What is Sitecore Content Hub?


Asset Management

Sitecore acquired stylelabs.io DAM product a while ago. With that purchase, Sitecore made their way into a new business area and extended its product portfolio with the product that focuses on the content creation lifecycle.

While Sitecore Experience Platform distributes content, Content Hub is a centre of content development.
This means that Sitecore Content Hub tackles down the creation, management and orchestration of content in your company in a centralised location.
The distributed data silos (like ERP, PIM, etc.) of the enterprise business can be fed into the Sitecore Content Hub, where the department teams, for example, marketing team, can collaborate on content creation. Once the content is created or updated, Content Hub can publish the content or save it back to the original system automatically, using a customisable business-specific workflow. For example, the content can be pushed to multiple marketing delivery channels, like an existing Web Content Management system (WCM/CMS), social media channels or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. 



Sitecore Content Hub provides common DAM (Digital Asset Management), MRM (Marketing Resource Management), DRM (Digital Rights Management), CMP (Content Marketing Platform) and PCM (Product Content Management) functionality.

Sitecore Content Hub is only available as SaaS (Software as a Service) which makes maintenance easy. Under the hood, a Microsoft Azure-based infrastructure serves you to provide you with a fast and stable experience.

Who needs Sitecore Content Hub?

Content is key! Managing content within an enterprise can be hard work. Think about the growing amount of marketing channels you have to feed with your content. 
Maybe each of it can be handled separately, but:

  • Do you really want to do redundant work when content is needed in multiple channels?
  • How do you find and get the content that you need?

When you ask the question:

  • In which system should I look for the content I need? Shall I really search in each system individually?
  • Why do I have to redo the work which somebody has already done before?
  • Should we ever be able to control the content creation process?
  • How do I establish a content creation process in my organization?

... then you should probably think to contact your Sitecore Implementation Partner to talk about Sitecore Content Hub.

How does Sitecore Content Hub interact with other systems?

What I have seen so far, I think the Content Hub is already usable in a standalone scenario in which assets are uploaded, reviewed, managed within Content Hub itself and then can be just downloaded or exported out without a need of automated integration.

Nevertheless, Content Hub provides the connection ability to other systems of the enterprise. This kind of connectivity is enabled by Content Hub connector plugins.

The connector plugins enable the integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Sharepoint, OneDrive and many more.

The "Sitecore Connect for Sitecore DAM" connector module enables Content Hub integration with "Sitecore Experience Platform (SEP)". Sitecore image fields and rich text components allow you finding, selecting and using Sitecore Content Hub assets directly from SEP user interface.

Customise!

Customise your Content Hub to your specific needs! 

Your Content Hub administrator has full control of the user interface in the "Manage" section. It allows tuning your Content Hub look and feel to match your enterprise/corporate design.
All type of assets and the data entities which are stored and managed in Content Hub can be extended and customised. You can use the configuration sections such as "Schema", "OptionLists" and "Taxonomy" to make the corresponding customisations.

You can also adjust the look and feel of page views, which are used to display and edit the specific type of data or assets. In the "Pages" section, you can change page template layout and add/remove the components so that the specific content type is displayed in the desired way.
For example, the preview page of an asset can be customised in the way so that it displays only the most relevant properties of the asset.

If you still see some functionality gaps in the Sitecore Content Hub's out-of-the-box set of features - it is not an issue! Sitecore Content Hub features can be extended. Your Sitecore Implementation Partner can help you with additional features implementation using C# based "Scripting Framework", which can be used to create a custom set of events and actions. In addition, the REST API and the Client SDK of Sitecore Content Hub enable further extension ability and provide the integration opportunity with the other systems.

Sitecore Content Hub is fit to address your content development work challenges and mitigate the risks of content crisis.