tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50996831949166724962012-02-16T16:06:54.497-06:00All about Sitecore!!! An informal way of letting you know what's on my mind about Sitecore as it comes. I hope you learn a bit. Sometimes a bit <a href="http://www.roundedcube.com">about Roundedcube</a> too.Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.comBlogger281100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-50106267360979390382011-02-14T10:42:00.001-06:002011-02-14T10:42:30.775-06:00

Sitecore has been chosen by the SQL Server Azure Team as its first ISV of the Month for leveraging Microsoft Azure.  You can read the blog post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2011/02/11/10128353.aspx As part of this exciting news, if you don’t know yet, Sitecore now works very closely with Microsoft. When I say closely, I mean physically.  They now have an on-site location at

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-8226367123894307402011-02-03T12:24:00.001-06:002011-02-03T12:24:25.821-06:00

I know that this is only my second post this year and I haven’t done one since November 2010.  I’ve been a bit busy lately and with the holidays, it was tough to get my head on a topic and write about it.  Anyway, I’m getting back to it and I’m hoping to find out what kind of topics you’d like to hear more.  I’ve been all over the place (but maybe that’s what makes you read my blog) from simple

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-24307439270539431972011-01-26T13:37:00.001-06:002011-01-26T13:37:51.026-06:00

One of the challenges many new Sitecore clients have is what happens after the Sitecore-based Web site is finished and running.  There are obviously many choices out there but the common theme is that whatever you end up with, you will need to have a good Sitecore technical resource…and this person doesn’t always have to be the best programmer you can find.  Of course, you can also apply these

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-67175391460111536702010-11-08T11:13:00.001-06:002010-11-08T11:13:23.744-06:00

We just recently launched our new Website and, of course, it’s managed using Sitecore CMS, what else.  It’s actually something that I had a hand on so that I can get back to doing some actual Sitecore work.  Although I may know the concepts, getting back to it took a bit of time especially when I started it was on v6.2 and now it’s on v6.3.  I think I was going to upgrade to v6.4 but didn’t have

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-2309307147862483122010-10-17T16:38:00.002-05:002010-10-17T19:59:38.015-05:00

If you want to know “what it is”, then check John West’s Blog.  John gives you a quick preview of this new powerful feature, what it does, how it compares with other Sitecore assets, etc.  The concept is not far-fetch and you may have already required or implemented it before.  It essentially allows an item to use another item’s field values.  Let’s say you have a Location page (content item)

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-188461754741280532010-10-07T14:33:00.001-05:002010-10-07T14:33:09.558-05:00

Yup.  Besides this blog and our corporate blog, I’m now also a Sitecore blogger: http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Best-Practice-Blogs/Marco-Tana/Posts/2010/09/Marketers-Top-Sitecore-Priorities.aspx This may sound self-glorifying but I’m actually proud where my writing skills has taken me.  I still have the occasional grammatical errors but I consider that to be part of my personality (nice

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-58380934578148341062010-09-20T18:17:00.002-05:002010-09-27T11:43:06.212-05:00

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sitecore released a fix last Friday on SDN. UPDATE: A FAQ that details more about the workaround and the vulnerability was released on Sep 20. Yes.  You read that right.  Essentially, by doing some queries on the server that has an ASP.NET-based Website/app, a hacker can eventually figure out how to download restricted files like web.config and even be able to determine

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-28895914994472086522010-09-20T17:17:00.003-05:002010-10-17T20:00:43.730-05:00

Roundedcube will be featuring Sitecore at the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) to be held in St. Louis, MO from Sept. 22 – 24.  We’re definitely excited for being part of the show because I think we definitely got something to show.  One of the highlights will be our work for the City of Ogden, UT which was released last year (a Sitecore case study is also available if you

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-42140518832373074002010-09-10T12:56:00.002-05:002010-10-17T20:06:55.644-05:00

The Sitecore Desktop is just like Windows, it’s customizable.  Not a lot have utilized it because there’s not much about on how to do so except for typical user-specifics such as wallpaper, desktop shortcuts, etc.  Here is one thing you can do to the system tray.  WARNING: Make sure to be cautious when making these changes as these updates the Core database. Click on the Database Selector

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-5839665578292192222010-09-08T15:32:00.003-05:002010-10-17T20:02:11.942-05:00

I was playing around with Sitecore and I saw John West’s way of randomizing the desktop wallpaper.  He uses a loggingin pipeline processor that essentially updates the Wallpaper property of the user.  It’s pretty cool….so I get to thinking…let me try to make it more dynamic.  I’ve always liked how the new HTC or Droid phones’ “desktop”.  They show the nice nifty time/date plus the weather. 

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-28376379243879724882010-09-02T21:28:00.001-05:002010-09-02T21:29:32.572-05:00

When I first saw that Sitecore is going to support the MVC architecture in a future release, I wasn’t sure exactly what that means.  I have some experience with MVC.  I know about ASP.NET’s implementation and also the S#arp Architecture that improves upon Microsoft’s version.  To me, MVC architecture is great with applications.  It allows me to separate (decouple) the various layers and actually

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-30302973910871807342010-09-01T00:19:00.001-05:002010-10-17T20:09:33.325-05:00

The Sitecore Dictionary is one of the newer features that may have gotten under a developer’s radar.  I’m sure there has been chances when a page design element just doesn’t fit any of the data template fields that’s been defined. Designers or content developers always surprise Sitecore developers with “minor” requirements that have been left out in the specs just because it’s so trivial.  In the

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-55091517402309668522010-08-13T13:08:00.001-05:002010-08-13T13:08:51.794-05:00

One of my brilliant Sitecore guys, Caleb Miller, just wrote a much needed globalization post particularly on language fallbacks.  Essentially, a language fallback is when “something” is not translated to the current language context…then the solution reverts to a fallback language that should have that translation.  I’m  sure this is not old news to those who’ve built global sites, but I’m sure

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-55130782814004117432010-08-13T12:51:00.001-05:002010-08-13T12:52:41.501-05:00

Sitecore has greatly improved its UI since I first looked at it (v4).  It definitely gone from traditional to innovative.  Sitecore has come up with so many new UIs in the past few releases  that it I want to make sure that the UI experts don’t forget about some of the original apps’ usability as well.  Just to give you an idea of how things have progressed in the current UI paradigm: typical

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-32269304162178913412010-08-03T23:43:00.001-05:002010-08-04T21:29:44.699-05:00

Did you know that Sitecore’s future release would actually support Firefox fully in the “Halo” release?  This means that you will now be able to use Sitecore CMS in Firefox with all the various user interfaces and not just Content Editor, etc.  I’m excited about because of the following reasons: Firefox has an active community of add-on developers that helps to make “things” available such as

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-85767439561782431882010-07-29T20:17:00.001-05:002010-07-29T20:18:55.909-05:00

So it used to be called the TwinPeaks release if you follow the Sitecore Roadmap but exactly what does it bring to the table?  There are some blogs already out regarding the release.  Alex Shyba showed how easy it is to cluster the CMS client (in fact he did 6 virtual servers in less than hour – follow him on Twitter to get more updates).  Oh yes, that’s what v6.3 really allows you to do (plus

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-383269719932792942010-07-29T17:48:00.001-05:002010-07-29T20:19:38.283-05:00

Have you ever asked yourself what’s the fastest (or easiest) way to sort a list of item that you retrieve using SelectItems or something similar?  It’s been answered before and there’s even been sample code provided before.  Here are some of the ones I’ve seen: using IComparer brute-force approach using the “sortorder” provided by Sitecore I think the last two is self-explanatory

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-15376714196997084222010-04-26T13:49:00.001-05:002010-04-26T13:53:44.977-05:00

Yes, it’s been 5 years.  I still remember the day when I first looked at Sitecore in our previous office.  It was for a prospect that wanted a CMS.  During that time, the CMS market was dominated by Interwoven, Stellent, MS CMS, Documentum, Sharepoint and Vignette.  None of those fit my criteria: .NET-based Less than $20k Open-architecture Strict separation of content from

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-16836062682952055402010-03-04T17:54:00.001-06:002010-03-04T18:01:49.420-06:00

Have you ever had a client request where they’d like to have any of their Web apps to be ported over to Sitecore?  And, why not, it looks like Windows and it’s .NET, it can’t be that hard.  Well it can be easy and it can be hard depending on what level you want to port the application.  For this post, we just want to see the legacy app in the Sitecore Shell.  Sometimes, that’s all is needed since

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-21238784841212306722010-03-03T13:11:00.002-06:002010-08-02T17:07:25.305-05:00

I had an initial reaction from my VP of Marketing, Aaron Branson, regarding my take on Sharepoint as being great on audience-profiling, targeting, personalization, and workflow in my previous post.  Aaron says, “What about OMS?”, who, by the way, is one of the first OMS Certified Professionals.  I just want to quickly clear things up that I have not misspoke since I think that Sharepoint is good

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-13008520833343350662010-03-01T13:24:00.003-06:002011-03-24T10:13:44.155-05:00

This should really be: “When not to use a portal-centric solution.”  I’ve been asked before by a client/prospect why not use their internal Sharepoint implementation for their corporate site.  The simple answer is because it’s not meant to be. I think that Sharepoint is a great product.  We even use it internally and it makes our internal processes go a lot smoother.  It helps us manage our

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-37344563203077501892010-02-24T16:51:00.001-06:002010-02-24T16:51:00.976-06:00

We have a client who wants to upgrade their Sitecore site to the latest version.  Well, normally that’s a simple “Sure, we can do it” but it’s not. The reason is that Sitecore sometimes releases a version that's not tagged “recommended”.  Sitecore will release a new version, even a totally new sub-version (6.1 or 6.2) but not call it recommended.  Then, they have the release notes of what

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-67993563227298511212010-02-23T13:14:00.002-06:002010-08-02T17:06:14.000-05:00

Okay, it’s been a while (specifically almost a year) that I’ve written something on Sitecore.  Since the economy wasn’t too good last year (even now), I had to focus my efforts on ensuring my company is not affected much.  I needed to redirect my attention to growth and to do that is to have the right people in place.  I think I have that now.  I’m still going to be busy doing that, but I’ll put

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-70982550376006993122009-03-12T01:09:00.000-05:002009-03-12T01:59:42.124-05:00

I've worked with dtSearch before on other projects and have used other ones since then. I'm currently working on a project that uses dtSearch as the primary search engine. There's always a synopsis for a search result and the dtSearch module actually provides a XSLT helper.If you just want to know how to do it, then follow this quick steps:Create an index in dtSearch using the Create Index(

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-57873140117471153702009-01-19T19:48:00.000-06:002009-02-09T15:47:26.938-06:00

First off, I want to announce that we just moved our offices to a much larger and spacious office space. I'm excited for our future and our potential. So, expect greater things from Roundedcube. If curious, you can find out more about our move.So back to our main topic here. As I said from my welcome post, I'm going to have a technical perspective of Sitecore as well. For these types of posts,

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-44098927477224094872009-01-16T17:03:00.001-06:002010-08-02T17:07:07.198-05:00

This is the second part of my blurb on the roadmap after Crestone. If you haven't read the first part, click here. On this part, we'll talk about the: Embedded Social computing and "WOM" capabilities Integrated faceted navigation and guided search Content orchestration and delivery tools Reporting and customization engine One of the things I really like about Sitecore is it's focus on CMS

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-7408804792070765512009-01-16T14:34:00.000-06:002009-01-16T18:22:42.084-06:00

I was really happy when Sitecore announced Crestone early last year. We were part of the beta program and we were certainly ecstatic about the future of Crestone. Now that it's in full version 6 and us implementing about 4 of these, our clients and us know how much better the product has become. The In-Line editing is just amazing and then couple with the Grid and Page Designers give

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5099683194916672496.post-23903122285654073992009-01-09T12:26:00.000-06:002009-03-12T01:03:46.150-05:00

This is my first blog ever and the biggest challenge I've had is to figure out what to write. So, I thought I give my kudos to the Sitecore world regarding its continued growth. Since 2005, we've been implementing Sitecore solutions and it started in v4.3. For those who had never seen that version, just think of the Content Manager in the later versions. However, the concepts were solid then and

Marco Tanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08384407599200428775noreply@blogger.com0