What is Sitecore Content Hub

Today, content is the main element of the marketing funnel, but unfortunately, it is scattered everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Marketing teams have their content spread around different work-streams, files, folders, and formats. Organizations have content, but where? That’s a mystery - that can be solved with a well-organized content hub from Sitecore.

Sitecore Content Hub – A Lot More Than DAM

Sitecore’s Tom de Ridder and Frederic Fosselle have introduced the Sitecore Content Hub at the Dutch Belgium User Group meetup in 2019. Users who thought that Sitecore Content Hub is yet another Digital Asset Management system where quite surprised when they realized it is much more than that.

It is a complete 360-degree content marketing solutions structure around SaaS solutions. Sitecore Content Hub consists of different modules.

• Digital Asset Management
• Content Marketing Platform
• Web-To-Print
• Product Information Management
• Marketing Resource Management

Source: blastic.be

However, in the minor version of Sitecore Content Hub, you will only get Digital Asset Management and Product Information Management modules. It is a compact content management software to give feedback on content, pipeline workflow, plan, and strategies collaboration. With the integration of Azure functions, the features like faceted search are enabled to collaborate through Sitecore Content Hub so that a large number of people can work together.

Sitecore Content Hub – Technical Edge

Source: https://www.kayee.nl/2019/09/29/sitecore-content-hub-more-than-just-a-dam/

The technical architecture of the Sitecore Content Hub is structured on a cloud-first architecture that supports servers and models such as Hypermedia HATEOAS REST API. All the user interfaces are available via the REST API. It also provides the Cloud Development Framework toolkit including numerous integration hooks and triggers to script a framework that can be executed. The entire setup is highly customizable and extensible, but does require a developer as it is quite technical.

Need for Sitecore Content Hub

In an organization, a large cluster of content is present which is useless without proper management. Today, businesses have to market their content on various marketing channels, but without content harmony, all this will be useless. To know whether Sitecore Content Hub is for you or not, ask yourself these questions:

• Are you tired of doing redundant work when you need marketing content for multiple channels?
• Which process do you follow to get the required content?
• Do you search each content piece individually?
• Have you wasted your time redoing the work that has been already done before?

If all the answers are positive, then you will automatically know that you need Sitecore Content Hub.

Sitecore Content Hub Workflow

Sitecore Content Hub is fully competent to tackle all the content development issues and reduce content management risks in plenty of different ways.

Source: https://getfishtank.ca/

Plan – It gives power to marketers to create a seamless plan based for their organization. The plan can include creating campaigns, targeting marketing channels, and so on.

Authored – Sitecore program will authorize your content to establish a collaboration between stakeholders. The content can be directly authored to the platform or via other platforms such as Google or a Word document.

Management - The authored and approved content is managed and curated in the next step. Content curation is a process of constantly adding value to your content. The common management and curation steps include version management, metadata solutions, inserting structured data to content, applications of local and personal tactics.

Publication – The last step of Content Hub is to edit and publish the content. Different programs can be connected together to publish content on separate channels. The content can be curated in the channel or published directly without curation, which can be mixed to create different pages.

Relationship of Sitecore Content Hub with other systems

Sitecore Content Hub is quite self-sufficient software and can perform all the functions of uploading, reviewing, and managing content on its own. You don’t need to integrate with any of the systems. But, still, if you ever want to connect Content Hub with other enterprise systems, then it is possible by using Content Hub connector plugins. The plugins can establish a relations between Sitecore Content Hub and for example Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint, OneDrive, and others.

With the Sitecore Connect for Sitecore DAM module, an user can establish a connection with the Sitecore Experience Platform. Moreover, Sitecore image fields and text elements will empower you to find, select, and use Content Hub assets from SEP UI without any hassle.

The Extent of Sitecore Content Hub customisation

Source: https://sitecore.namics.com/2019/12/16/sitecore-content-hub-at-first-glance/

You can fully customize your Content Hub to achieve some of your specific goals. The Content Hub admin has complete control over the Manage area. You can modify the look of Sitecore Content Hub to match your organization's look and feel. From assets to the data entities stored and management in Content Hub can be customized easily. To make the corresponding customizations, you can use the configuration areas such as Schema, Taxonomy, and so on.

The look and feel of page views can be also modified where the specific types of data or assets are displayed to make edits. In the pages section modifications can be made to page template layout and page components so that the content can be displayed in the desired manner.

Extend of Content Hub

If you are experiencing the lack of some functions in Sitecore Content Hub, then you can also extend its features. Your Sitecore implementation partner can assist you in adding the extra features within the Sitecore solution. This can be further utilized to design custom events and actions. The cherry on the top is placed by the REST API and Client SDK that enable the further extension and integration of Content Hub with other applications.

Content future

Sitecore Content Hub is a perfect solution for marketers to properly plan, review, and manage their large amounts of content efficiently. This tool has a lot more features than a DAM that makes it an ideal application for the future. This will suit all the content management problems and eliminate content development risks in the best possible way to make the content workflow smoother.