I'm Bluffing

 Stepping up your Sitecore game   The whole Sitecore ecosystem is changing. Sitecore is looking into more and more acquisitions following its large capital injection of last year. And it is not only changing on a level of acquisitions and platform capabilities. The platform is moving forward at cruising speed, with a solid release cadence moving the platform onward. Over the last years we have seen the technology change, noticed remarkable architectural shifts back and forth. All these changes obviously make an impact on several levels; how should you host this application, what about integrations, what about containers, what about platform functionalities. And even though the above questions feel pretty redundant, a lot of customers are still on older versions of Sitecore, and Sitecore 10 is still a distant dream. Which is why this article aims to provide a mix of where the platform is, where it is headed, and what would be a good approach and timing to get back on trac...

As most of the world at this moment, I am (together with my colleagues) stuck in a different working rhytm and momentum. And regardless of how this is impacting businesses, either through an unexpected drop in business and turnover or by creating opportunities (depending on how long this will last), I feel that it is our duty to try and turn this global pandemic in a time for opportunities. Meaning that while we need to fill in on the amount of work we do daily in a different way, we might just be able to change this for the better.So, from a standpoint of Sitecore development, what can we actively do to aid ourselves and our customers? Sitecore Upgrade If there ever was a somewhat convenient time to perform Sitecore upgrades, then that time is now. Customers typically are noticicng a drop in amount of visitors, have less active campaigns and have a lower rate of activity when it comes down to creating and updating content on their various platforms. Also, with the expected re...

As I made my way back from Orlando to Brussels, I had some time to reflect on the vast magnitude of information that was handed down to all attendees during this 5-day event. That is right, a total of 5 days, as I attended both the Symposium as well as the MVP Summit. Moreover, since all that content is spread out across different types of tracks as well as multiple breakout sessions, it is nearly impossible to cover everything. However, a few topics really stuck with me that seem to interweave just great in the grand scheme of things. So, without further ado; Sitecore goes SaaS Sitecore Content Hub Exploring FaaS capabilities Sitecore goes SaaS This announcement had been hanging in the air for quite some time. Over the course of the last years we had seen a number of evolutions and new products in the product ecosystem that were already starting to level the playing ground for the introduction of SaaS. Two years ago, Sitecore introduced their vision of a ne...

In a little under a month, we will be heading back out towards the yearly Sitecore Symposium. When you explore the online agenda for the Symposium, it can be somewhat overwhelming to look into the 120 (!) different sessions and decide on which one offer the most value or novelty information. Since everyone who attends the Symposium has a slightly different focus, it would be an absurd claim to provide you with an ideal guide into the different tracks as a whole. All speakers and sessions have been meticulously chosen and offer great quality and expertise in their own domain. Sitecore has been hard at work in a number of products and technology choices: Handling larger volumes and scaling your different environments for bigger load Sitecore Commerce with enhanced performance, tooling and stability (and B2B?) Sitecore 9.3 release with the all-new Horizon interface that will be revealed Assist and accelerate your website development through tools such as SXA and JSS Stru...

When installing one of the various Sitecore Connect for Salesfoce connectors that can be found here: https://dev.sitecore.net/Downloads/Salesforce_Connect.aspx You may run into problems when moving through the various steps in the case that the Salesforce environment you are using is actually a Sandbox environment. The various steps of the installation are actually pretty straight forward. they are described in much more detail in the specific installation guides but the information below gives you a good overview of the complexity and specific highlevel steps. And it adds just that little extra sauce in case you are using a sandbox environment: - Install the correct DEF framework (2.0.1 and onwards) - The 3 providers (Salesforce CRM, Sitecore and xConnect) - Sitecore connect for Salesforce Once these pre-requisites are set up, it is time to Convert the installed xConnect Model to JSON and deploy it onto the xConnect roles (xconnect server and indexing server) Next, log i...

 A little while back, end of January to be precise, I was awarded the Sitecore Technical MVP award for 2019. I am a little late to the announcement party, at least here on my blog. Which doesn't mean it doesn't merrit the much deserved attention and appreciation! Now, what does one have to do to achieve the MVP level? Well, that is one of the reasons that this blog is rather late. I don't get to spend a lot of my time on social accounts, blogs, stackexchange and even slack. Meaning that it is a lot harder to get visibility through digital presence if you are not constantly on those channels. My job mainly consists of following up on projects, providing estimates, knowing everything there is to know about Sitecore, both functionally as well as technically and which restrictions come with that. So, setting my goals for 2019; what do I want to do with Sitecore? - Set up a whole lot of instances on 9.1 for testing, upgrades and new customers. - Keep on hostin...

Let me start of with a general clarification for those of you who have little to no experience with SXA. With Sitecore Experience Accelerator, data sources can still be stored in multiple places. And by default, your page's datasources will be stored either under a site-wide data folder node or the data folder located underneath your actual page. Meaning that everything related and uniquely linked to a page is simply nested underneath that page and those blocks of content that allow further re-use are found on a higher data-repository level. When adding a new component you are presented with the following option to select or create a new piece of associated content: However, from time to time some unexpected behavior might pop up. Sitecore, by default, will use the Sitecore GUID as reference point for the datasource location in your presentation properties. However, with SXA, the relative path of your datasource is used instead SXA chose this approach to make the ...