Last week there was a webinar discussing the future of SDL Web and several questions around DXA were asked there. Unfortunately I couldn't attend so I've decided to handle those questions in this blog post, since it is my responsibility as the DXA Product Manager to clarify any type of questions about "my baby", and the answers could interest a broader public.

One of the biggest questions around DXA is always its support status, "will DXA be supported in our contracts?". When you read the support statement currently in the official documentation of DXA, you will find the following:

The SDL Digital Experience Accelerator is intended as a toolkit to help the SDL Tridion community and is not an officially supported SDL Tridion product.

Getting support
If you encounter problems, reach out to the community: http://tridion.stackexchange.com/

That is the current statement and it isn't likely going to change this year, but I have an addition to this official statement to make. SDL is dedicated to make DXA a success, which also means that we are dedicated to supporting all of our customers using DXA. As such SDL has opened up support requests for DXA via the regular SDL Customer Support channels. Meaning you can raise issues in DXA via the Customer Support ticketing system. At this point there is no Service Level Agreement for DXA, so any tickets will be directed to the DXA development team and handled on a best effort basis. You can also log issues directly on the DXA GitHub repositories, which will also be handled on a best effort basis by the development team. 

For technical and implementation questions, you are kindly directed towards http://tridion.stackexchange.com/, here the entire community will be able to answer. Eventually DXA will be promoted to a fully supported product, but we will never change the fact it is open source, so even then all the sources will remain available. At present time, when you have a platinum cloud offering, DXA is part of that offering and as such, it and your entire implementation falls under the cloud support contact. 

This should give you enough clarity around the DXA and support question, but I haven't answered the second most asked question, which directly follows, "is SDL supporting DD4T?". I have to be careful answering this, since I used to start with: "SDL will never support DD4T", but I won't use that statement anymore (reasons why, I'll explain later this year). Currently SDL is not supporting DD4T. However since DXA is using the DD4T providers, when there is an issue in DD4T that is affecting DXA, it will be fixed as part of the DXA development. The DXA development team is involved in DD4T development also, as such we have already introduced changes in the ECL support of DD4T.

Support statements are clear now, interesting to hear nobody on the webinar asked a question around DD4T versus DXA, although there was this one "What is the future of DXA, will it be part of the SDL roadmap?", which could be seen as a similar question. I have noticed a lot of people are wondering why SDL got started with DXA, and if it will be something that has a future. In previous presentations I've explained why we started with DXA, and also mentioned where it fits in the SDL roadmap. Simply put, DXA is the future of SDL Web Templating. We created it as an open source community project to allow for quick adoption of new concepts around implementation, so it continues to follow best practices and is not restricted by the release cycle of the SDL Web product line. The alignment of DXA and the SDL roadmap can be seen in the latest release of DXA. DXA 1.4, was released together with the Cumulative Update 1 for SDL Web 8, and SDL Web Experience Optimization 8 (see also this announcement), this included compatibility and support for the updates in SDL Web 8 and Experience Optimization. More information about the future of DXA will be presented by me at the Tridion Developer Summit, you don't want to miss that.

The last question around DXA was "is DXA right tool to spin static microsites quickly?", which is an interesting one I must say. DXA is created to solve a few common issues found in SDL Web implementations, those being; shorten time-to-market, reduce total cost of ownership and speed up development. As such it is the perfect tool for spinning up a microsite quickly, be that a fairly static or a more dynamic site. However DXA is truely multipurpose, it also doubles as a quick demo environment, because it comes out of the box with a working website including sample content, and because it is following best practices and comes as open source it is also the perfect training environment, allowing one to learn by example. Last but not least, also because it is open source, DXA is also the perfect start for any type of project, since it can be customized to suit any requirement. So where on a microsite you might be up and running in no time because all required functionality is readily available in DXA, for an enterprise website, you get instant project acceleration because you can utilize the DXA framework and its out of the box modules to add Media Manager and Experience Optimization support to your website.