As a leading Kentico web development agency, we take enhancing our knowledge and staying on top when it comes to Kentico seriously. Regularly attending and often participating in their events around the globe, members of the NetConstruct team including MD, Jonathan and Developer, Liam, attended Kentico Connection on 18-19 September in Brno, Czech Republic. The insightful event was just the right mix of software news, Kentico culture and announcements for the future. Here are our top takeaways from the event.

Commitment to Dual Product Strategy

With the rebranding of Kentico Cloud to Kentico Kontent taking place, there was a lot of discussion around their dual product strategy, defining this clearly to partners and end users. Confusion has been rife over Kentico’s CaaS (Content as a Service) product but Kentico Connection clarified their long-term commitment to the original EMS product. Clear positioning of both products means Kentico now has a distinct solution for the needs of any business who is serious about digital marketing.  

Openness to Feedback

A hallmark of Kentico’s culture is their willingness to take on board feedback from customers, partners, developers and integrators. This was obvious during the event through the numerous conversations with both company executives and other key staff members who invited and discussed our opinion on a range of product and strategy related matters.

Increased Focus on Larger Projects

With continued endorsement from both Gartner and Forrester, Kentico EMS is now regarded by many as a true enterprise product. While Kentico initially positioned the EMS as a mid-market solution, there is no denying its use in a growing range of very large digital solutions. Kentico Cloud, is also being used across large-scale solutions, for example, a project for AC Milan Football Club to deliver a heavy throughput of content.

Kentico 2020

The release of their updated software is planned for September 2020 and the project has been given the official code name of Phoenix. Phoenix symbolises the rise from the ashes after burning away the remainder of Kentico webforms. The current Kentico MVC take up is approximately 40% of users with the software looking to push that figure closer towards 100% through the release of Kentico 2020 next year. The key improvements expected are:

• Built in Automatic Dynamic Routing: Bespoke routing implementation will no longer be required. Kentico’s routing will instead work alongside custom routing, standalone, or completely disabled.
• Linked pages: This feature will allow for reusable content within the content tree.
• Support for .NET Core: Kentico libraries will be fully migrated to .NET Standard 2.0 once the release has launched. This will enable Kentico MVC projects to be built with the latest .NET Core release version 3.0.

Kentico Kontent

Further updates on Kentico Kontent were shared during the event with the new release of the Content Management API (CM API v2) coming soon. This version will bring more advanced support for publishing, unpublishing, workflows, content types, snippets, taxonomy and languages. CM API will no longer be for importing alone, it will also allow for integration and automation too.

Webhook debugging tools have also been added to Kentico Kontent, allowing developers to debug webhook responses with ease. In addition, advanced configuration options have been implemented which will enable specific content types and workflow steps to trigger specific webhooks.

Kentico MVC Marketplace

During Kentico Connection, their MVC Marketplace was promoted regularly, encouraging partners and developers to submit work to help enhance the Kentico community. Something we’re keen to be part of, NetConstruct developer Liam submitted an MVC form component prior to Kentico Connection which can be viewed here.

A growing list of custom elements have been added to GitHub, a marketplace for developers to share new functionality and integrations. A number of example eCommerce integrations for Kentico Kontent are now readily available on GitHub which can be added to existing and new Kentico Kontent builds.

Jonathan and Liam were unanimous in their opinions that Kentico Connection brilliant and informative across all bases. A big thank you to Kentico for hosting us and delivering yet another intriguing Kentico Connection, sharing further insight into their future plans and advancements. We’re already looking forward to the next one! #KenticoConnection2019