Microsoft

Ever since Microsoft started adding support for Git into Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), many veteran developers on the Microsoft stack who had never used Git before started wondering what was up with that.  One of the things I quickly picked up on at the Build 2016 conference is that most of the dev teams […]

Top of mind for most clients these days is how to use technology to digitally transform their business. And within this is the underlying current of always putting the customer first. Whether it is improving communication by moving Exchange to the cloud, or streamlining collaboration with SharePoint online – the end goal is to be […]

While the Office 365 Roadmap is the authoritative source for features being added to the service, many features seem to receive a sort of “official announcement” via blog post or otherwise before they appear on the roadmap. Before the feature announcement, one would assume that Microsoft has made a fair amount of progress of integrating […]

Sitecore 8 introduced a new Explore Mode option to the Experience Editor that allows content authors to test their digital marketing strategy by simulating visits to their site as different users. One feature that has been particularly useful for me is the ability to simulate different IP addresses to test GeoIP integration in components I’m […]

In my previous post, GEOIP – Getting Started, I mentioned that I would illustrate how to actually use the GeoIP components, and here it is! I’ll start with a personalization example. For this example we have a tab component that will have content specified for different US states. When a visitor comes to the site from Georgia, […]

This week I’ve worked on a Sitecore upgrade from version 8.0 update 4 to version 8.1 update 2. Overall, following the documentation provided by Sitecore it was pretty smooth. I did run into a couple of things worth sharing. One of the first things I ran into was an issue with the Update Installation Wizard. […]

The term DevOps is still relatively new to the technology industry. The definition of DevOps isn’t really as clear as is for Agile Development Methodology. For many teams and organizations DevOps is a sort of unobtainable mythical beast; a unicorn if you will. Although, DevOps is obtainable for any team so long as the necessary […]

At Build 2016 last week, Vittorio Bertucci, Program Manager at Microsoft presented a session titled, “Microsoft Identity: State of the Union and Future Directions”. https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/B868 Most Identity conversations usually discuss Forests, Domains, and Active Directory Administration. This talk is for developers and Vittorio makes that clear in a very humorous way from the beginning. Microsoft’s vision […]

Just a quick post today on something that doesn’t seem to be well documented and could be helpful… AAD Connect is basically Microsoft’s third version of their Directory Synchronization tool for Office 365. While AAD Connect includes more of a “wizard-type” interface for configuration of components such as AD FS, it’s also the current Directory […]

A couple of days ago I accidentally removed broken links in the Core database of a new Sitecore instance using the Remove Broken Links tool at http://{your-sitecore-url}/sitecore/admin/RemoveBrokenLinks.aspx. The next time I logged into Sitecore, I got the following exception: After some digging around I found that the Remove Broken Links tool erroneously deleted the Model property of the ExperienceAnalyticsLineChart […]

GeoIP is quickly becoming a necessity for the analytics functionality of Sitecore. With GeoIP we can personalize content based on the user’s location to present the most relative information and provide a more engaging user experience. Starting with Sitecore 8.1, the necessary config files and dlls are included in the base install. Prior to 8.1, […]

There are many ways to collaborate and communicate in Office 365.  Exchange Online (EXO) and SharePoint Online (SPO) and Yammer and Office Groups and Skype for Business and Office Video and OneDrive for Business (ODFB), oh my!  We all know how and when to use Email and IM but what about all these other workstreams?  How do you decide […]