I'm Bluffing

Welcome into a humble recap of the second MVP Summit day.  A beautiful second day that took place at a unique location, more specifically the NOLA Motorsports Park. As the information that is shared to the attending MVP’s is mostly confidential and should under no circumstances be shared publicly it is challenging to disclose what the summit is actually all about. The MVP Summit aims at providing first-hand information, concepts and new product development into the various types of MVP’s present. This allows for Sitecore receive early feedback and insights which can help to further streamline new or existing product features. A while back, Sitecore promised that they would adapt their product development strategy to better fit the requirements set forward by the actual customers as well as technology and feature requests from the user base and developers. And most of the topics offered in this second day of the MVP Summit proved exactly that. No gigantic ne...

Sitecore MVP Summit 2016 – Day 1 This year’s Sitecore MVP Summit is being hosted in New Orleans for the second time in a row. An ideal opportunity for dedicated Sitecore users and developers that have earned the title of MVP in the past year to help set the roadmap for the upcoming year. It also offers a unique opportunity to get a firsthand insight into what the product wants to evolve into and what the overall roadmap is for the upcoming releases. As a technicalical MVP, I am attending the Summit with our Digital Strategy MVP - Thomas Danniau. We are are currently at the MVP Summit to make sure that every aspect that holds significant value to our new and existing customers is taken in and properly evaluated. As the information that is disclosed on the summit is mostly under NDA, MVP’s are not allowed to share any specific details on the product’s next features or overall roadmap. So, we’re afraid that is not what we are able to share with you on this blog post. ...

So, in one week time from now, the Sitecore MVP Summit is upon us. Starting on September 12th, we have two days of intense collaboration and feedback planned for us. Following closely is the already sold-out Sitecore Symposium which is also taking place in New Orleans 2016. I'll be posting that which can be released under NDA on my blog when possible and in the extent possible :) Hope to see many of you there and let's mingle for a full week of New Orleans Sitecore madness. Kind regards.

Mild introduction A while back, we hatched the idea to create a new Marketplace module based on our experience and the feedback of editors with regards to content management in sites that are both heavy on amount of hosted sites and the available languages. All of that and much more detailed information with regards to the EasyLingo module can be found on Gert Gullentops blog here: http://ggullentops.blogspot.be/2016/08/easylingo.html However, the first version only featured an integration into the Content Editor as a new bar in your editing pane of the selected item. We decided to up our game a little and introduce our new functionality into the Experience Editor. My first idea was that this would go rather smoothly, because, let's face it, all I had to do was look at how Sitecore does it now and find a way to display the same HTML we were already rendering into the Content Editor. So, how hard could it be? Note that I have no (zero) experience on creating or using Spea...

During the last Sitecore User group session here in Belgium, Ryan Donovan was featured as the central speaker. The following two topics were on the agenda: Sitecore Commerce An in-depth information on 8.2 and 8.3 I was impressed by the drive behind Ryan and his team(s). It emphasized the drive that is pushing Sitecore forward. Sitecore is putting a lot of effort in producing well hardened and tested product releases that bring new features and rich applications. Sitecore Commerce Previous Sitecore commerce solutions were structured around either SCpbCS and SCpbMD. However, the vNext commerce product has been newly developed from the ground up. Previously, the commerce solution focussed itself around the architecture of Commerce Server to provide and API, manage the products and to derive the entire feature set from. With this Commerce vNext solution, Sitecore has set forward the aspiration to become one of the market leaders in commerce. The fist aim is to focu...

We have noticed performance decreases with a number of customers on Sitecore where a lot of content started to make its way into the overall site structure as well as into the Media Library. However, we were unable to pinpoint the exact problem for quite some time. It was not so much a problem of reproducing the actual problem in the environment but rather an problem with finding the triggerpoint where the problem really started to present itself across the environment. After applying the typical Performance tuning segments with regards to Caches, Indexes, Database maintenance plans and what more through: https://sdn.sitecore.net/reference/sitecore%207/cms%20performance%20tuning%20guide.aspx , we did notice an (expected) increase of site and backend performance. However, we noticed that the problem persisted in the Media Library. After this, the following tests were performed: - Check IIS logs - Check all available application logging - Run the databasetest.aspx help page f...

After participating in the Sitecore Hackathon of 2015, we had really been looking forward to this year’s edition. And it turns out that this edition was again very valuable, an opportunity to work together closely, explore unexplored aspects of Sitecore and deliver another valuable building block to Sitecore. But let’s kick this post of by explaining what a Hackathon is all about. A Hackathon is a community driven event that aims at creating new functionalities around an existing concept or product.  As the event is participated voluntarily, no real product enhancements are developed to be incorporated into the base product. Often these Hackathon events are organized as small competitions to increase the gamification factor and add some healthy competition. A Hackathon mainly aims at developers although some front-end and analysis is often required to conceive and complete the project. A Hackathon usually has a timeframe of 24 hours, this allows for the team to prove t...

About a year ago I wrote a blog post on the admin pages and some of the hidden functionalities with Sitecore. This post is meant to elaborate on that by showing the differences that have come up since then with the release of the Sitecore 8.1 version. You can read up on the previous post here: http://kverheire.blogspot.be/2014/12/sitecore-hidden-gems-admin-pages-based.html And I will not be repeating myself endlessly, so my goal is to list the differences in this post. I think a good excercise could be to start of in pretty much of the same structure and post : The List versus              When comparing these two we can see the following differences: ContentTestingUpgrade.aspx InstallLanguage.aspx kill.aspx * PathAnalyzer.aspx RebuildKeyBehaviorCache.aspx RedeployMarketingData.aspx UpdateSocialProfiles.aspx  The updated admin pages - what are the actual differences and funcionalities As my previous blog post alread...