Sitecore Experience Platform - 8.2 Highlights

1.     Content Foundation improvements (Dependency Injection, Caching and Performance).

2.      Support for the Publishing Service (installed separately).

3.       Support for Express Migration (installed separately).

4.       Sitecore Experience Accelerator (installed separately).

5.       Enhanced Experience Editor features.

6.       Marketing Funnels.

7.       New Experience Analytics reports and charting.

8.       Improved Content Testing UI.

9.       Enhanced Path Analyzer component.

10.   Includes all the fixes from 8.1 Update-3.

11.   Search and indexing no longer requires a third-party DI container to enable Solr and there is no need for a Solr support package.

12.   Sitecore 8.2 now supports .NET Framework 4.5.2 and .NET 4.6. Microsoft no longer supports .NET 4.5. For further information, go to

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2015/12/09/support-ending-for-the-net-framework- 4-4-5-and-4-5-1/

13.   Support for Oracle 11g has been added, but only when Sitecore is deployed in Experience Management mode – there is no support for Oracle in the xDB.

14.   Support for SQL Always On has been added.
This add support for a SQL Server 2012 and 2016 feature that enables high availability and a disaster recovery. SQL Always On availability groups allows a group to have a set of failover databases so that if a database is unavailable, this fails over to a secondary database.

15.   Horizontal, Vertical and Table views have been added to make it easier to read the maps.

16.   The path filter has been added, which provides advanced sequential filtering.

17.   You can now apply a Metrics filter with data visualization to easily find outliers or interesting correlations between key node metrics.

18.   You can now create and explore funnels in the Path Analyzer.

19.   The Dashboard is the new default view for marketers that showcases the KPIs from a selected map, top landing pages, featured paths, and favorite funnels.

20.   A context-sensitive help window has been implemented in the Path Analyzer.

21.   The map selector has been improved to enable favorites, show status, and display metadata.

22.   The Date range selector has been redesigned to display date intervals for the available map data.

23.   You can now export map data into a CSV file using download or copy commands.

24.   All nodes now have labels which you can switch on and off.

25.   Item info for nodes now provides greater detail and includes the display name, template, content tree path, and URL.

26.   The Notification bar has been extended to display all key app messages.

27.   The ​Page Analyzer app has been rebuilt on the new technology stack and aligned with the main application.

28.   API level data compression has been introduced, which reduces payload and improves application responsiveness.

29.   Map retrieval performance has been improved, reducing the load on the master database and improving API performance.

30.   The Silverlight dependency has been replaced with a standard HTML technology with great cross-browser compatibility.

31.   The application has been redesigned for improved usability. ​​​

32.   Duplicate nodes are now removed by default. This behavior is controlled by the PathAnalyzer.Aggregation.CollapseDuplicateRecords' setting.

33.   ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI now use the Sitecore Dependency Injection container by default. ​

34.   SPEAK 2.1 adds support for composite components, which are SPEAK components that are created using other SPEAK components

35.   The SPEAK component guidance pages include improved demos and provide information about more components. Authenticated users can access the pages using the alias: http://<host>/sitecore/shell/speakguidance

36.   The SPEAK 2.1 business component library now includes ported versions of the 16 version 1.1 components missing in 8.1 , as well as 9 new components.

37.  All page components that have data sources are highlighted with the green frame if the "associated content" checkbox is selected. 

38.  The toolbar of the component shows the datasource item's workflow and the number of pages that use the same datasource item.

39.  For each piece of content used on the page, you can see the content item's details and the other pages that use this content.

40.  For each page, you can see all the content items that are used on the page and their workflow states.

41.  New notifications have been implemented to prevent authors from publishing broken pages.Data sources move through their workflows together with the context page.  

42.  The ribbon performance has been optimized for loading in the collapsed state. Now it loads only the required controls when it is collapsed.

43.  To improve performance, the Experience Editor ribbon now loads only the controls required for the activated tab (lazy loading).

44.   The possibility to start a test without using workflows has been enabled by default.

45.   Experience Analytics now supports historical re-aggregation. This feature enables any historical data that is added to the xDB after its initial deployment to be viewed in Experience Analytics.

46.   Dynamic titles are now displayed on charts. On all reports that you can drill down to, a KPI chart with a dynamic title has been added to make it easy to navigate through the reports.

47.   A simple KPI (Key Performance Indicator) chart has been introduced to provide a simple overview of data.The chart:

·         Shows the average or sum for the Visits, Value, and Value per Visit metric(s) for the selected period.

·         Enables you to select all the available metrics that you need to personalize the chart.

·         Is available from the Experience Analytics dashboard and all drill-down reports.

48.   You can now visualize data using a combination chart when you select two metrics in Experience Analytics. This improvement has been implemented based on UX feedback.

49.   The FusionCharts charting library has been replaced with the D3 charting library, which is used in other areas of the platform. This change ensures consistency and improves performance.

50.   When no data is present, the Experience Profile now shows a hyphen “-“. Previously, the Experience Profile showed an empty field when there was no data, which was confusing to users. The hyphen ensures that there is now a clear distinction.

For More Information, you can review them on release notes of Sitecore 8.2.