Let me start by quoting myself.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose     

By any other name would smell as sweet;           

So Tridion would, were it not Tridion call’d,”

—Quoting myself, as adapted from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

SDL Tridion DX is the name of the SDL product suite that includes SDL Tridion Sites and SDL Tridion Docs, formerly SDL Web and SDL Knowledge Center, respectively.

The DX refers to Digital Experience and the suite blends the best of Web Content Management with Structured Content, starting with a unified delivery platform. To be clear, though we might talk about architecture, frameworks, and integrations, the "DX" does not imply Digital Experience Platform (DXP), which is a relatively new category in analyst reports (that not all agree with).

This suite will bring delivery-side features such as the Ambient Data Framework to Structured Content as well as the ability to blend, or "mash-up" if you will, content from both repositories within the same web application.

As we go along, we'll introduce technology and features from one product to the other. For example, User Generated Content started as a Tridion Sites feature, which is being introduced to Tridion Docs and the Search featured in Docs will enable the update to the Experience Optimization prescriptive personalization feature in Sites, as well as delivery-side Search in Sites' as well.

What Does This Mean for the Communities?

I was quite excited to join Professional Services in 2011 and even more wowed at the opportunity to join Product Management three years ago. But the DX suite changes everything, for me personally but more importantly, through benefits for customers, opportunities for implementers, and maybe even expectations of the industry.

Same Skills. New Domain.

Tridion Sites background and expertise with content delivery will start to apply to Tridion Docs implementations. The powerful existing abilities of Tridion Docs such as version management in content delivery, content embedding within other content, and even version branching have long been interesting use cases in many of the Sites implementations I've seen. And the Digital Experience Accelerator reference implementation will serve both products, sharing examples of how to combine the features of both products in delivery.

Thought Leadership

SDL Community includes this recent Tridion DX group as well as the existing product groups for Sites and Docs, offering opportunities to interact, share, and collaborate. Additionally, Tridion Stack Exchange is open to questions from a Docs perspective. 

We've also gained the expertise of my colleague and fellow blogger, Senior Product Manager Joe Pairman for Docs, who is also a fellow former customer-turned-consultant who is now in SDL Product Management.

Events

Community member and MVP award winner Robert Curlette created the Tridion Developer Summit to bring great minds together to share and learn about the Tridion suite, especially as it grew to include more products and integrations. With the announcement of the DX Suite, we'll have an opportunity to learn and share information about Sites and Docs at TDS 2018.

We'll also see more cross-product sharing in Bootcamps, User Groups, and code.

What's Next?

SDL Tridion Docs took the first step by adopting Unified Delivery Platform and introducing a web application leveraging DXA. SDL Tridion Sites is next with a release that includes enhancements to Web Content Management while also enabling mashups with Docs, in that same delivery platform.

Personally, I'll be sharing posts about our internal and external knowledge sharing activities, getting ready for the Developer Summit, and supporting those interested in learning or sharing more. It'll be yet another new and fascinating time in our respective communities; now's a great time to join!

And honestly, as I learn more and more about Docs, I'm as wowed by its structure as when I first learned the Tridion (Sites) content model. I'm almost hesitant to share but remember it's all about giving yourself permission to start something new.

Oh, and we'll all need to stop using the term "SDL Docs." The SDL Documentation Center might be hosted at http://docs.sdl.com, but that "Docs" isn't the Docs I'm referring to in this post.