Recently, I had a client that did not wish to use the Page Editing controls provided by Sitecore. They were only interested in the Content Editor. This greatly simplified our data access needs. We were able to grab field data and not worry about field names, etc…
Once field render controls were not needed, our CMS access scenarios were VERY simple and VERY repetitive (for example, getting the value of text field X). To meet this need, we created a set of simple extension methods.
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Big announcement today in the CMS world that Adobe has bought Day for $240 million. A significant acquisition on a lot of fronts. Adobe’s enterprise suite now consists of Day, Omniture and LiveCycle. The Alfresco/Livesite piece may be marginalized over time by this acquisition. The Day - Omniture marriage is a pretty attractive option for enterprise Web sites assuming that there is even minimal effort to marry these tools over time. The press releases all mention Flash and the other Adobe desktop software, but those seem like a smaller part of the story vs. the Day, Omniture and LiveCycle suite.More...
There are some configuration concepts for Sitecore that require some planning. This is especially true for larger environments.
Below are parts of the planning document we created for a recent client. The site being considered here is characterized by the following: staged environments (development, QA, production), multiple content delivery servers in QA and production, a large content authoring team, all running Sitecore 6.1.
An early version of this plan was discussed with a contact in Sitecore USA. His feedback has been applied to this document. Sitecore was very helpful, even providing code samples for some of our needs.
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Aware Web Solutions is featured on the front page of Monday July 12 Star Tribune Business section. Aware’s approach to empower its clients and steady focus on implementing content management systems seems to be paying off. Read more about how Aware continues to grow despite the economic downturn. The complete article can be found here - Aware Web Solutions Featured In Star Tribune Business Section.
After attending the Sitecore roadmap session in Boston a few weeks back, I've been wondering if we should recommend to our clients whether they should wait until the new version comes out? There are many exciting new possibilities that the new software provides. Mainly, these include unstructured content and lots of it. Along with faster database performance, and we've suddenly got a CMS that can truly scale to the largest of sites, yet have all the modern day features that most of the CMS granddaddies don't have.
So with all these new features why not just wait until the next version? The challenge in waiting is that there's no release date yet! If it were a month to wait - maybe, but there's a bit of time before this release hits and lots of web things to do in the meantime. Getting your content organized and up-to-date within Sitecore's current structure and getting it ready for the next major Sitecore release is something each current Sitecore customer should be doing, well - now. This is especially true if you haven't been keeping upgrades current in a while. The jump from an older Sitecore version to Massive will be quite challenging. Even more so if you've been a bit willy nilly about best practices and allowed end users a bit too much freedom.
Ultimately, as with any new technology, you don't necessarily need to be the first to jump in with both feet either, so if you're implementation and version upgrade cycle finds you a few months away from the new software, you might be just fine with the the current version as well.
