Are you ready for the MongoDB 3.4 EOL?

August 13, 2019Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

If you are running Sitecore version 8.2.x, you are running MongoDB 3.4. Unfortunately, that also means you are impacted by the announcement by MongoDB that version 3.4 will reach end-of-life in January 2020.

You have some options on how you want to fix this and it sort of depends on how much tolerance your organization has for running production systems that don’t have commercial support from the vendor.

Over on the Sitecore Technical Marketing blog, I outlined a variety of options and provided a few FAQ answers:

Using Sitecore 8.2 with Mongo 3.4? Time for an upgrade!

Preparing your CMS infrastructure for traffic spikes

November 22, 2018February 12, 2019 Leave a comment

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 to flock to your site, with little or no prior warning.

Take Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show in 2017—millions of people saw her backup dancers in Steve Madden boots and rushed online to order them. That can amount to more traffic than most people dream of in a year, all arriving in seconds.

Major televised events are only one piece of the puzzle. In the modern digital world, digital marketing is aimed purposefully at trying to create demand–and businesses need to be ready to scale up to meet sudden successes from the drop of a tweet.

Crucially, it’s not just about bearing the weight of enormous traffic spikes. It’s about being able to innovate, and capitalize on sudden demand at a moment’s notice. One great way to do that is to leverage cloud hosting for your CMS.

Mitigating CMS implementation risk

October 23, 2018November 26, 2018 Leave a comment

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, even with the best partner. No implementation project is exactly like another, so there is always an element of the unknown as you undertake this new project. Also, just like the selection process, these projects are highly visible to the rest of the business. That means risks need to be identified early and addressed as soon as possible.

Warning signs you might need a new CMS

August 15, 2018November 26, 2018 Leave a comment

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 on what you already have.

Getting started with Sitecore Marketing Automation

July 27, 2018July 27, 2018Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

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 as you need to.

I have put together a video series as well as a blog post on the new capabilities in Sitecore 9 and published it to the Sitecore Technical Marketing blog!

Evangelist Year One – a Retrospective

June 10, 2018Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

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 happening, what worked well, and what didn’t!

FAIR WARNING: This is a long read, there is no TL;DR, this is mostly for me. Read at your own risk!

TL;DR: I lied. The short version is I had a blast all year and am way too excited about more big things this year!

Continue reading “Evangelist Year One – a Retrospective” →

Sitecore 9 xDB Sharding

March 25, 2018March 26, 2018Jason St-Cyr 7 Comments

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:

B9814105-1F45-E611-82E6-34E6D7117DCB

The xDB scales out by splitting these contacts across the various shards based on their contact identifier. A 16-byte hash of the GUID is used and assigned to each shard to ensure distribution.

Continue reading “Sitecore 9 xDB Sharding” →

St-Cyr Thoughts

Swimming against the waterfall…

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