Digital Learnings in Sitecore & Cloud

Just about every site that I have worked on recently takes advantage of Sitecore's multi-site capabilities to host more that one website within the same Sitecore instance.  Apart from a few extra steps that you need to take to ensure that support teams can keep a reasonable degree of separation between the sites when performing maintenance and release activities (a subject that I mean to come back to in another post), this approach works really well.  One of the key advantages of this approach is the ability to share content between multiple sites. The challenge One of the great "selling points" of Sitecore 7 is the ability to keep a large amount of content in item buckets and then interact with it using search.   This also provides a great opportunity for content syndication between Sitecore sites, as the shared content can be centrally managed, but then "included" in separate sites.  However when want to display this content resulting from a search in a p...

Sitecore's Active Directory connector  provides functionality to allow users to perform Single Sign-on to the Sitecore client transparently using their Active Directory accounts.  It is easy for content authors to use, all they need to do is point their browser at the following URL on their Sitecore content management server: /sitecore/admin/ldaplogin.aspx However users can only login to Sitecore in this way if they have been synchronised using the Active Directory connector configuration.  All the gory details of setting up Sitecore configuration can be found in the module's Administration Guide , but the two that I want to talk about in this post are the LDAP connection string, and custom filters.  Together these settings control which groups (roles) and users are synchronised from AD into Sitecore. LDAP Connection String The LDAP connection string is configured in the Sitecore ConnectionString.config file, it provides the details for connecting to Acti...

I'm always telling anyone who will listen: "You have to define the problem before you can define a solution".  So in the spirit of practicing what I preach, I'm going to try and define what is prompting me to start writing this blog. I'm lucky enough to be able to work on enterprise level Sitecore CMS implementations, and working as a solution architect I often come across some slightly different questions and issues than developers might do (as well as a lot that are the same).  You work through these issues as they arise, and it would be great to record what I learned to help others that come across the same problem (paying it forward for all the other great bloggers out there who must has saved me several lifetimes of research and investigation of technical problems over the last 10 or 15 years!) So I intend this blog to be a record of the things I have learned delivering projects for clients.  I expect that there will be a very strong Sitecore and .NET fla...