Last week SDL / Nuno Linhares gave a fantastic presentation to the SDL Tridion community (watch online and slides available) about the cool new technical features available in SDL Tridion 2013.

I’ve provided a little summary after the jump, but really you should be clicking the link above and watching this first major presentation for SDL Tridion 2013.   Thanks to all involved in the webinar

What’s new in SDL Tridion 2013

Platform and support

• The SDL Tridion CME is now 64 bit only
• In CME and CD Java 6 has been deprecated in favour of version 7
• .Net 4.0 onwards in both CME and CD 
• Windows XP is being deprecated as a supported user environment

New Features

• XSLT Mediator is now part of the core product
• Power shell support on the CME 
• New Message Center – The notification bar in the CME has been ‘super-beefed’ to include actionable items, workflow integration and the users work list.  This looks really cool
• Bundles – A big piece of functionality that allows users to create a ‘bundle’ of related items.  A bundle can be published, added to workflow, exported / migrated to another CME.  There is also a new schema type ‘Bundle’ to allow the attaching of metadata and workflow to a ‘Bundle’.
• Ability to store workflow code within the CMS as TBB items
• External Content Libraries (ECL) – Showing content inside Tridion, that is not ‘inside Tridion’ and allowing content editors to use these items.  For example, Flickr photos, Youtube Videos, file in Dropbox etc.
• Content Delivery Undo – Ability to undo (describes as ‘compensating’ rather than ‘ rollback’) a an item based on it’s publish transaction ID.
• Ambient Data Framework ‘Claim forward‘ – Developers have the ability to pass ADF claims from the web application to the Odata web service.

Removed features

A number of legacy items have been removed from SDL Tridion 2013, I’d be amazed if anyone other than dominic cronin still uses them

• Old event system (Tom / Com)
• VB Templates
• Business connector / Xml Responder

Note: Whilst these are removed from the new system it is still possible to install legacy functionality as an add-on called the ‘Legacy Pack’.

Congratulations to the entire team at SDL, the new version looks really great.  I’m happy to see the near-death of COM and VB templates and especially look forward to playing and working with the new Bundles, Workflow and ECL functionalities

SDL Tridion 2013 will be released around the end of March, 2013.