The Technology
Xpress is derived from an amazing product- but remember, this is the Personal Developer Edition. If you want a version to evaluate for commercial purposes, please contact Sitecore or a Partner.
100% Microsoft .NET and open standards
If you have chosen .NET as a development platform or you are considering it, then you owe it to yourself to take a serious look at what Sitecore can do for you. Sitecore is totally focused on supporting .NET and Microsoft technologies, and is the only CMS product in the marketplace this dedicated to the Microsoft .NET platform. The advantage is that Sitecore allows you to fully exploit all of your Microsoft and .NET competencies. Sitecore even works with Visual Studio and Visual Sourcesafe out of the box, and lets you work with all the other Microsoft oriented development tools that you use and love.
State of the Art
Sitecore is built as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) based on XAML and AJAX. You’ll think there is a desktop application running on your machine when you see the rich interface and what you can drag and drop and do, but it’s just your browser and a very rich RIA. This rich experience extends to the eventual Editors of the sites you create – they’ll love the familiar Microsoft Office-like editing and navigation interface, and be right at home. All content in Sitecore is naturally stored as XML. Unlike some, we don’t store our content as HTML pages - we abstract our content as XML and .NET objects. We allow you to freely mix your .NET code with (automatically pre-compiled) XSLT. This gives you faster and more reliable results.
Playing well with others - Integration
Today's websites often integrate with third-party systems and reuse that data not only for website content, but for other tasks as well, such as authentication or interactive database queries. Sitecore makes this simple, straightforward and high performance. It’s where being built exclusively in .NET and based 100 percent on XML comes in. Sitecore’s flexible “data provider” integration capabilities allow ease of integration with back-end systems, totaling over 1,000 different applications, including MySQL, SAP, Salesforce.com, Oracle and more. What’s more, our connector modules give full featured integration with Microsoft’s SharePoint and Microsoft Active Directory (AD). The good news is that if and when you want to do this stuff, you can get there with Sitecore CMS.
Dynamic and fast
Sitecore only serves dynamic web pages, and our content management server is integrated with our content delivery server. Of course, we have the ability to distinctly separate your development and staging environments from your production systems, but we've always known that content management is useless without integrated content delivery. You no longer need to solve speed problems by using static HTML pages, or be locked in with that constraining structure.
Getting going with the Starter Kit
The best way to learn is to dive right in. After downloading Sitecore Xpress you’ll also get the Starter kit, an easy to install, easy to use pre-defined Sitecore web site ready to accept content. It’s all in Sitecore, so you can immediately put the technology to use, in your own way. Plus, Help is built in. Easy.
You can read the license agreement here.