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Setting up TDS to work with Azure DevOps

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We recently had the challenge of moving across a legacy project, that we inherited, to run on Azure DevOps.  This project is five or six years old and still leverages TDS for packaging Sitecore items. Helpfully the code repository already had a copy of the nuget package contents checked in and referred to by the TDS project files, however this was designed to use an older version of visual studio (2015) than we had available as a part of the default Microsoft supplied build agent (2019).  In addition we needed to make sure the build agent was able to use our TDS license keys. Setting up the TDS license The old HedgeHog documentation has some good info on how to set up TDS to run on a build server.  This states to set up two environment variables: TDS_Owner and TDS_Key with the license information that the TDS tool will look for at runtime. Our first attempt to follow this instruction for DevOps was to create a powershell task to set the variables - task: PowerShell@2 displayName:
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Sitecore Experience Edge, GraphQL and publishing pages utilising data sources

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We've been working on a large headless solution recently that utilises Sitecore Experience Edge for XM. We are working in a micro-front ends architecture, with some parts of the site leveraging Sitecore JavaScript Rendering SDK (previously known as JSS) for delivering pages whilst supporting full inline editing and page designing. Other parts of the site use GraphQL queries via backend-for-frontend (BFF) style APIs to pull back content. Both these approaches leverage Experience Edge for serving GraphQL however the nuances of how they are implemented need to be understood because we have found they lead to some different behaviours that can impact the way content editors need to use the system. The point of rendering One of the most important things to understand about Experience Edge before you start using it is that for performance reasons it does a lot of work at the point of publishing, that used to happen at the point a page was rendered when using Content Delivery instan
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To JSS or not to JSS

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Sitecore JavaScript Services (JSS) was launched, now a few years back, as Sitecore's solution for meeting the needs of doing headless content mangement on Sitecore using JavaScript, without losing the key capabilities (especially in line editing) which makes Sitecore great. It consisted of JavaScript SDKs that worked with the JSS layout service running on Sitecore. Now renamed the Sitecore JavaScript Rendering SDK , and supporting the JSS services or Experience Edge, this SDK is an important part of delivering JavaScript web apps leveraging Sitecore editing capabilties. That said, for a lot of front end developers JSS is a skillset that they might not know a lot about. Using it properly requires not only an understanding of how to install and work with the SDKs, but also understand Sitecore concepts such as placeholders. Furthermore not all web use cases, even those that leverage content, benefit from such advanced capabilities. Benefits and complexities I see the followin
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Integrating from Content Hub to enterprise systems - Security challenges

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In a project where we're implementing Content Hub, there in a PIM system which is used to manage products that feed into various downstream systems. Content Hub is to be the new source of truth for Digital Assets, and this will include all product images. We already have various entities mastered in other systems including PIM such as products and categories bing syncrhonised into Content Hub as taxonomies that will enable tagging of Digital Assets to assist in organising them. This integration is done via Mulesoft with the PIM system raising an event when an individual product/category is changed, with a Mulesfot subscriber responding to the event and pushing the change to Content Hub via it's REST interface . In our case we want the association of product images with products in Content Hub to control what images are shown for products in downsteram systems. This means that data will flow from Content Hub back through Mulesoft and into PIM. PIM then manages the flow of
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Personalising Search using Sitecore CDP and Personalise (Boxever) -- Part 2

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In Part 1 of this series, I covered the background of relevance scoring in search and covered setup of Search Studio and Sitecore CDP & Personalise. In part two I will work through some example code that pulls these products together to show end to end search capability using the setup we covered in the last post. This demo code provides a command line "head" which utilises the Sitecore and Search Studio APIs to return personalised search results for the provided search terms of user. Overview The high level flow of the demo application is reasonably simple: Console.WriteLine("Getting search model for user " + email); var searchModel = await GetModelForUserAsync(email); Console.WriteLine("Search Model calculated: " + searchModel); Console.WriteLine("Getting search results"); var searchResults = await GetSearchResultsAsync(searchModel, term); if (!(searchResults is null))
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Personalising Search using Sitecore CDP and Personalise (Boxever) - Part 1

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I had the opportunity recently to present at a Sitecore User Group session with Sameer Maggon , the founder of SearchStax. We've used SearchStax for many years to provide cloud hosted managed Solr Cloud for customers -- Sitecore even use SearchStax in their own Managed Cloud offering -- and the now have a new SaaS offering called Search Studio that lets you define different models to apply to searches which alter how relevance scoring is calculated. In part one of this blog post, I'll cover the main moving parts of SearchStax and Sitecore Personalise used to drive the solution. In part two I go through some example code that uses the two configured products together to render personalised search results. Relevance scoring When content is indexed for searching, the contents are tokeninsed and put into an index. Information is stored in a "Document" (either tokenised or stored directly) with term vectors associated. Term vectors are essentially the individ
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Playing nice - Principles for Sitecore Content Hub and XM/XP working together

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The Sitecore product family now provides two key platforms where you can manage content (and technically this is now expanding as you can manage content in Sitecore Send and Sitecore CDP as well -- the future for these is unclear however I'd expect the patterns below may well expend to those other delivery channels in a similar way).  When you have platforms with overlapping capabilities, I believe it's always important to have some clear principles as to what the role of each system is in the overall architecture - so you know what you should and should not do in each place.  I guess it's kind of like putting together a recipe to follow when you are making decisions to ensure that everything works together and you don't end up with a failed cake. Below I outline one way that I feel makes sense to align the responsibilities between Sitecore XP/XM and Content Hub in an enterprise digital architecture. The moving parts The Sitecore tools that we're considering are
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