Category: Sitecore
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Preparing your CMS infrastructure for traffic spikes
We’re living in the days of “going viral.” Consumers move faster than ever, and businesses need to be ready to respond to sudden demand the moment it arrives—or risk losing out to competitors. The right endorsement from the right person can generate global exposure and cause unprecedented numbers of people…
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Mitigating CMS implementation risk
Prior to joining Sitecore as a Technical Evangelist, I worked as a consultant on many projects implementing Sitecore in various types of scenarios. The implementation is where things can really start to heat up! The stakes are high. More than that, implementation projects can also be long, costly, and susceptible to error,…
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10 Content Editor Features for your new CMS
When looking at content management systems, there are several features that you need to look at for your content authors. The content editing team spends most of the time in the system, so they will be your number one customer of the CMS. This third article in the series covers…
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Building the business case for a new CMS
The second part of a new series on choosing the right CMS system has published on the Sitecore blog! This second article focuses on the business case you will need to put together to get the approval for getting that new CMS. Read more on sitecore.com…
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Warning signs you might need a new CMS
The first part of a new series on choosing the right CMS system has published on the sitecore.com site! This first article delves into some of the reasons you might be thinking you need a new CMS, and some other situations where you might be okay to just incrementally improve…
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Getting started with Sitecore Marketing Automation
With the latest Sitecore 9 release, a completely new Marketing Automation tool is available for users to quickly plan and extend their automation activities with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Also, a new fully-scalable engine architecture is now available so that you can make sure to process new activities as quickly…
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Evangelist Year One – a Retrospective
Just over one year ago, I wrote about a big change in my career as I joined the Sitecore Technical Marketing team to work as the North American Technical Evangelist. Over the last 12 months, a lot has happened, and in typical agile fashion I’m looking back at what has been…
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Sitecore 9 xDB Sharding
Have you ever wondered what is going on with those new Shard databases in Sitecore 9? This is the new xDB! The new Shard Manager stores data based on the contact ID. A contact ID is a GUID identifier that is unique for each contact. It looks something like this:…
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Scaling Sitecore 9.0 XP Services
The blog here has been a little quiet lately as I have started moving to creating content on the corporate site. I wanted to share something I worked on and has been posted on the Community blogs. Here you go: Scaling Sitecore xConnect and XP Services architecture In the linked blog…
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Continuous Improvement for Sitecore DevOps
Did you miss out on my Montreal SUG presentation a few weeks back? Not to worry, I got your back! I recorded a run-through of my presentation and uploaded it so you can hear my thoughts on how we can continuously improve and invest in DevOps practices for our Sitecore…
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Sitecore + SOLR + SSL
When you are doing local Sitecore development, you might need to setup a local SOLR instance to host your indexes. This is especially important if your project isn’t using Lucene indexes in production and you need to replicate the environment. When replicating production for troubleshooting, it is also useful to…
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Continuous Improvement for Customer Engagement
Sitecore’s Customer Experience Maturity Model has been around for a while and it is still as relevant today as it was when it was first released. The model helps a team to understand where they are right now and where they could possibly be with customer engagement. However, it isn’t…
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Meet Sitecore at MSBuild 2017 conference!
This year, Sitecore will be exhibiting at the Microsoft Build conference in Seattle. This will be my first time attending the conference and I look forward to getting the chance to meet so many of the developers in our industry! I have been working with the team to put together…
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A new challenge with an old friend
Today I embark upon a brand new journey in my career. Excitement. Trepidation. Giddiness? Perhaps! Part of me is sad to leave my Nonlinear family behind, but I am so very excited about the opportunity to join Sitecore as a Technical Evangelist starting today. That’s right, no more MVP for…
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Speaking this week at Toronto SUG
On Wednesday evening I’ll be visiting Toronto to speak about all the buzz about Sitecore and Azure. You should come on out and say hello! JOIN US to learn about #Sitecore #Azure Deployment and Personalized Promotions on March 29th https://t.co/xUWYgecT6Y pic.twitter.com/639giWwvnm — Nonlinear Digital (@nonlinear_DIG) March 23, 2017 To get…
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The Sitecore Shibboleth Login module – SSO one header at a time
When you start using Sitecore as an intranet you inevitably must face the identity management scenario: where are the users who are visiting the intranet going to be stored? In most established organizations, a centralized identity management system is already in place. For a recent project, I came across the…
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Sitecore 8.2 ProtectedImageLinkRenderer throws “Length cannot be less than zero” exception
I ran into this particular bug when upgrading a client to Sitecore 8.2 update 2. Whenever a RichText block had both a link to a media document (like a PDF) and an anchor with no HREF the processing pipelines that update the HREF links would blow up. For those who…
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Sitecore announces 2017 MVPs
With a new year upon us, the time has come again: Sitecore has announced the 2017 MVPS! I was again honoured to see my name on the list for the fourth year in a row. You can see the full list of 2017 MVPs on the Sitecore MVP site. There are also…
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Tenth day of Christmas… Women of Sitecore
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… ten women of Sitecore! …nine sessions of training, eight tweets a-tweeting, seven VSTS features, six GIFS a-dancing, five Golden Rules! Four Community Sites, three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. Nick Wesselman said it well in his post asking…
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Ninth day of Christmas… Sessions of Training
On the ninth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… nine sessions of training! …eight tweets a-tweeting, seven VSTS features, six GIFS a-dancing, five Golden Rules! Four Community Sites, three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. Throughout 2016, Akshay Sura and Mike Reynolds have been bringing unofficial Sitecore…
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Sixth day of Christmas… Animated GIFs!
On the sixth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… Six GIFs a-dancing! …five Golden Rules! Four Community Sites, three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. SIDE BAR: I don’t care what the creator of the acronym says, it’s pronounced with a hard G… I like my Gifs…
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Fourth day of Christmas… Community Sites
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… Four Community Sites! .. three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. Community Docs Built by the community, this documentation covers everything from MVC to xDB to SPEAK: https://sitecore-community.github.io/docs/ Sitecore Community Forums Built by Sitecore,…
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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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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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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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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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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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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…
St-Cyr Thoughts 