Delivering The Sitecore Experience

Although Sitecore offers multi-tenancy OOTB, many enterprise customers of Sitecore find themselves managing websites across multiple brands, business units, regions and often end up with multiple deployments that may increase redundancy, reduce reusability and increase overall cost of marketing and IT operations. This session will showcase how a large CPG enterprise used OneWeb framework utilizing best practices and enabling advanced features of Sitecore to unify digital operations. OneWeb: Unifying multi-brand experience management and digital operations with the power of Sitecore from VarunNehra

 Now that Sitecore v10.x is fully supported on Azure AKS, Sitecore in its reference architecture has replaced Azure Search with SearchStax as the go to provider for Solr as a service. This presentation showcases the what, the why and the how to deploying SearchStax. Migrating from Azure Search to SearcStax from VarunNehra

An introduction to Jamstack architecture. With Sitecore supporting React and Next.js you are one step closer to Jamstack delivery with Sitecore JSS, Experience Edge for Sitecore Content Hub and  Experience Edge for Sitecore XM enable Jamstack architecture. Get ready for_jamstack_with_sitecore_experience_edge_upload from VarunNehra

Here is the slide deck from my presentation at Sitecore Symposium 2019: Marketing personalized at scale sitecore + sfmc = success final final from VarunNehra

Sitecore symposium is their biggest annual event hosted by Sitecore. It's usually during the month of October or November and officially lasts 5 days Day 1 is considered pre-conference day Day 2, 3, 4 are actual conference days with the Symposium Party on Day 3 and the closing note on day 4 at noon. Day 5 is MVP summit and open to Sitecore MVPs only The attendance is almost a 50-50 distribution of clients and partners. Buying a pass If you are selected as a speaker you get a free pass. Early bird pricing can save you hundreds so look out for early bird pricing dates. If early bird pricing has expired. If you are a partner, you could become a sponsor and score some free passes. If you are a client or prospect, you should get in touch with your vendor partner as they may have discounted passes or even free passes they can offer you. If you are an individual looking for a last min discount, follow #SitecoreSym on Twitter for $100 discount code from Sitecore MV

Here is the slide deck from my presentation at Sitecore Symposium 2018. Update: Uploaded deck to SlideShare. Sitecore: Session recommendation engine from VarunNehra

Here is my slide deck for my talk at  Sitecore Digital Destiny Tour 2018 . Update: Link to SlideShare Accelerating Time To Market with Sitecore & Helix from VarunNehra

A while back I worked on a Sitecore specific QA assessment for a client. The idea was to take our QA competency's methodology and best practices and tailor them to be Sitecore specific. One very interesting out put from it was what I called Sitecore Testing Matrix. Here it is:

There was a great report from Gartner a while back that summarized e-commerce architectures into three categories: Commerce-led architecture Experience-led architecture API-led architecture Following which, Rob Earlam wrote a great summary of Sitecore Experience Commerce's experience-led architectur e. Looking back at my e-commerce experience, I would like to propose a possible fourth one, which is Hybrid Architecture.   Now, before I get into the Hybrid architecture. Let me quickly summarize these three architecture types. Commerce-led Architecture The idea here is simple, self-contained commerce solution, often times a monolith, where each every commerce feature is tightly coupled. The advantage in this case is in quickly deriving ROI from the system by shortening the time to market. However, there are several disadvantages to this approach such as single point of failure, lack of scalability options, high cost of maintenance etc. Experience-led Architectur

Welcome to part 2 of the three part series of  The Crawl, Walk, Run of Sitecore Experience Management. You can get a good context of what this series is about by reading  Part 1 . In this part we will add more digital engagement tasks to our 4 primary categories: Content Profiling Content Personalizatiton Contact Profiling Analytics The Walk Phase In this phase we will do more of what we did in crawl phase but by looking back at the analytics we have collected thus far. We will also add and expand on our list of to-dos. Content Profiling - Walk Phase After having collected sufficient web analytics data, you should be able to move on to the walk phase of content profiling.   Data Driven Personas: Evolve your existing personas from research driven to data driven personas. Have a data science team analyze your web analytics data in order to come up with personas and profiles. Create Profile Keys, Profile Cards, Pattern Cards: create these based on the data

In all my experience delivering Sitecore solutions, and having worked for a few platinum implementation partners, I have come to know the "Crawl, Walk & Run" pitch quite well. To most customers, when they hear the crawl, walk and run, I think all they hear is Phase 1, Phase 2, other parking lot items. And guess what is often a Phase 2 item...enabling xDB and its features such as content personlization, visitor identification, campaign management etc. Implementation partners actually may help you justify this by giving various excuses such as, the implementation of these featured will have a significant impact to budget, timeline, etc. I think this has been the challenge Sitecore as a company has been trying very hard to overcome. Moreover, the past two Gartner reports show Sitecore neck to neck with Adobe as clear leaders in the Digital Marketing space but falling short on execution of it's experience management features (now digital exeprience). One of the bi

Almost every life-size Sitecore implementation has a multi-lingual aspect to it. Asking the right questions separates the men from the boys, in other words, shows how mature your digital practice truly is. Here are my top questions I commonly ask my potential clients before implementing a multi-lingual/multi-cultural implementation: Question #1: What languages are to be enabled in Sitecore? Seems like an obvious one but there can be some nuances to consider here and our job is to dig into them.  A good reason to know all the languages you will need to support up front is that certain languages (German, Japanese etc.) can and do have an impact on your creative design and UX.  Speaking of nuances, if a client says they would like to enable Chinese, it's not enough to ask if they would like both Mandarin and Cantonese. I would further ask them if they are looking for traditional or simplified Chinese, and mind you they all have different language codes that you will n

Going through the recently published Sitecore StackExchange site, I came across a question regarding modifying the date format of visits in Experience Profile since it shows the dd.mm.yyyy format by default. In case you don't know what I am talking about, here is what it looks like: It's not just that one view, the default date format seems to apply to other views as well: My obvious thought here was that there has to be a config setting somewhere that controls this date format. Here is my process of elimination: Eliminated Experience Profile configs since it did not contain any date related settings Looked at showconfig.aspx and found some index fields that contained date formats but eliminated since the default format was yyyy/mm/dd Eliminated the Reporting Database since the data formats were different Looked at the service calls made by Experience Explorer to fetch view data and found this: "InteractionStartDateTime":"2016-10-20T15:34:20.44

Just when I thought I have Alex Shyba's Language Fallback module all figured out, I ran into a bug related to indexing fallback versions of items. Bug (Short Version): Fallback language variants of items do not get crawled by the default SitecoreItemCrawler.  Bug Explained (Long Version) The reason is that the default crawler relies on field values stored in the database in order to index them. The Fallback Provider in the fallback module "spoofs" fallback language version of  the field values by returning the field values of the master language version of the item, and as such does not store these values in database. The result is that you only have the master language field values available for crawling. But thanks to the Sitecore community, had already been resolved  here . However, this resolution assumes that you are working with SEARCH CONTRIB / ADVANCED DATABASE CRAWLER module. I wasn't looking to introduce more uncertainty to my solution by add

Here is something in addition to my previous post regarding indexing associated content: Here is a common scenario: Your custom index configuration is set up to crawl all the content for your website which is then used by your site search (keywords search) to fetch search results. In addition to you content item crawlers, you add a crawler for Media Library items as well and Sitecore does a great job of indexing PDF, DOCX, DOC, etc. files automatically, provided your have a valid IFilter installed, and now you have search extended to show file items as search results. Now consider the following scenario: One of the lookup fields on your page points to a file in the media library and the new requirement is to show the page item in the search result when the search phrase matches the content in the associated file. Solution (Lucene & Solr): Create a computed field called "related_content" that stored the crawled content of the associate file and extend the query to now se

Server Error in '/' Application. Value cannot be null. Parameter name: fieldNameTranslator Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: fieldNameTranslator Source Error: An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. Stack Trace: [ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: fieldNameTranslator]    Sitecore.ContentSearch.Linq.Solr.SolrIndexParameters..ctor(IIndexValueFormatter valueFormatter, IFieldQueryTranslatorMap`1 fieldQueryTranslators, FieldNameTranslator fieldNameTranslator, IExecutionContext[] execut

If you encounter the following error working with setting up Active Directory integration: A domain specified in the Sitecore.Security.SwitchingProfileProvider provider/domain map could not be found. Domain name: <yourdomain> Line 3897:        <clear /> Line 3898:        <add name="sql" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider" connectionStringName="core" applicationName="sitecore" /> Line 3899:        <add name="switcher" type="Sitecore.Security.SwitchingProfileProvider, Sitecore.Kernel" applicationName="sitecore" mappings="switchingProviders/profile"></add> Line 3900:      </providers> Line 3901:      <properties> The solve is pretty simple, add a domain element with your domain name such as: <domain name="yourdomain" />  to App_Config/Security/Domains.config

If you implemented Solr with Sitecore using Solr 5.x, you may run into the following error when indexing extremely large content in string fields: org.apache.solr.common.SolrException: Exception writing document id <xxxuniqueid> to the index; possible analysis error. Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Document contains at least one immense term in field="<xxxfieldname>" (whose UTF8 encoding is longer than the max length 32766), all of which were skipped. Please correct the analyzer to not produce such terms. The prefix of the first immense term is: '[10, 9, 9, 10, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 82, 84, 82, 83, 32, 70, 97, 99, 105, 108, 105, 116, 121, 32, 10, 32, 32, 32, 32, 84]...', original message: bytes can be at most 32766 in length; got <intgreaterthan32766> Caused by: org.apache.lucene.util.BytesRefHash$MaxBytesLengthExceededException: bytes can be at most 32766 in length; got <intgreaterthan32766> This is due to the fa