Sitecore announced Experienced Platform 9.3 at Symposium in Orlando. Which comes with a lot of new features, enhancements and performance improvements in all the areas i.e XP, XC, SXA, etc. Sitecore Install Assitance is not an exception here. As per the announcement and per the six months cadence, it should be available to download in Dec 2019.
When Sitecore 9.0 was launched with SIF, it was initially a major lift-n-shift in the vanilla installation process. Especially for the non-development folks from the Administrator/Infrastructure department who were used to do wizard-based Sitecore installation up to version 8+ to spin up a new machine etc. Sitecore Install Assitance brings the joy back in such scenarios.
Most us know that SIA was launched with 9.2 which is a GUI wrapper on top of SIF which makes the Sitecore vanilla install wizard-based again. Whereas at the backend it still runs the Powershell scripts to install different roles of Sitecore 9.
In this blog post, I am not going to post how to install Sitecore 9 using SIA as my friend Peter Prochazka (chorpo) has already blogged it for Sitecore 9.2.
Let talk about what’s new in SIA with Sitecore 9.3. Notice the difference between the two screenshots below on SIA with 9.2 and 9.3:
Did you notice the additional options on the left menu?SIA Installs Solr for you
Fantastic isn’t it? So far we have to install and configure Solr on HTTPS as a pre-requisites before installing Sitecore 9. Good news is SIA on 9.3 will install Solr for 8.1.1 for you, create the service for Solr using NSSM and configure Solr on HTTPS. You just need to provide couple of parameters like Solr Port, Window Service & Path Prefix, Install Path. Once done SIA will install Solr for you end to end. Additionally, create all the required OOTB Solr indexes.
Read more about Solr installation with Sitecore 9.3 by our own Jeremy Davis on his latest blog post.
SIA Installs SXA for you
Yes, you read that right. While installing Sitecore 9.3 using SIA you will get an optional option to choose if you want to install any Option Module, where you can select SXA. Once you select your License File and if you are licensed for SXA, it will install compatible SXA version end to end.
Therefore once the installation is successful, you will be having a fully equipped Experience Platform along with SXA.
I would like to give a big shout out to the SIA and SIF team as it took nearly 10 minutes altogether to install everything end to end. Fast N’ Furious!
Hope this helps!
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