Delivering The Sitecore Experience

I have been meaning to write this post for a while as I have been using this nifty little feature in all my content search API implementations using the Solr provider. Unsafe: Defining SearchResultItem classes using hard coded Solr fields names for IndexField data annotation attributes as follows: [IndexField("page_title")] public string PageTitle { get; set; }   Problems : Cause runtime errors when field names change in Sitecore Hard coded strings, sort of magic values Unmanageable code Safe: Define SearchResultItem classes using strongly typed constants for data annotation attributes as follows: [IndexField(SampleItem.PageTitleSolrIndexFieldName)] public string PageTitle { get; set; } Solution : Compile time errors are way better than runtime errors More manageable code More readable code More dynamic query building Trick : Fetch Solr translated field name values on template fields  using  FieldNameTranslator  and reference them  w...

Achieving the  Run phase means that you have arrived when it comes to your digital marketing goals and capabilities. Before you continue with the Run phase, if you haven't already read Part 1 and Part 2 of this 3 part series, I highly recommend reading the Crawl and Walk phases first. As this the last phase of experience marketing maturity, sky is the limit to what you can do with Sitecore's experience marketing features. Let's see what more we can do within our four categories of experience marketing tasks: Content Profiling Content Personalization Contact Profiling Analytics The Run Phase One thing you will start to notice as we get into the Run phase is that you start to blur the lines between the 4 categories mentioned above. Each category will start to get intertwined with another. Let's see how occurs in this phase: Content Profiling - Run Phase By now you should have a good grasp of audience segmentation and having arrived at well define...

Welcome to part 2 of the three part series of  The Crawl, Walk, Run of Sitecore Experience Management. You can get a good context of what this series is about by reading  Part 1 . In this part we will add more digital engagement tasks to our 4 primary categories: Content Profiling Content Personalizatiton Contact Profiling Analytics The Walk Phase In this phase we will do more of what we did in crawl phase but by looking back at the analytics we have collected thus far. We will also add and expand on our list of to-dos. Content Profiling - Walk Phase After having collected sufficient web analytics data, you should be able to move on to the walk phase of content profiling.   Data Driven Personas: Evolve your existing personas from research driven to data driven personas. Have a data science team analyze your web analytics data in order to come up with personas and profiles. Create Profile Keys, Profile Cards, Pattern Cards: create...