Sitecore Demo environment - A (hidden?) Gem!

-

A while back, I was in dire need of setting up a demo environment for an existing customer.

However, whereas in the past we would simply setup a local environment based on the most recent ZIP file that contained the latest Sitecore version.

Just attach your databases, change the pw, create accounts and then import the latest demo script / package that you could find.

However (and luckily) times has changed ;)

Nowadays we have started to embrace the whole of our composable and cloud-based platforms.

Which means we'll need to provision an environment, make sure we have a Head up and running, have content in there, we look at the whole picture and make sure everything fits together really well.

SO...

I went to part of the community, went to my peers, went to Sitecore and got the same answer every time:

Go to the Sitecore cloud portal and spool up a new environment. And that was what I had to work with... :




Which is a great platform... No comments there!

But this was not what I needed, I needed an environment that would allow me to choose between the options and capabilities Sitecore has to offer and set up a story.

It should hold some (kind of generic) images, assets, content and a story that I can bend to my needs. But due to time and other constraints, I made due with one of the SXA starter kits that one of my fantastic colleagues had deployed already and re-used that, in the hopes that it would not be changed during (or just before) my demo.

However, and honor to whom deserves it, after the demo (unfortunately) I got a mail from Ivan Lieckens with the following link: https://portal.sitecoredemo.com/ 

And this is EXACTLY what I needed anyway:



It has a button to see all demos set up for you, and a button at the top where you can spool up a new Demo for the platform you need, not just XM Cloud ofc:



I am not going to place all the steps here. That would add zero value, you can all figure that out yourselves. Also, I don't want to share what types of demos are in the platform, so that competitors can not look inside the box OR have prospects see what they might have seen or needed :)

However, since it was such a hastle in getting the right information eventhough I asked around, this simply had to be shared (again).

Hope it helps and saves you all the effort I had to put into it :)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stupid exception: Device is not ready – System.IOException .net

-
When installing a Sitecore implementation from an development server environment to my laptop I ran into an absolutely stupid error. And it's great to have this kind of errors pop up from time to time even if you have been in the development world for so long and are still unable to fix it immediately. So, what error did I get? Device is not ready – System.IOException .net That is right... Nothing at all related to Sitecore. But then you start to doubt that as my stacktrace showed to Lucene [IOException: The device is not ready. ] System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath) +1091 System.IO.Directory.InternalCreateDirectory(String fullPath, String path, Object dirSecurityObj, Boolean checkHost) +1413 System.IO.Directory.InternalCreateDirectoryHelper(String path, Boolean checkHost) +92 Sitecore.IO.FileUtil.EnsureFolder(String path) +128 Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider.LuceneIndex.CreateDirectory(String folder) +100 Sitecore.Co
Read more

Sitecore 8.2 in-depth preview + 8.3 update info and Sitecore Ecommerce information

-
Image
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
Read more

Date Ranges in C#

-
DateRange utility class Throughout development there are a number of typical things that tend to recur. One of these is implementing a means to display start and end dates for News, Events, Symposiums, Lives etc etc Writing a little class that manages printing these dates seemed like a necessary task that just had to be done in order to make this tedious task be a thing of the past. Therefore I created my "DateRange" class (what's in a name) that should handle this entirely for you. The Idea The intriquities of displaying a datetime range should be an abstraction. You should only need to worry about passing the correct dates (start and end - if applicable) to the Utility class combined with an optional formatting. The class can be entirely configured through use of Enumerations for all the separate settings such as DayFormat etc. An additional class was used to implement this utility, the StringValue attribute class. You can easily use thie class to a
Read more