Sitecore Sundae 🍨 Technology Blog

I recently had the opportunity to lead one of Productive Edge’s “Lunch and Learns”. These are regularly scheduled development lunches that prioritize a culture of continual learning and growth. In this presentation, I focused on my key takeaways from the 2018 Sitecore Symposium I attended in October. Keep reading to find out my top insights from the event and the exciting new innovations Sitecore has to offer. Sitecore Symposium 2018 From October 8-11, Sitecore’s annual conference, Sitecore Symposium , brought together over 3,000 attendees from more than 53 countries. The attendees, ranging from Sitecore experts and developers to partners and marketers, came together to network, inspire, learn, and get an early preview of Sitecore’s newest innovations and plans for the future. Elevate the Experience The central theme of the 2018 Sitecore Symposium was “Elevate the Experience”, with 100+ sessions revolving around how businesses can enhance the overall journey for customers. ...

During my years as a Sitecore platform strategist,  I have never found it to be more relevant and necessary than I do today. While most content management systems allow website owners to manage their content in a fairly easy-to-understand manner, the reusable templates that they so often encompass are quickly becoming outdated and too rigid for today’s digital marketing needs. Once upon a time, these templates were excellent ways to populate sites with content, however, now they require massive overhauls and technical design skills whenever a redesign is initiated. In addition, the rigid page-template approach does not support more advanced digital marketing needs for A/B and multivariate testing or subtle one-to-one personalization techniques. So, what other options do companies have when it comes to a CMS (Content Management System) that will provide simplicity without having to spend hours of time on complicated coding? The answer is modular web design. I have been able t...

Whether they realize it or not, customers want a personalized online experience. Even subconsciously, people are more likely to open emails if their name is included in it. Why? Today’s consumers want to believe that a company is tailoring its searches, results and content specifically for their preferences. This demand stems from the fact that a multitude of other companies provide this experience so consumers have come to expect it from everyone else. The benefits of personalizing online experiences are ten-fold for businesses: more impulse purchases, increased basket size, higher brand loyalty. If there was a time to start personalizing the online experience, now would be it. But, it’s impossible to totally personalize the online experience for your customers without knowing exactly what type of information and data your customers want. Providing a smooth search experience encompasses understanding exactly what your customers are looking for and providing the best options based...

I recently came across an issue synchronizing Salesforce Marketing Campaigns with Sitecore using Sitecore 8.2 and Sitecore Salesforce Connect 1.4.1. While troubleshooting the issue, I discovered a bug in one of the Sitecore Salesforce Connect DLLs. If you discover a similar problem and want to see how it was resolved, please read on. Sitecore Contact Not Part of Salesforce Marketing Campaign Background I recently worked on a project that was implementing personalized content from Sitecore in a Xamarin based mobile application. In this scenario, we wanted to create a unique experience for visitors that were part of a Salesforce campaign using the Sitecore xDB personalization engine. We eventually got to a point when we could see that the Salesforce Campaigns were synchronizing properly, but the personalization rules based on campaign membership were not functioning. Investigation The adventure began like many complex Sitecore problems by decompiling a DLL. Specifically, the Sale...

I recently had the opportunity to work with the latest Coveo for Sitecore release ( Oct 2017 4.1) that includes the new Coveo Hive Framework. While working with this release I discovered an issue where my placeholders did not appear in Sitecore Experience Editor. Here is what this looks like in Experience Editor. No placeholders appear and therefore new components cannot be added in Experience Editor. Problem To investigate the problem, I created a new Sitecore 8.2 instance and installed the Coveo for Sitecore Oct 2017 4.1 release and was not able to reproduce it. After digging further into the issue I found the problem was related to a conflict between the (incredibly useful) Sitecore Dynamic Placeholders module and Coveo's Dynamic Placeholder implementation. If you are not familiar with the Sitecore Dynamic Placeholders module you can find it on NuGet here or on GitHub here . The problem was that the Dynamic Placeholder module inadvertently identified Coveo Dynamic plac...