Author: Jason St-Cyr
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On the second day of Christmas… two Sitecore PaaS features
On the second day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… two Sitecore PaaS features: Redis Cache and Azure Search! …and a Sitecore in a NuGet feed. With Sitecore 8.2 Update 1, the PaaS offering shown at Symposium 2016 became available on Azure Marketplace along with ARM templates and much more.…
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On the first day of Christmas… Sitecore in a NuGet Feed
On the first day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… Sitecore in a NuGet feed! One of the great things announced this year was the Sitecore public NuGet feed for Sitecore DLLs. This really makes managing Sitecore dependencies on a project a lot easier and makes life deploying…
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The 12 Blogs of Christmas are back for 2016!
I enjoyed the Christmas blogging so much last year that I decided to bring it back for 2016! Starting December 13th and all the way up to Christmas Eve on the 24th there will be a new blog on the site. Like last year, some will be helpful, and others will…
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VSTS and Sitecore NuGet feeds
SPECIAL NOTE: This article is a lead up for my November 30th #SCUniversity session on Continuous Integration and Deployment. Register for the webinar now! When you are setting up your Continuous Integration build definition in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, formerly Visual Studio Online) you will get a NuGet Restore step…
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Sitecore Production Deployments: The Big Bad Wolf
SPECIAL NOTE: This article is a lead up for my November 30th #SCUniversity session on Continuous Integration and Deployment. Register for the webinar now! Do you need to secure 14 signatures and present technical documentation just to run a script on your production database? Does it take a group of enterprise…
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SSL for multi-tenant Sitecore installations
From the dawn of HTTPS-time, admins have struggled with setting up multiple SSL certificates on a single server. At the same time, we have Sitecore’s licensing model which really drives the business to get the most value out of fewer Sitecore instances. This leads teams to encounter multi-tenant installations that also require…
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2016 Sitecore Symposium – Day Three Recap
This week has been an overload of information! Hard to think that Symposium is all wrapped up now, but it was a great time meeting old friends and new ones and enjoying many things that New Orleans has to offer. A great week provided to us by the team at…
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2016 Sitecore Symposium – Day Two
Today the 2016 Sitecore Symposium was about to truly get underway with keynotes and sessions and music, oh my! It was a very busy day to recap, but before we get to that there is a little matter of a breakfast (or two) to enjoy.
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2016 Sitecore Symposium – Day One
With the MVP Summit wrapped up, it was time to welcome the opening of Sitecore Symposium 2016. The Hyatt is looking very spiffy with all the Sitecore branding and lots of folks are arriving to check in. However, before I can get officially underway with my Symposium fun, I needed…
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2016 Sitecore MVP Summit – Day Two
The second day of MVP Summit 2016 started with a bit of a rushed breakfast down in the Hyatt lobby with some fellow MVPs. I was wondering whether I should bring my laptop or not to our offsite meetings today, but I decided to lug the bag with us and…
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2016 Sitecore MVP Summit – Day One
Like many of the MVPs who travelled to New Orleans this year, the trip began in the wee early hours of the morning. A 3:30am alarm gets me up and ready for the 4:00am taxi to the airport with a driver who thankfully understood I had no desire to chat…
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Using email addresses as your Sitecore username
Are you storing extranet users in the Sitecore database? Want the user to sign in with their email address to easily remember their username? By default, Sitecore doesn’t allow email address formats to be stored in the username field, but never fear, it can be done! The Sitecore setting ‘AccountNameValidation‘ sets a regular…
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This has been a Sitecore Burst!
One of my new ventures this year was to try my hand at creating short Sitecore help videos, under a minute. I wanted to be able to speak not just to developers, but sitecore admins and content authors as well. My good colleague Grant (@GrantReadAccess) has been helping out and…
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Corello brings dashboards to your Trello life
A while back, Corello came across my desk as something to look into for reporting on Trello boards. It took me some time to finally get around to it, but I’m glad I finally did. If you use Trello at any scale, you have probably hit the limits of your…
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Continuous Everything: The Art of Repetition
It is very fashionable to apply a single word to pretty much ANYTHING to try to get in on the latest trend. The current ‘Whatever-Ops’ trend (MarketingOps, ChatOps, OpsOps) is one such example. For a while, though, we’ve been having the word ‘Continuous’ thrown in front of a whole lot…
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TeamCity FTP plugin 501 error: Cannot accept argument
While investigating options for deploying Sitecore to Azure, I found a TeamCity deploy plugin that supported FTP (among other things). Unfortunately, after trying to get it up and running I ran into the following 501 error while using FTPES (explicit FTPS): “Failed to upload artifacts via FTP. Reply was: 501…
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TDS Custom Post Deploy Actions
With the release of TDS 5.5, deployments now support post-deploy actions with a few out of the box options. However, you can even add your own custom actions into the flow. With a little help from Hedgehog Sitecore MVP Sean Holmesby (Thanks Sean!), I was able to get this working…
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Patch delete Sitecore elements based on element content
Recently, I wrote about patching Sitecore instances for specific roles. During my research on how to do this, I was able to use a manner of Sitecore patching I had not previously known about. With a patch:instead, instead of targeting an attribute of the element you can actually target the contents of…
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Sitecore DevOps: Deploying instance role configurations with solution
Those of you who have installed Sitecore in a scaled environment (i.e. multiple instances) know that the process can be somewhat tedious. To configure an instance to use a specific role, you need to manually enable/disable/modify config files to make the instance act as a delivery, authoring, or processing instance. Oh, do…
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Sitecore announces 2016 MVPs
It’s that time of year again: Sitecore has announced the 2016 MVPS! I was again honoured to see my name on the list for the third year in a row. You can see the full list of 2016 MVPs on the Sitecore MVP site. My outward reaction when reading the email may have been…
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Where are the roles in my TDS update package?
Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) supports the ability to manage your Sitecore roles within your TDS projects in Visual Studio. This ensures that important roles defined for things like workflow or other security needs can be deployed to all your environments. Recently, I was building my packages for deployment to…
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Sitecore SMTP messages throw “device not ready” error
This was an odd one that came up during a recent project. My colleague Kevin had activated our standard Keystone workflow email notifications and configured the SMTP settings for the Sitecore application. A short workflow test later and not only were emails not going out but an error was occurring with the…
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Twelfth day of Christmas… Sitecore memes!
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Twelve memes of Sitecore, Eleven lips a-syncing, Ten WTFs, Nine giphy’s dancing, Eight Scrums a-scaling, Seven most-heard retrospective comments, Six Keystone config tips, Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule…
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Eleventh Day of Christmas… Lip Syncing!
On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Eleven lips a-syncing, Ten WTFs, Nine giphy’s dancing, Eight Scrums a-scaling, Seven most-heard retrospective comments, Six Keystone config tips, Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree.…
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Tenth day of Christmas… Ten WTFs!
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Ten WTFs, Nine giphy’s dancing, Eight Scrums a-scaling, Seven most-heard retrospective comments, Six Keystone config tips, Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. For years, I’ve…
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Ninth day of Christmas… Nine Giphy’s Dancing!
On the ninth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Nine giphy’s dancing, Eight Scrums a-scaling, Seven most-heard retrospective comments, Six Keystone config tips, Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Time for a little fun…
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Eighth day of Christmas… Scaling agile!
On the eighth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Eight Scrums a-scaling, Seven most-heard retrospective comments, Six Keystone config tips, Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. You may have found that a lot of…
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Seventh day of Christmas… most-heard retrospective comments
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Seven most-heard retrospective comments, Six Keystone config tips, Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Over the years, I’ve sat in a lot of sprint retrospectives.…
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Sixth day of Christmas… Keystone config tips!
On the sixth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Six Keystone config tips, Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. There are a lot of configurations that come with the Keystone for Sitecore development accelerator,…
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Fifth Day of Christmas… Five Golden Rules
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Today I offer you some best DevOps practices for your delivery team. Do, or do not. There is no…
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Fourth Day of Christmas… Continuous Integration tools!
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. We all love checking out tools, so here are four Continuous Integration applications you can put under your tree this Christmas!
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Third day of Christmas… Powershell Scripts!
On the third day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Let’s unwrap those scripts!
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Second day of Christmas… Keystone merge tips!
On the second day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Let’s check out those merge tips!
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First day of Christmas… Rules for nested placeholders!
On the first day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: a placeholder rule in the content tree! One of the nice things that comes with Keystone for Sitecore are some built-in rules that let you set placeholder settings via the rules engine. We’ve done things like create re-usable groupings…
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An experiment in holiday festivities…
I’ve been quiet on the blog for a bit while I plan a new special feature for the blog. I felt like doing something a bit different this holiday season and will be bringing you something new: 12 Days of Christmas Blogs. Some will be serious, some will not be,…
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Can I have my DevOps Fluffy with a side of Culture?
Wednesday afternoon, while at the DevOps East Conference, I attended a Continuous Integration (CI) session delivered by Chris Riley (@HoardingInfo). Chris was sharing his past experiences with CI and how to best roll it out to all types of organizations. I particularly liked his suggestion of putting the QA team front and center,…
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Sitecore DevOps: Scaling content deployments
When a solution is in operational support, handling ongoing changes in the Sitecore database can be challenging. System admins and content marketers need to be able to make changes in production authoring, the maintenance team needs to make quick fixes through all environments, and the development team needs to be…
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SUGCON – Day Two
The end of SUGCON arrived as quickly as it started. I had a chance to see a little of the commerce panel this morning before I started prepping for my own presentation. It wasn’t until I walked out of the Rosedown room that I felt like I could finally relax,…
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SUGCON – Day One
The MVP Summit may be over, but SUGCON started today and all I can say is that I WAS NOT PREPARED. I was not prepared for the amount of work that Akshay, Mike, Hedgehog, and BrainJocks had put into this event. I was not prepared for the number and variety…
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Sitecore MVP Summit – Day Three
Well, the MVP summit has wrapped up, and SUGCON is about to get into full swing. Which means my time for procrastinating is gone. 🙂 Now the rubber will hit the road for the accelerator panel tomorrow, and then my Continuous Integration presentation on Friday.
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Sitecore MVP Summit – Day Two
The first day of full MVP sessions has wrapped up and now I have the chance to look back on today and think about “what did I learn?” I’ll tell you what I learned: I like Apple Pie moonshine, I suck at multiple choice, and I don’t get the chance to…
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Sitecore MVP Summit 2015 – Day One
It’s Monday and I’m in New Orleans. Wait. I should phrase that differently. I’M IN NEW ORLEANS! The Sitecore MVP registration and reception happened this evening. The real fun is chatting with MVPs from all over the world. I had a great talk with Robert Hock by the pool, and…
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Can Trello Gold enhance your Scrum board?
A long time ago, in a blog post far, far away, I explored the use of Trello’s agile task tracking toolset to create a Scrum board for developer implementation. This has worked well for me over the years, especially when a project needs a little more structure than Kanban sometimes…
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Automate your server updates with OPAS and get some sleep at night
This week I got to see a demo of Infront’s Orchestrated Patch Automation Solution (OPAS). The software promises to automate away all the manual steps that operational staff need to perform to update servers and then validate that they are healthy after the update. This could put an end to…
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Sitecore xDB infrastructure planning
Over the last while my colleague Amanda and I have been collecting information to guide people through the upgrade to Sitecore 8 and plan for the new xDB. There are a lot of scenarios to consider and new scaling options available to you. Provided below are the collection of resources…
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Keystone: Errors with syncMaster strategy in hardened delivery instance
If you are using Keystone 4.6 or earlier, you may receive this index-related error message after hardening the Sitecore content delivery instance: Could not find configuration node: contentSearch/indexConfigurations/indexUpdateStrategies/syncMaster Even if you have followed the SwitchMasterToWeb workarounds from Sitecore’s KB article, the error will not be fully resolved as the standard SwitchMasterToWeb…
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TDS “the package builder failed” after project rename
This is a quickie for anybody using Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) and encountering the mysterious “The package builder failed” error. In my scenario, the builder fails and informs you to check the build output log, but there are no build output log details. This makes debugging the issue rather difficult……
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Creating interactive wireframes using Keystone
This past week I was onsite with a client to review their site requirements and visual designs that had been created. My biggest focus was to try to determine how much additional effort would be required beyond what we could accomplish by implementing Keystone out of the box. Having talked through…
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Making it Work: Specialists on an Agile Team
In some lines of business, such as consulting, the organizational business goals require a certain amount of specialization in order to deliver to clients efficiently and with high quality. These organizations also typically bill by the hour, meaning downtime is a serious cost to the business. This can be difficult…
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Visual Studio Online: Project Renames and Fields on Cards
I was not surprised that a lot of news came out from Microsoft this past week during their Build event, but some of the changes announced specifically for Visual Studio Online (VSO) were very nice. The first announcement brought us the much sought-after team project renames. The second announcement was the…
St-Cyr Thoughts 