I'm Bluffing

There is a large gap between understanding customer needs and satisfying these needs. In the context of software development, the same can be said of maintaining healthy and bidirectional relationships with partners. Of course the purposes of an agencies and software vendors are the same: the overall satisfaction of the customer. A certain synergy needs to exist between the two in order to be able satisfy the customer. Customers expect maturity, confidence and a healthy dose of logic combined with creativity from their implementation partner/agency. And with regards to the software vendor they tend to look for the same maturity combined with stability and consistency fused with a good amount of innovation. Innovation that creates that competitive edge every business is looking for. It is however the implementation partner that is closest to the customer. Normally, agencies understand the business of their customers. They know of the intricacies, challenges, internal struct

   I am using EXM 3.1 for a customer and a POC... However, I do come across quite the number of issues with the EXM module. We all know this module is still subject to some growing pains but as I am curing these, I will list some of the fixes and encountered issues on the blog just to help my colleagues along before another fix on Sitecore is released... When using the EXM 3.1 I came across the following issue When creating a new email message I seemed unable to save the item entirely. I noticed saving was not performed correctly as the title and body fields were not sent out as I tested the email message. However, when I went into the content editor and navigated to my email in the messages bucket under 'content', I changed the fields manually and tried to save it. However, on doing so, Sitecore notified me that there were broken links in the value of that (freshly created) mail message. The problem is on the MessageType field, my message holds the value &qu

I was introduced to Sitecore in 2010. At first, I approached the product as a developer, but as the product and our digital agency The Reference have since evolved, and so has my understanding of and collaboration with Sitecore and its platform. I now no longer perceive Sitecore simply as a means to implement our customers’ needs but rather as a system that helps shape business requirements and define desired future business outcomes, based on out of the box possibilities and custom work. My role has therefore broadened a lot: I often act as a trainer, technical consultant and presales consultant. This implies that figuring out the limitations of system capabilities, studying the product roadmap as well as all third party integration systems are part of my set of responsibilities. To keep that knowledge up to par, the technical team of Sitecore developers (20 and growing) at The Reference has gone through every Sitecore training imaginable and we are constantly on the lookout fo

Announcing the final agenda of the next user group session! The next Sitecore Belux user group is taking place on the 29 th of October. The main focus of this session is on the Hedgehog Tool Suite, mainly TDS and RAZL. This session is taking place at the Boondoggle offices in Leuven and starts at 18 o’clock with an introductionary session by Boondoggle on the role and practical implementation of Responsive styling with WFFM module. If you want to become informed on how th Hedgehog toolset tool could improve your project execution / development and deployments and you wish to find out more on WFFM and its various implementations, this session is just what you need.   Please find all information and registrations here: http://www.meetup.com/Sitecore-User-Group-Belgium/events/223625395/

Introduction Sitecore is a powerhouse. That being said it is also a huge pile of configurable sweetness, and as with each pile of goodies, things tend to become lost or confused. Sitecore allows for so much modifications, configurations and so on that it can't hurt to keep some overview from time to time. This post is aimed at looking into the bare bones building blocks of Sitecore: Content and the fields that make up that content. I will not go into detail on which fields exist within Sitecore that allow you to define specific data templates for your content objects. Enough technical information exists on that already. My goal is to give you a run-through of the Standar Fields. You can also find a high level description of the fields in the Data Definition Reference on Sitecore SDN for any specific version of Sitecore. This first post give insight into the first three sections : Advanced, Appearance and Help. The other sections will be handled in subsequent

Turns out life goes exceedingly fast when you are occupied by having both a very busy work-agenda and personal life. That might be a possible explanation as to why my previous blog post dates back to mid december last year ... A lot has transpired since then :p First off, Sitecore 8 became released The new platform made it in time... ! All developers were are aching to get their hands on first developments and going forward with development and new projects on the shining new release. A number of projects are now in startup phase and we are gently going ahead with looking into the future for our other existing and active customers. The future seems to hold a large set of opportunities, both with regards to new approaches in Sitecore as well as insights and customer / marketer options! Shortly after, I got a few mails from Sitecore that contained the following sentence: " It is my pleasure to inform you that we have reviewed your nomination for Sitecore Technolo