What's in a Name? That Which we call SDL Tridion is Still Just as Sweet

SDL recently announced the next generation of their intelligent content platform, SDL Tridion. If you've been in the Tridion community for any length of time, this may sound like Yet Another Confusing Name Change — but it really isn't. SDL's announcement presents a much-improved clarity in their offerings. Let's discuss what this news really means for those of us in the business of implementing SDL's offerings.

The Many Names of the Past

Tridion has gone through a few different names over the years. Before SDL owned it, the world knew it as Tridion. Then it became SDL Tridion, and then SDL Web. From there, it became SDL Tridion Sites, and now SDL is announcing that it has an "Intelligent Content Platform" that includes SDL Tridion Sites.

So what's SDL Tridion?

SDL Tridion is the name of a platform that includes:

• SDL Tridion Sites
• SDL Tridion Docs
• SDL Tridion Delivery
• SDL Tridion Accelerators

In marketing-speak, SDL Tridion is now an "Intelligent Content Platform" that can address Digital Experience, Enterprise Knowledge, Global Website management, and Technical Communication. You know, all the words that excite the marketing folks.

But, developers and architects will probably keep calling SDL Tridion Sites," Tridion." And they'll still call SDL Tridion Docs, "Docs." But let's talk about these “two new things” that have names now:

• SDL Tridion Delivery
• SDL Tridion Accelerators

SDL Tridion Delivery

Tridion has always been smart with how it's handled publishing. It's always been agnostic of its output format and how applications could consume it. In recent years SDL has adopted a headless model, which means content now can be accessed with APIs.

Quite smartly, SDL is now presenting this as a separate and unique offering. Before, this was a "feature" that was somewhat hidden in the shadows. It was documented and known to developers, but as marketing organizations increasingly became aware of headless CMS and their value, they didn't see that this was a Tridion strength.

Calling out the GraphQL public content API and calling it SDL Tridion Delivery is a Good Thing®. It gives visibility to an incredibly valuable component of the Tridion platform.

SDL Tridion Accelerators

If you're a Tridion Developer or Architect, you may already be familiar with DXA (Digital eXperience Accelerator). DXA has gotten a lot of attention over the past few years as being the "Tridion bootstrap, with Bootstrap," that provides a solid (albeit opinionated) starter for an SDL Tridion implementation.

But, there's more than DXA. SDL Tridion has several accelerators that ease the pain and improve speed-to-market for implementations:

• DAM Accelerator, for integrating with, well, digital asset management systems
• CRM Accelerator, for connecting to customer relationship management systems
• Dynamic Documentation Accelerator, for helping get SDL Tridion Docs off the ground
• DX Accelerator for China, a managed service that helps work with Chinese Firewall restrictions

What does this mean going forward?

It's a tad less troublesome to talk about Tridion. SDL Tridion is a box of Legos rather than a single brick. While that’s been the case for a few years, we didn’t always have the language we needed to describe the bricks. Architects and consultants will have an easier time explaining SDL Tridion to clients when we can describe Sites, Docs, Delivery, and Accelerators as just a "first name" to the "surname" of SDL Tridion.

So Tridion still is just as sweet.