Expert Summit 2020, an online conference that in some ways is the successor of the Tridion Developer Summit, and in other ways is definitely something different. It's hard to say how much of the difference comes from it being online. I definitely missed the personal interactions, but none of us would have wished to ignore the need to be responsible regarding covid. I hope next year we'll see this evolve into a "physically present" event.

As an online event, I have to say I was impressed with the platform. SLD/RWS had used spotme, and the combination of being able to follow the live stream while simultaneously interacting with the agenda, Q&A, and to some extend with other attendees, was pretty smooth.

Pretty much all recent Tridion events have had an uncomfortable divide between the "sites" audience and the "docs" people. To some extent, we're all still in our individual silos, and material relevant to one group is less relevant to the other. Still, to an increasing degree, we're seeing content that's of common interest, such as the combined architecture and how it all hangs together. For me, at least, it was cool to see that my old team-mate Ivo van de Lagemaat, these days a product owner on Docs, hasn't forgotten his old coding skills! He put together a working demo without any trouble in "What metadata in Tridion Docs can teach us about decoupled metadata integration and the future of taxonomy features".

Many of the topics were covered from different aspects by various speakers. the main points from a Sites perspective were:

Data publishing

The evolution of publishing models over the years, and how we've come eventually to what's described as "Data publishing": in other words, the component template is no more. (Not really, because they'll have more than one publishing model.) Tridion's always had a better-than-most claim to supporting "headless" but now there'll be a dedicated and optimised publishing model for it.

Tridion integration framework

a technology agnostic basis for plug-ins and integrations

Taxomomies and smart tagging

External taxonomies become more of a first-class citizen. Content can be tagged automatically, and then the tagging reviewed and tweaked by a human.

CoreService.REST

A modern take on the what we used to call the TOM, this time based on Open API definitions

Tridion Access management

A unified approach for integrating with external identity providers.

All told, there was plenty of interesting material. Thanks to all who spoke and to everyone involved in organising it.