Our key takeaways from Opticon 2024

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<h1>Our key takeaways from Opticon 2024</h1>

Again, this year we had the pleasure of attending Opticon, Optimizely’s flagship event, in Stockholm. We were inspired by industry experts and enjoyed numerous networking opportunities. The event showcased the latest advancements in the Optimizely ecosystem, including immersive sessions filled with inspiration, and case studies from Optimizely clients.

Optimizely announced the launch of CMS 13, designed to help marketers manage increasingly complex content supply chains with new tools, including the latest SaaS CMS features such as Visual Builder, which empowers marketers to easily create personalized experiences. We are very proud to be a trusted partner of Optimizely and have an opportunity to enhance digital experience of our clients.

Below you can find our key takeaways of the event for Marketing, Business and Tech people. 

Enhanced digital experience

We delved into many interesting topics, including developments in the Optimizely ONE offering, the use of artificial intelligence in marketing, and new opportunities in content marketing. We learned how we can provide excellent customer experiences, personalize the entire customer journey, and leverage data-driven marketing. We examined multi-site solutions from a business perspective. We gained a lot of new ideas on how these innovations can further enhance our clients’ digital strategies.

At the Optimizely Opticon session, the focus was on providing an ecosystem and go-to tools that empower marketers by reducing mundane tasks and offering a comprehensive set of tools for marketing planning, execution, and testing. The latest updates to Optimizely bring AI capabilities into play in a flexible manner, further assisting companies in maintaining and managing their web presence.

We engaged with cutting-edge insights and heard inspiring success stories from both solution partners and clients. We were shown how these innovations can further enhance and support various organizations’ digital strategies.

The event featured a wide variety of sessions with industry experts and practical tutorials from notable organizations. Sessions covered a range of insightful topics focused on transforming marketing strategies with a digital-first approach, including the impact of AI on content creation, enhancing the marketer experience, understanding customer behavior, and leveraging digital experience analytics to drive experimentation and innovation.

Additionally, the event was an excellent platform for networking, and offered a broad perspective that we can bring back to our clients.

Our key takeaways - Tech

Written by Senior Developer Teemu Eronen at Kraftvaerk.

We were introduced to a very interesting developments for all areas of Optimizely offering – covering CMS, commerce and experimentation tools. Headless, AI, advanced analytics capabilities, and improved payment capabilities to mention a few. Please check out the more extensive list below.

  • CMS PaaS

    Version 13 is set to release in 2025, featuring the new Visual Builder as the default content editor.

    Enhancements include improved headless support and an updated integration and Content API framework.

  • CMS SaaS

    Possibility for integrating to external systems available next year.

    SaaS will receive all new features with short iterative release cycles where they will be rolled out to PaaS with normal version release cycles.

  • Visual Builder (in SaaS and CMS 13)

    Offers side-by-side editing experience with properties on the left and a live preview on the right.

    Allows editors to create and save sections as “Blueprints,” enabling them to build components like Hero section with specific properties.

    Editors can style sections directly within the editor, using predefined CSS classes.

    Supports using data from any source by indexing it to Graph via APIs.

  • Payment Service

    Composable Payment Service: This service supports over 200 payment gateways.

    Security Features: It includes 2-factor authentication and 3DS support.

    Independent Updates: The payment module updates independently from Commerce.

  • Opti ID

    Single Sign-On (SSO) Solution: Access all Optimizely products with Opti ID.

  • Optimizely Graph

    Graph Developer Portal: A new portal is coming soon, offering tools to build and optimize queries, set up webhooks, manage API keys, view query logs, and more.

    Conventions API: This upcoming feature will include base types, interfaces, and extension methods to Graph index with C#. Also it will allow linking them to types like SitePageBase. 

    Zero Downtime Rebuild: A feature to rebuild accounts without any downtime is on the way.

    Boosting, Semantic Weights, Faceting: These enhancements will improve query performance and relevance, coming soon.

    External Data Integration: With the Content Graph .NET SDK, you can link external data types for example to SitePageBase.

  • Optimizely Graph x Commerce Connect (earlier called Customized Commerce)

    Indexed Data: Product variants, categories, list prices, and stock are now indexed into the Graph.

    Tutorials: Find the Product Listing Page (PLP) build tutorial on Opti World.

  • Opal AI

    AI Assistant: Optimizely’s AI copilot can be trained with your own LLM models (e.g., LLama) for better, customized results.

    Features: Includes retrieval augmented generation (RAG), auto suggestions, and data generation (tags, descriptions, images).

    Integration: Works across all workflow steps and fields.

    Flexibility: Uses ChatGPT by default but can be switched to other models or turned off.

  • Many other upcoming developments

    Audit logs, personalized profiles to manage preferences and notifications, and a partner dashboard to oversee customer activities. Additionally, more analytics capabilities will be added to Sales and Orders, such as performance reporting from a single interface, metrics to track the number of orders, average order value (AOV), and gross merchandise value (GMV), along with comparative analysis.

The Rising Star Solution Partner of the Year

Rising Star Solution Partner Nordics 2024

We were honored to be awarded the Rising Star Solution Partner of the Year 2024 in the Nordics, thanks to the dedication and hard work of our Kraftvaerk team, which works as truly one team across borders and organizational structures. This recognition is a testament to our remarkable efforts in delivering innovative digital experience solutions, product knowledge, and implementation expertise, showcasing exceptional competencies.

Our close collaboration with Optimizely ensures we bring the latest advancements within the Optimizely offering to our approx. 20 Optimizely clients in the Nordics.

If you want to know more about our possibilities with Optimizely, let's talk:

Ready to transform your digital experience?

Contact us today to schedule a consultation and see how Kraftvaerk can take your business to new heights with the Optimizely platform.

Reetta Peltonen

Engagement Director