This year’s Tridion Expert Summit was virtual and organized by SDL. Even though it wasn’t an in-person event, you could still find people and businesses attending and participating from all over the world, sharing their own experiences with various SDL technologies.

#TXS2020 began with Marcus Hearne (Senior Vice President, Product & Solution, SDL) on SDL keynotes. He reviewed SDL’s greatest achievements over the past year and shared a glimpse into plans for 2021.

In 2020, major achievements could be found in Tridion Sites 9.5, Tridion Docs, One Tridion, Market Successes, and Partners and Connectors.

Joe Pairman (Senior Product Manager, SDL), Arno van Nijnatten (Product Manager, SDL) and Arpita Maity (Senior Product Marketing Manager, SDL) explained how Tridion has proven itself time and again as an Intelligent Content Platform.

They walked us through some content challenges like Volume, Quality, and Fragmentation; demonstrating the ideal way to deal and mitigate these types of pain-points.

Joseph Higler (COO, Enterprice Knowledge) superbly explained the role of Taxonomies within our profession and the ways they help us save time and resources in areas like managing people, revenue generation, and generating accurate reports.

Our very own Tridion Lead and Technical Manager, Damian Jewett, presented the case study for Dynamic Delivery publishing Architecture.

He walked us through a very detailed description of the Dynamic Experience Delivery Architecture, including the services involved, the configuration, and the database used. He also explained how we can manage the published content using DXD.

Another team member, Content Bloom’s Senior Technical Consultant, Saurabh Gangwar, presented on how PDFs can be published and customized using DXD in the Tridion Docs.

This included explaining customization in PDF publishing with the use of a visual example where he’d customized company-specific branding of a published PDF.

Ivo van de Lagemaat (Technical Product Owner, SDL) presented the decoupled metadata integration and how the taxonomies can be used in the future.

He demoed the metadata binding with the help of an example where he created a JIRA connector from scratch to retrieve the list of values, searching the values, and validation of identifiers. It was a purely technical presentation and I really enjoyed it.

Rick Pannekoek presented next, on the Tridion Architectural Runway–data publishing models. He showcased how it behaves differently on different pages, the benefits, and upcoming improvements.

Some other takeaways

Taxonomy connectors – How they fit in Tridion Integration Framework (TIF) and how they are important for TIF, their benefits, and Smart tagging:

CoreService.Rest – Its usability and benefits.

Tridion Access Management – Its architecture, supported protocols, benefits, and supported identifier types.

Path to .Net core and .Net6 – Expected changes in future and their benefits.

Dave De Meyer (System Architect) walked us through Tridion Docs Architectural Runway.

He explained the functional and architectural changes while moving from one technology to the next generation.

The final session concluded with a Q&A where Dave De Meyer, Ben Middleton, Julie Landman, and Rick Pannekoek answered questions related to Tridion.

Overall, it was a great first day and I left feeling really knowledgeable and excited for Day 2 of #TXS2020!

If you’re curious to learn more about your investment in Tridion Docs and the SDL platform, we’re providing a free consultation to businesses looking to enhance and improve their CMS capabilities.