What could potentially happen to your Sitecore installation when applying this patch?

1. A couple of users get logged out. That’s only really notable for the user who use the check box ‘Remember me’. Just login again. That’s the deal. According to my checks on 6.2, this does not happen.
2. Potentially you could get an exception for people who have a open session while updating Sitecore. According to my checks, this doesn’t happen.

So it seems that you can install this patch without any unexpected side effect. I’ve checked it on my machines and tested it there(so this is an unofficial Sitecore  statement). If we come across issue, we will let you know. If you come across issues, please let our support team know.

Update: Sometimes an ‘HttpException: Unable to validate data’ happens when people are already authenticated. I couldn’t reproduce this. But it seems to be there. In that case, please review this solution on SDN.

For more information, please review this article on SDN.

The following diagram shows how the CMS, OMS, Webforms for Marketers and Dynamics CRM Campaign Integration glue together:

On top of the Sitecore Web CMS you can find the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite(OMS) which is used for gaining more details out of the visitor experience.

The Webforms for Marketers module is added on top of the OMS. It relies heavily on the OMS, so I’ve decided to add it there.
Eventually you can run this module without the OMS, but you’ll definitely not gain all the potential out of it.

For integration with MS Dynamics CRM, we have our new Dynamics CRM Campaign Integration module. This module consists of 2 parts:

1. Save Actions: An extension to the Webforms for Marketers module. It allows any business user to import data into any CRM entity. All WYSIWYG. So no coding required.
2. Security Provider: Share Contacts in Dynamics CRM as Users in Sitecore. This means that a contact in CRM can login into your Sitecore website for extranet purposes.

Let’s assume you want to start developing on a similar solution. Then it’s highly advisable for you to setup a sandbox environment. You need the following components:

• Windows Server 2003/2008 Web with IIS installed (you can virtualize this)
• SQL Server 2008 (2005 is possible but 2008 is a speedy animal)
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Installer (on your MSDN subscription) or CRM online
• Sitecore 6.3
• Sitecore OMS 1.1.1
• Webforms for Marketers 2.1
• Dynamics CRM Save Actions & Dynamics CRM Security Provider

Then you’re ready to rock!

So far so good for today. We’ve got plenty more to talk about. But that can wait for later.

Here’s my view on this:

1. Individual item
   Rarely, you want to setup Insert Options on individual items. Something when you have a specific folder or section in your website, you might chose for this option. Keep in mind that this you always should have a valid reason.
   For example: For all my meta data I use the /Common/Folder template to store my item underneath. As these folders have only 1 specific setting(Insert Options), I’ve decided not to Subtemplate(create a new template and inherit from the Folder-template) the Folder-template, because of maintainability. Consider in that case Insert Option Rules.
2. Branch Templates
   It’s a bad practice to set any Insert Options on Branch templates.
3. Standard Values
   95% of the cases setup your Insert Options on Standard Values as it’s applied everywhere when you use the specific template.
4. Insert Options Rules
   When you need to setup global conditions, like ‘All the items based on the Folder template containing the word ‘Blog’ should add the Blog Entry template as Insert Option’.
   We use it ourselves in the Marketing Center. We allow everybody to create folders, but we want them to create specific items underneath.
   Before setting up a rule, figure out if you can’t do it with Standard Values.

Trimming the list afterwards can always be done by settings up Insert Rules.
For an advanced Reference regarding these Content Infrastructure topics, please refer to Data Definition Reference.

And seriously, if there’s one thing I hate about .NET in general, it are exceptions. 95% of the time they are non self explaining and sometimes even nonsense. This exception would normally take me 20 minutes to solve at least. But not this time. So how to solve this one?

Basically, this is nothing more than a Database Connection error… When I added /sitecore behind my url, I received a generic connection failure exception. I had to do some work on my connection string(or start my SQL Server). That’s all. But Alex, where did it come from? And why does the login page show something different?

Chicken and the egg issue: when accessing an Item we need a (SQL)-Database, but before allowing to access an Item, we need a User, a User needs a (SQL)-Database. And of course, this dependancy became stronger when we introduced Sitecore v6 with the Membership Providers.

So what can we learn from this? Always consult both pages: / and /sitecore. Often, there’s a different message. Sitecore is all based on context(yes, Sitecore.Context…). So when you have a problem, always try different entry points to minimize the Context. For example, Sitecore has by default 2 active websites running: ‘website’ and ‘shell’. In this case, I tried to access both of them.

Happy coding out there

Although it isn’t a recommended release at the moment, I’d suggest everybody who’s working with the Sitecore OMS to update your installation to this version. Especially when you’re still in the development process of your website. Directly after the final release we’ve been working for a full month to make sure this release would fix every annoying issue which was introduced with our newest release feeded by the earliest Customer and Partner feedback.

So to give your site an optimal boost: install this version!

Later this week, I do expect some more exciting news… I’ll keep you posted!

So let’s have a look how this functionality is working. I’ve installed an empty Sitecore 6.1 installation and created a couple of sample items in a random order.

Now I want to sort my items in a less random order. Let’s order them on Display Name. To do so, I’ve to go to my Home and click on the Sorting Command:

A new windows will appear with a list of the default Sitecore Sorting settings:

In this case I select ‘Display Name’. The box below will give me an immediate preview how the new order of the Subitems looks:

 
There are plenty other options to choose, including Standard Values.
When I click on ‘Ok’, the setting will be applied and my content tree will refresh:
To reflect the change in the front-end, you’ve to publish the Home item including subitems (or execute an Incremental Publish).
Note: As always, it’s a best practice to setup Subitem Sorting on the Standard values of a template. That will make sure that all the items based on the Template will reflect the same sort order. For individual cases, you can set it up on an individual item.

To make sure that this example works fine, I’ve made sure that the name of the item is also inserted in the Title field of my Item:

Now I want to create a custom Sorter which sorts my items rather on Title than on Display Name. The first thing I’ve to do is to write a small class:

   1: using Sitecore.Data.Comparers;

   2: using Sitecore.Data.Items;

   3:  

   4: public class YetAnotherComparer1 : Comparer

   5: {

   6:     protected override int DoCompare(Item item1, Item item2)

   7:     {

   8:         string x = item1["title"];

   9:         string y = item2["title"];

  10:  

  11:         return x.CompareTo(y);

  12:     }

  13: }

The class implements Sitecore.Data.Comparers.Comparer. This base class forces you to implement the DoCompare method. Basically, this method reads both title values and compares it using the .NET built-in string.CompareTo().

Note: I’m using the indexer(["fieldname"]) to retrieve fields. This will never return a null, only a string.Empty when the field doesn’t exist or is empty.

Afterwards, we’ve to register the class in Sitecore. We can create an item of the template ‘Child Sorting’ (/sitecore/templates/System/Child Sorting) in /sitecore/system/settings/Subitems Sorting:

Now I’m able to select my item from the sorting dialog:

And from now on, my items will get sorted by title-value.

Of course this is just an example. You can think about different sorters and also use them in the front-end.

Sitecore’s VP and Founder Lars Fløe Nielsen will follow up on this post with more technical details and how to use Sitecore Sorters in the frond-end. I’ll update this post once his second article is published.

Today I had a short conversation with a partner and later on one of our core developers about the page editor. It seems that we can accelerate very quickly when you express what your thoughts are.

It’s also a big compliment to our core team. These highly skilled guys are able to look through the bush and discover real life issues. It requires a high level of abstraction but also a deep insight in daily issues at our partners and customers.

Please keep the suggestions coming. I try to direct them. Likewise will Lars and Darren. And when I’m talking about suggestions, don’t stick to API changes, also higher level opinions such as documentation or development strategies are welcome. Feel absolutely free to contact us either using email(adg-at-sc-net), Twitter or any other media.

That’s it for this morning. Have a great day, I’ll have a great coffee .

Today I represent (as usual) my personal vision. I tell this once again, just to be sure that my personal vision won’t become Sitecore’s public vision .

This morning while I was running through my task list I decided to share this on my twitter account:
Thinking about my CMIS proposal for product management: can WCM really benefit from an ECM(mostly DM) standard?!

I see it as one of my primary responsibilities inside Sitecore to inform product management about changes in our world of content management. Most of the time they’ve already added something similar on the roadmap, but it’s good to have my input. I talk on daily base with our implementation partners and customers, they do not always get that chance.

After a while, a couple of reactions showed up. John Newton, one of the founders of Alfresco replied to me and so did some others. It shows how constructive a tool like Twitter can be, but more important, how hot this topic is.

JBoye just posted a blogpost(also a reaction) about what they think customers should do an not do at this moment. I agree with them to some level, but only if you include the reactions in your vision.

But let’s get back! What is CMIS? It is a standard for communicating between different ECM installations. There’s a big need for the possibility to interexchange documents including metadata between these systems. These documents often have a lot of metadata and also their folder structure tells a lot about their semantics. As every vendor has its own idea about how to store this data, it is very important to have an common format for communication otherwise exchange of documents becomes impossible or very expensive.

(This is of course a simplified view on CMIS. It does include the state where a document is in and lots of other features. Some more or less important.)

The evolution of having such a ‘protocol’ and to see the different vendors talking about these things is a very good step. As vendors ECM, DM and WCM have to deal with all kinds of different standard. Most of them are very technical, take for example Web services, RSS, Atom, WebDAV, etc. Most of them are also not intended to become a standard in our particular space of issue solving. Which means that they are too general or too domain specific to integrate tight with a system like Sitecore.

The question is now what value CMIS brings to WCM. WCM is not document minded and often it does not focus at all on storing document. Looking at today’s Web pages, you often see that companies try not to deliver to many documents on their websites. Which is a good move, as it improves usability. But CMIS is not just about PDFs or Word documents. It does include movies, illustrating images and results of collaborated documents as well.

As soon as the standard will reach its public stages, we as Sitecore, but all the purely WCM vendors should definitely start supporting this standard. But not as a content producer. ECM and DM will continue to focus on creating documents. Although WCM can deliver this, their main target is a markup languages. WCM is very good in producing (X)HTML, XML and image manipulation. Its strength is definitely not creating PDFs or so. Most WCM vendors are capable of doing it technically, but they cannot facilitate the quality process steps ECM can.

Therefore it doesn’t make a lot of sense to integrate the whole standard a producer. But as a consumer it does. Often documents get published out of intranets and other collaboration environments. It does make sense to be able to consume these documents and use them on all kind of web pages.

In some way WCM should support the production side as well. WCM has a real strong relation minded structure. This means that content tagging, inter-content-relations and other ways of categorizing are available out of the box. Why not use this data back to feed the ECM again? Looking at the world of web 2.0, you often see the end consumer(also known as website visitor) does tag/rate content. This information is highly interesting for the content producer.

On the other hand that’s also the challenge for WCM. Because of our nature in linking data to each other, you can harder define a single asset. That’s a pity as you have to define, in my suggestion above, if user generated content is a property of a certain asset or not.

As you have seen above, I see a lot of value in CMIS for WCM. But we should keep in mind that the standard is still a draft. When the final version is there Sitecore and all the other WCM should start to support it as a data consumer(once again: my opinion). It will decrease the investment for companies to get their back office to communicate to the front-end. Which is always a great step. Beside of that it can decrease the time to market for certain information and allows team to gather feedback from the web(depending on the implementation and the product visions of both vendors: ECM & WCM).
It also shows how separated WCM can be from ECM. This discussion wasn’t ongoing when ECM had incorporated WCM totally.

The acceptance of the standard can highly benefit from a toolset developed for the different platforms. I would highly support the idea of having Microsoft (.NET) and Sun (Java) writing the communication layer as a library. The specific implementation can be completed by every individual vendor. But this communication part shouldn’t take to much time from every individual vendor, reinventing the wheel.
It doesn’t matter if it are Microsoft and Sun or if it becomes an open source project. As long a the biggest vendors doe support this open source solution as well and give an indication of it’s quality.

This whole CMIS standard, all the attention and discussion around it will hopefully open the discussion for standardizing WCM solutions as well. Similar to DM I think that it would be good to come to an exchange format which allows WCMS’s to exchange data but in a more specific way than RSS and Atom do these day. A big lack of these formats are internal linking and once again document support. Also, you’re strictly bounded to a set of predefined data.

But that’s a total different discussion. Hopefully this posting explains a lot to you. I’m sure I haven’t covered all parts of CMIS and also haven’t spoken about all the business opportunities WCM can get out of it. But I’ll leave that up to the imagination of you, my reader and commenter.
It’s time now to get this in more in-depth and slightly more technical to product management .

So what’s the general idea of SSL? You want to have certain pages to execute over an encrypted connection. The most feasible solution is SSL which encrypts the data by default using a 128bit encryption. Still pretty strong these days, although I won’t be surprised if we move to 256bit somewhere in 2010. There are several traditional vendors who deliver certificates. In the Netherlands for example KPN. All register their certificates at VeriSign, a party who does take care of the strength of the encryption and the validation of newly created certificates.

Afterwards you’ve to integrate it into Sitecore. A very simple solution is to decide per item if you want to run the constructed page on SSL or not. The Shared Source component takes care of that part.

Now the infrastructure / OS ‘issue’. It seems for a several reasons that running certificates on the web application software(IIS) is very expensive. Combining encryption with page rendering is always possible in every internet server(Apache, Tomcat, IIS, etc), but all have significant disadvantages when it comes to delivery.

I often suggest to rather use a network based solution. These days’ routers, load balancers and switches have the possibility to handle https/ssl for you. As these machines are designed for passing TCP/IP packages thru, they can easily encrypt them. Beside of that, when you run into out scaling scenarios, you don’t have to manage your certificates on multiple places.

Here’s a simple diagram:

In this case the SSL Executor is a Reversed Proxy, but it can also be a firewall or other network interface.

Hope this helped.

Note: This is a post written out of my experience as an architect in many projects. I’m involved in general in Sitecore projects, but rarely I’ve got the opportunity to ‘work’ a little outside of this boxed environment. Often these high level problems arise in project where Sitecore is involved but also in other projects. It’s never my intention to blame a vendor, although I might point out some weaknesses.