Friday, October 27, 2017

Sitecore Symposium 2017 - Day Three And Four Experience

This day started with a lovely breakfast, mingling with Sitecore people then the keynote for the day.

Jake Johannsen was a guest at the symposium and he was the one starting and ending our days talks with a beautiful flavor and his funny jokes :D

Some of the sessions I attended was about people sharing there experience in dealing with Sitecore, like implementing Sitecore solutions with Helix and deploying Sitecore Microsoft Azure. Some Sessions were actually demos to the steps followed to implement this.

One of the main topics I was interested in was implementing personalization in Sitecore, discuss the nuts and bolts of using this tool, and see how do I get started with it.

Day 3 ended with an amazing chat between the Legendary actor, producer and writer Mark Hamill and Scott Anderson (Sitecore CMO). He was talking about his experiences playing iconic "Star Wars" character.

Day 4 was the last day for the symposium which started with a breakfast as usual :) and some sessions like the Sitecore rules engine, getting started to cloud.

Last keynote of the day was giving us a glimpse of the of the future product direction of Sitecore and when is the venue of the Symposium 2018 going to be.. which is Orlando!

It was a lovely experience after all and I am really looking forward to next year's one!






Sitecore Symposium 2017 - Day Two Experience


So day 2 started at 7 am with enthusiasm. I was looking forward to the amazing experience I am going to get. This was the first day of sessions too!

It started with an introduction to what is new in Sitecore world regarding the newest versions, enhanced functionalities and new features in Sitecore like Sitecore xConnect, Cortex, etc..

The sessions that I was in interested in and I did attend them had to do with implementing xDB and EXM, deep dive into SXA, and implementing Sitecore on Microsoft Azure.

It was a long lovely day getting to know the Sitecore community and expanding my Sitecore knowledge.  Second day finished at 5 o'clock.

Stay tuned for my Day 3 experience :)


Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Sitecore Symposium 2017 - Day One Experience

Attending Sitecore symposium was one of my main goals to achieve, despite the long trip I went through to reach Vegas!

So yesterday was the first day of the Symposium, my feeling was like how am I gonna introduce myself to people :) the registration went smoothly.

At the reception, I got to see and meet people in person and it was an honor to meet this love community. The reception was amazing. I even won the NishTech 100 Dollars Amazon prize :)

It was good to get to know Sitecore partners in the Partners Pavilion and visit the booths to know more about Sitecore business.

Looking forward to the second day of the symposium and starting the sessions.



Sunday, May 21, 2017

Sitecore Publishing Service on CM – CD Environments

Publishing Service is one of the great features Sitecore has. I used to have issues publishing my site as there are lots of items in there and it was a slow procedure since that you need to wait until the publishing ends so that you would be able to continue working on Sitecore. 

Now, with this service, you are able to continue working on Sitecore while publishing your site, plus this process is much faster than before.

The reason behind me writing this blog is to focus on the publishing service installation on a content management server as I faced a couple of issues before installing it on sitecore, so I would like to share those issues with you.

 As we know, one of the basic steps that needs to be done before installing the service is to install the .NET Core. When I followed the steps to install the service host, I used to get an error when trying to test if the service works before installing it on Sitecore (you should get the following result {"status":0} usually to make sure that the service works fine but I never got it).

The error was not informative to be able to figure out the issue. After some investigation and the help of Sitecore Support, I found out that installing .NET Core is not enough on the CM server. You need to make sure that the ASPNetCoreModule is installed (This is required to host .NET Core projects in IIS). You can check if it is installed by opening IIS and looking for it in the modules section.

If you didn’t find it, you need to install ASP.NET Core Server Hosting Bundle (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=798480), and this would solve the issue.

When installing the service host and adding the connection strings file that connects the service with the Sitecore databases, you need to add another node for the pub database. Moreover, you need to add a target definition node under the “targets” node for the pub database:


Note: The target node should have the same name as the publishing target item name in Sitecore. Ex.: “DEV-CM”.

Hope this blog is useful :)

Monday, February 13, 2017

Custom Experience Analytics Reports

Sitecore has really cool features to implement. One of them is creating custom reports in the Experience Analytics Dashboard. Sometimes, customers need to know essential information in order to improve their website.

In order to improve the website content and words used in its pages (SEO), the customer needs to know what are the most used words in the site search. Therefore, I am going to walk you through the steps to track the words used in the site search and creating a report that displays those words and how many times are they being searched for.

By default, the internal search keywords are not being tracked in Sitecore. Therefore, in order to track them, appropriate search event should be registered when the search occurs.

Following code should be added when the user searches for a word in the site, and hits submit:



The above code means that the search keyword is being tracked and saved in Interactions table in the analytics mongoDB:


The data then gets aggregated to the “Fact_SiteSearches” table in the Analytics database in SQL.
We’re almost there! All what we have to do now is to create a custom report in the Experience Analytics Dashboard to show the words and their count.

To create a report page, you should do the following:
  1. You should have Sitecore rocks installed and a connection created to your website.
  2. Navigate to the core database in the website content tree using the following path: core/sitecore/client/Applications/ExperienceAnalytics/Dashboard
  3. Right click on any report category (for example Aquisition), and click on Add – New Item.
  4. Select the “ExperienceAnalyticsReportPage” template, and enter a term (recommended to start with “experienceanalytics”).
  5. Click Ok.
  6. There will be PageSettings created by default under the report item you just created.

Now, we have to choose a chart component to the report created. In order to do so, follow the below steps:
  1. In Sitecore Rocks, right click on the report page item you created, and click on Tasks – Design Layout.
  2. In the Design Layout, click on Add Rendering.
  3. In the dialog box, select a chart control to use for your report (Example: select an “ExperienceAnalyticsBarChart” if you want to display a bar chart).
  4. Click Ok after choosing the rendering you want.

After that, you need to add a parameters item to configure the report metrics (which will be “Count” in our example):
  1. Right click on the PageSettings item that is under the report item that you created and click Add- New Item.
  2. We will have to choose the “ExperienceAnalyticsBarChart Parameters” since that we chose the “ExperienceAnalyticsBarChart” rendering.
  3. Enter a proper name for it and hit Ok.
  4. Double click on the new parameter that you added in order to configure the metrics there.
  5. Choose the “Count” option from the “metrics” field and hit save.

Last step we should do is to bind the bar chart we created with the parameters item that we added. This is done by doing the following:
  1. Right click on the report item and choose Task - Design Layout.
  2. Double click the chart item “ExperienceAnalyticsBarChart control”. In the Edit Rendering Properties box – Behaviour – Datasource, browse the location of the parameter you created.
  3. Click Ok.

We are done now! You can go the Experience Analytics dashboard to check the report you created:


Note: The data is being displayed from the view that is in the Analytics database (dbo.SiteSearches)

Happy Sitecore Coding!


Monday, January 23, 2017

Experience Analyitcs and Rebuilding Reporting Database (Part 2)


Previously, we talked about checking if there was any issues preventing the rebuild process from being executed using the debugging mode in the config files. Today I will focus on rebuilding the reporting DB when having a multi environment setup (Content Authoring and Content Delivery environments).

I used to have issues rebuilding the reporting DB on content authoring server. There are a couple of steps that you need to do to ensure that the processing is working correctly on CM server:

1- Enable the following configs in the CM server:

a- In App_Config\Include\ExperienceAnalytics folder:
  • Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Aggregation.config
  • Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Reduce.config
  • Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.StorageProviders.config
b- In  App_Config\Include\folder:
  • Sitecore.Analytics.Processing.Aggregation.Services.config
  • Sitecore.Analytics.Processing.Services.config
  • Sitecore.PathAnalyzer.Processing.config
2- Make sure that the Segments table of the Reporting database is not empty and contains 35+ segments.


If it is empty, please perform the steps mentioned in the following post:

3- Perform the rebuild of the Reporting database:


4- Check Experience Analytics reports.

Note: it is recommended to use a clean copy of Sitecore_Analytics database in order to get best results.

To check what goes wrong as you go through the rebuild process, you can perform a following test:

a) Start the rebuild again and wait for HistoryProcessing state.
b) Open the HistoryTasks collection in the analytics database, there should be a history task record with the statistics information.
c) Check how many records are present in the ProcessingPool collection of the tracking.history database.
It should help you understand if any tasks are added.
d) Check if the records are being added to the [Fact_Visits] table in the sitecore analytics database (SQL). In case no historical records are being added - then the rebuild is still not working correctly.

One of the issues that I faced also is that the tracking_contact db was not created for some reason in the Mongo DB. You should make sure that it is there too.

Sometimes when developers upgrade from an old sitecore version to a newer one, some of the config files don’t get updated. So one of the main config files that does the rebuild is Sitecore.Analytics.Processing.Aggregation.ProcessingPools.config. Make sure that you have the updated one for the version that you’re upgrading to.

I hope this information helps! 




Thursday, January 19, 2017

Experience Analyitcs and Rebuilding Reporting Database (Part 1)

There is a very interesting feature in sitecore that everybody should make use of. Users need to check out some reports that analyze the ways that contacts engage with their website. 

What is Experience Analytics?

Experience Analyitcs dashboard provides reports for marketers and marketing analysis to identify patterns in experience data that is collected from the website.

Rebuilding Reporting Database

Sometimes users need to upgrade from older sitecore versions to newer ones. Therefore, merging historical data from earlier versions of Sitecore with live xDB data is essential to make all the data available to Sitecore reporting applications. This process is called “rebuilding the reporting database”.

To ensure that the reporting database has all the latest changes, you need to rebuild from time to time.
I have gone through this experience and faced a lot of issues during this process. Sometimes the rebuild process gets interrupted due to several reasons.

One of the main things to know if there are any errors that caused this interruption is to go through the log files to see if there are any errors. In order to know if the error is related to processing pools, you should perform the following steps to enable the errors being registered in the log files:

1. In Sitecore.config file, set the log4net logging level to DEBUG in the <log4net> node:



2. In Sitecore.Analytics.config file, set the "Analytics.LogLevel" setting value to Debug:


3. Start the rebuild, wait until it is finished, and then check out the sitecore log files to                         see if there are any errors caused.

The Debug log level adds additional information about the agents/history tasks to the log files, so it should help identifying the step where the rebuild is failing.

Next part, I will tackle some issues that need to be checked and fixed if your rebuild process did not go through. Let's continue!