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What a week it was! I am referring to the last week spent at Sitecore Symposium North America and Annual MVP Summit that took place in Las Vegas. There was plenty to absorb with as much as seven sessions in progress at the same time. Sessions were divided into three different tracks: Product, Business and […]

I am back to blogging after a long pause – way too modest term for more than 7 months of break. 🙂 But you know the days when you are swamped too deep into the project and don’t do anything other than breathing and work. Everyone, almost everyone, goes through it. Anyway, back to business […]

Last week, Sitecore announced acquisition of commerceserver.net from SMITH(formerly Ascentium), a global digital agency that develops and supports it. Commerceserver.net is a continuation of Microsoft Commerce Server. Acquisition of commerceserver.net complements well as it brings B2B and B2C e-commerce capabilities to Sitecore’s Customer Experience Platform(CXP). As per Sitecore press note, “Sitecore’s acquisition lays the foundation for […]

Yet another win for Sitecore! Sitecore wins Critic’s Choice Award in “Best Enterprise CMS” category after winning People’s Choice Award in the same category last month.  Sitecore and winner of the last year, Adobe CQ5 which is re-branded as Experience Manager were running neck and neck for People’s Choice Award but Sitecore won it in […]

What is Sitecore Azure? In simple words, it is your Sitecore implementation running in Windows Azure, a popular cloud computing platform from Microsoft. Sitecore Azure provides development and deployment tools to support Sitecore CMS and DMS(Digital Marketing System)  in Windows Azure. Windows Azure: As you may already know, Windows Azure services are available both as […]

It is very trivial to retrieve items from Sitecore content repository. Like any other CMS, Sitecore provides APIs for reading and enumerating items and item fields and there is nothing special about it. Without wasting time, let’s talk code straight away. Consider following two lines of code typically found in code behind of a SubLayout: […]

Gone are days when going online for an enterprise was considered a proud moment and the only purpose its public facing website served was an instant ‘brochure’ for visitors about its products and offerings. Nowadays visitors can not only browse the information but also can purchase directly on the website or show an interest into […]

SEO features in SharePoint 2013 are bundled into a SearchEngineOptimization feature. Its feature.xml file references two element files – searchengineoptimization.xml(SEO.xml) and searchengineoptimization1.xml(SEO1.xml). SEO.xml defines elements that make up its UI by extending ribbon interface. It also registers few candidate web controls with AdditionalPageHead delegate control. Delegate control is a powerful mechanism to alter application behavior declaratively. One […]

SharePoint 2013 introduces several new WCM capabilities and one of the addition is native support for SEO(Search Engine Optimization). In absence of any native support for SEO in earlier versions, developer community relied on custom solutions. However with out-of-box SEO capabilities in SharePoint 2013, now you can Configure Canonical URLs Verify site ownership with web […]

SharePoint 2013 introduces the concept of App level External Content Type(ECT) which allows model representing external entities to be packaged along with app in single unit so later it can be accessed by app to understand and integrate external data without outer dependencies. External Content Types(ECTs) and External List – BCS(Business Connectivity Services) is an […]

SharePoint 2013 has improved OData support. In fact, it offers full-blown OData compliant REST based interface to program against. For those who aren’t familiar with OData, OData is an open standard for querying and updating data that relies on common web standard HTTP. Read this OData primer for more details. The obvious benefits are: 1. […]

SharePoint 2013  has an out-of-box supports for connecting to OData sources using BCS. You no longer are required to write .Net assembly connector to talk to external OData sources. 1. Open Visual Studio 2012 and create a new SharePoint 2013 App project. This project template is available after installing office developer tools for Visual Studio […]

Infinite authentication prompts issue when launching SharePoint 2013 on local machine After setting up on premise SharePoint 2013 environment, isolated application domain must be configured to install and run SharePoint 2013 App. Ofcourse the application domain has to be added into the bypass list and trusted sites list to avoid authentication prompts. Despite of right […]

SharePoint has been around for years and has gained incredible popularity in last few years in a time where many products, including some of its competitors, vanished quickly after reaching a peak. So how does SharePoint, or any product for that matter, remain persistent in an ever changing technology world? How it successfully evolved from separate […]

SharePoint 2013 cross site publishing allows content authors to create content in a site collection, called Authoring site collection, different from the one where content is published. The clear separation of content from its presentation allows authors to write and manage content without worrying about how and where it will be published. The other obvious […]

1. Create at least two site collections – authoring site collection called ‘Authoring’ where content exists and publishing site collection called ‘publishing’ where content will be published. 2. Turn on Cross Site Collection Publishing(XSP) feature on authoring site collection. [Site Settings -> Site Collection Features -> Click Activate right next to XSP feature] 3. Go […]

In today’s world, information is fairly scattered within an organization, mostly in form of emails, documents, file share, third-party repositories and it could be a challenge for an organization and its legal teams to find relevant content in an event of legal action, litigation or simply for compliance to standards and policies. eDiscovery in SharePoint […]

Out of box navigation in SharePoint was always bound to site hierarchy until now and implementing a custom navigation around another logical structure or business concept such as hierarchy of units in an organization, categories of product or any custom hierarchy was challenging. Creating a custom source for navigation and maintaining it was even more […]

Customizing look and style of a SharePoint site is much different from traditional web site and anyone who did brand a site earlier with SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 would quickly agree with it. One must possess knowledge of master pages and page layouts, different placeholders a master page has and the default styles a […]

As discussed in the post earlier, SharePoint 2013 allows you to write Apps which can extend the functionalities your SharePoint website provides. Primarily an App can be divided into two categories depending upon where its components reside: SharePoint hosted App – Major pieces of an App are on SharePoint server with business logic and presentational […]