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When it comes to content creation, marketers cannot afford to skimp on the type of material we publish for our audience to lead them down the marketing funnel. Creating a good content strategy is a long-term plan, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel each time - sometimes, your most valuable asset is the content you already have lying around somewhere.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots have become popular with companies looking to automate their interactions with their customers and increase business growth. These little robots are entirely AI-powered and simulate natural human conversation through text or voice commands. Although they aren’t on the company payroll, they are quite efficient and bring great assistance to their human colleagues.

What is Jamstack?

Jamstack: It’s the new web development stack on the block, and for the last few years, it’s been the talk of the town. If you’re involved in web development, you’ve no doubt at least heard of the Jamstack, a catchy acronym that stands for JavaScript, APIs and Markup, which outline the core concepts of the architecture.

Everyone knows that the best way to increase business is by attracting new prospects and converting them into loyal customers. However, once a company has experienced exponential growth and has acquired a sizable portion of clients, marketers should try to look for ways to re-engage existing clients and convert them into long-term customers.

It was a hot summer day in 2002, when my manager at a Digital Marketing firm in New Delhi accidentally introduced me to the concept of search engine optimization. The brief was simple, “One of our customers wants to appear on search results, figure out how.”

Why This Is A Problem?

It is not unusual to land on an old Sitecore project which you don’t know everything about. Even if it is old, it still needs to be maintained, right?. With that in mind, you start giving it some love, looking for improvements from and architectural perspective and also for small wins. Every win counts.

If you are using the October 2020 Coveo for Sitecore release (https://docs.coveo.com/en/3360/coveo-for-sitecore-v5/october-30-2020-release-5-0-822-2#downloads) or newer, you might think about this new feature. When applied properly, it increases query performance dramatically. To understand how it works, let’s start by explaining what is this proxy thing.

Jamstack is an architecture based on JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. Jamstack is designed to make web applications faster, secure, scalable, performant among other advantages.

In this post I will provide an overview of a recent project at Konabos to show a practical example of how to use the outcome of a discovery phase for designing and building a mobile app (a sports app for archery students in the United States).

Hi, everyone, today will be asking the question, what is your Jamstack? My name is Akshay Sura and I’ll be going through this and answering this question with you.

Register for our Free Webinar on: Lean ‘n Mean Jamstack

A fundamental premise of Sitecore has always been the flexibility of the platform - I’ve always thought of it as a giant XML document with smarts to make the nodes and branches do cool stuff – tis all.

This is the transcript and video of the Look Before You Leap Webinar.

Small Things with Big Impacts

At a Sitecore Symposium in Australia, many years ago, Lars Birkholm Petersen asked the well-known question ‘How Do You Eat an Elephant”. The answer is of course, “A bite at a time”.

In this video we are going to go through how we used Sitecore Content Hub As a Service and push content using Next.js to a static site on Netlify.

Migrating your website to a new platform, version or domain is a sensitive affair and if you work in digital marketing or production you might find yourself in this position sooner or later in your career.

This is the transcript and video of the Supercharge your Product Strategy using Sitecore Content Hub Webinar.

Tips for overcoming the inevitable disconnect between Project Managers and Developers.

We are currently working with one of our customer on the AODA compliance. As we are migrating content from our Sitecore XP to Sitecore Content Hub, we realized that the Image Alt tags which are usually different from the Name or the Title of the image.

In this video I am going to go through how we tried to solve the issue of updating products from Sitecore Content Hub Product Content Management (PCM) in to Sitecore Commerce. This same method can be used to sync products to Sitecore XP and other channels.

In our current digital era, businesses are being confronted with extreme competition, evolving technologies, pandemics, and other factors that cause 90% of start-ups and new products to fail (it is shocking, and it is true).

In this video I am going to go through how we tried to solve the issue of migrating products from your existing content in to Sitecore Content Hub Content Marketing Platform (CMP).

In this video I am going to go through how we tried to solve the issue of migrating products from your existing product repositories to Sitecore Content Hub Product Content Management (PCM).

In this video I am going to go through how we tried to solve the issue of migrating assets from the Sitecore Content Management System’s Media Library to Sitecore Content Hub Digital Asset Management (DAM).

What are Web Vitals and why do they matter?

Web Vitals or Core Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. The initiative was announced in May 2020 and is expected to be a critical ranking factor in 2021. That is right, Google has given marketers like you and me a head start to comply.

So, this is a bit of a commercial recipe I am happy to share, garnered and honed from several projects over a 2-year period. Often, clients are mostly happy with Sitecore as a platform, even though it is likely they haven’t leveraged the experience functionality.

They may be using anything from version 6 to 8.2 and have an ok content management setup, probably with a custom framework from a previous partner.

Does your Sitecore Roadmap include a Sitecore upgrade? Are you undecided as to whether you should upgrade to Sitecore 9.x vs Sitecore 10?

I would not usually recommend upgrading to a major-release-version of a software before it has released its first set of updates and fixes. However, the Sitecore 10 Upgrade has some compelling reasons for doing so.

In this video we will look at what are Azure Functions? How we can use them and building our first Azure Function.

In this video I am going to walk you through the integration of the Sitecore Digital Asset Management (DAM) with the Sitecore CMS. Hoping that future videos will capture Sitecore Product Content Management (PCM).

In this video I am going to walk you through the administration of the Sitecore Digital Asset Management (DAM). Hoping that future videos will capture the setting up of DAM and the technical aspects.

Ladies and gentlemen, SearchStax, which already offers a fantastic Solr-as-a-Service product, just announced a new product release: SearchStudio, and it’s a BIG shot of good news for any organization that understands the value of personalized relevance!

In this video I am going to walk you through the Sitecore Digital Asset Management (DAM). Hoping that future videos will capture the setting up of DAM and the technical aspects.

We asked our friends at Konabos three questions:

1. What does Konabos do?

2. How does Konabos do it?

3. Why does Konabos do it?

Yes, I am still headfirst down the Scriban rabbit hole, grappling with queries, arrays and little Scriban gems that make life easy. And so, to be fair to Akshay and Kamruz who must format this stuff, this post is brief and refreshingly free from overwrought code blocks.

As an aside I think I have found the line between Scriban and when a view rendering might be better, more on that later - enough chit chat. Here we go, headphones on, my current Scriban Top 5.

In this video, I am going through the Sitecore Content Marketing Platform (CMP) Integration to Sitecore XP/XM. We are hoping to release future videos for integration of DAM into Sitecore.

In this video I am going through the Sitecore Content Marketing Platform (CMP) Administration. We are hoping to release future videos for integration of CMP into Sitecore.

In this video I am going to walk you through the Sitecore Content Marketing Platform (CMP). Hoping that future videos will capture the setting up of CMP and the technical aspects.

Konabos Consulting Inc. Recognized as Sitecore Silver Partner

JULY 6TH, 2020, - Konabos is pleased to announce that its all-star team of multi-year Sitecore MVPs and senior consultants have been recognized as a Sitecore Silver Partner. This acknowledgement should come as no surprise to those already familiar with their team’s work and notable contributions to the Sitecore community.

If you ask people in the Sitecore space: “How do you feel about Sitecore?” most likely you will get some sort of “love-hate” response with some very interesting stories about their experiences with Sitecore. As a Sitecore Project Manager, my answer to that questions would be: Sitecore is just “different“… in a good way! 😊

Sitecore SXA includes components called composites, things like accordions, tabs etc. OOTB they are ok, but you still must fiddle about with alternate views to have full control, they also don’t have rendering variants like other simple components.

So, unless you are happy to try and torment these poor things into fancy pants UX stars, you were a little stuck. But then Scriban arrived and all your front ends are belong to us.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect on January 1, 2020. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25th, 2018 in all member states of the European Union. The Washington State Privacy Act and New York Privacy Act (NYPA) both failed to pass last year, but it is only a matter of time before other states implement similar laws.

We all are consumers in our daily life, whether you are a CEO of a Fortune 100 company or a sales executive. Being consumers, we need to understand what these privacy laws are trying to protect.

As I mentioned in my recent blog posts, Docker was built for Sitecore Commerce. The script I use for commerce deploys locally to Docker is similar to what I used to use for a local install when using Sitecore Commerce 9.2 and 9.1.

I modified the script a tiny bit to work with my Docker instances.

Scriban has been jokingly called the new XSLT, but the templating language, Scriban, was released with Sitecore SXA 9.3 is the latest addition to the SXA toolkit, and a welcome one. If you haven’t bumped into it yet, there’s a lot of resources available to get you rolling.

The official documents are here: https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/sxa/93/sitecore-experience-accelerator/en/scriban-templates.html

While dealing with clients of all shapes and sizes, it seems there is one thing they all have in common: the struggle to get their content ideas “out the door”.

Some organisations are not sure how much content to produce, while others don’t know what kind of content to produce. Then there are those who know both the what and how much, but are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content needed; often lacking the resources to produce it all.

In this blog post we shall continue our Docker journey to hopefully reach a state where we could get Docker to help us with the Sitecore Commerce development.

I truly believe Docker was built for Sitecore Commerce. If you have been part of Sitecore Commerce projects, you would know that it takes quite a few installations on vm’s or the local machine to get up and running. You should also know that from time to time, you simply want to just wipe out your machine and restart the process again. No amount of checkpoints would save you on your hyper-v’s ;).

Docker manages this very easily. I could simply wipe out my whole environment and relaunch it within minutes.

While deploying Sitecore Commerce to our local development installations we ran into the following errors. Could not load file or assembly System.Runtime.CompilerServices.Unsafe Version=4.0.4.1 and System.IO.Compression Version=4.2.0.0

Dockerify: To move a program that was run on a monolithic application into a container system like Docker.

You hear Docker much more often in the Sitecore world nowadays mainly to simplify your development environment and reduce the complexity of installs. This was apparent in our recent project which involved Sitecore Commerce and the ease of setting up different devs with different pc specs on Docker for Sitecore.

I want to thank all the community and sitecore contributors for working on the Sitecore Docker repo - https://github.com/Sitecore/docker-images.

In this blog post we are going to setup a base Visual Studio solution for working with Sitecore Commerce 9.3 using the Sitecore Commerce Engine SDK version 5.0.76.

As part of your commerce install you would have downloaded Sitecore.Commerce.WDP.2020.01-5.0.145.zip from the dev.sitecore.net site. The commerce SDK (Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.SDK.5.0.76) is part of this file.

The world of containers seems to be on a very fast paced development cycle at the moment from everyone - Docker, Microsoft and the Sitecore community at large.

If you have created your first Docker image and started your first Sitecore container, then no doubt you have read through the Sitecore Docker for Dummies posts by our good friend Mark Cassidy. For those of you jumping into the world of Sitecore Docker, we thought it might be helpful to share some recent updates to help you in the debugging world.

⬆⬆ Thank you everyone for reading. If you checked the date, and multiple other cues throughout the post and the links, most of you twigged that this was an April Fools joke. We hope that it brought a smile to your face. Stay safe and look after yourselves. ❤

The past few years has seen fairly wide adoption of Sitecore Helix by the community. Helix is a set of recommended practices and conventions for the solution architecture of Sitecore product implementations. There are many benefits to following these practices, reducing both project complexity, tight coupling and maintainability in the future.

SiteCron 3.2.0 has been released. SiteCron is a scheduling module based on Quartz.NET Job Scheduler. SiteCron can be used to create precision schedule jobs in Sitecore.

Temecula, California, USA – 13th March, 2020.

Since the World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed the COVID-19 (coronavirus) a pandemic, we felt it prudent to let you, our valued customers, colleagues and friends, know that at Konabos, health and safety is our top priority. We are closely monitoring the coronavirus pandemic and have activated our Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and other precautionary measures.

Temecula, California, USA – January 3, 2020.

Konabos Consulting, announced that four of its team members have been named Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the Strategy and Technology categories by Sitecore®, the global leader in digital experience management software. Founders Akshay Sura and Kamruz Jaman were recognized as two of only 154 Technology MVP’s globally for their seventh and eighth consecutive Sitecore MVP wins respectively. The power-packed consulting firm’s Strategy Team led by four-time MVP Dennis Augustine and repeat winner Kennith Gray also took home two of the 46 Strategy MVP awards this year with.

Akshay Sura and Jason Wilkerson are going on a Sitecore User Group

Tour in Europe starting September 25th to October 4th 2019.

Once you have successfully installed the Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.1, the next step is to setup your local development environment.

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.1 was released in April 2019 and runs on Sitecore 9.1 Update 1.

Make sure you have a valid working instance of Sitecore 9.1.1 running before we begin. Download the Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.1 Initial Release On Premises Packages for On Premise 2019.04-3.0.163 and the Installation Guide - On Premise using the link below:

Sitecore has made the process of installing Sitecore 9.1.1 much easier than the previous 9 versions. This blog post demonstrates the installation of a Sitecore 9.1.1 instance on a developer workstation. I wanted a single post where I have all the resources I need to install Sitecore 9.1.1 (other than the Sitecore install files download links).

SiteCron 3.1.0 has been released. SiteCron is a scheduling module based on Quartz.NET Job Scheduler. SiteCron can be used to create precision schedule jobs in Sitecore.

If you are looking to create a new customer entity in Sitecore Commerce 9.x, this is the post for you. I spent some time searching for code using my friend Google but couldn’t find much. Hope this helps.

Ever since its release there has not been much information published about the Sitecore Universal Tracker. This post hope to cover some the Questions related to the Sitecore Universal Tracker Initial Release Version 1.0 which was released along with Sitecore 9.1 on November 28th 2018.

This is a quick post, and I am hoping that it can help others who are searching for similar fixes. While working with a huge commerce implementation, I ran into an issue where the Sitecore Commerce Minion was timing out and recycling itself every 20 minutes. This meant that the Import I was running restarted every 20 minutes.

Sitecore Universal Tracker Initial Release Version 1.0 was released along with Sitecore 9.1 on November 28th 2018.

Sitecore Universal Tracker is an API first, a micro-service-based tracking service to track actions from mobile apps, IoT, AR, VR and other emerging channels.

WHAT’S NEW?

Lets look at what was added and modified. Please remember to Merge – Append when installing the package if you are upgrading.

To Reference, or to NoReference, that is the question
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous NuGet references
Or to take arms against a sea of DLLs

Sitecore Universal Tracker 1.0 was released along with Sitecore 9.1 on November 28th 2018. The best definition I found that fits what the Universal tracker is:

Sitecore Experience commerce 9.0 Update 3 was released today (December 4th 2018). This post outlines the process of upgrading Update 2 to Update 3 as described in the Sitecore Experience Commerce Upgrade Guide. We will only concentrate on the engine upgrade and not the SXA Storefront upgrade.

Sitecore Universal Tracker 1.0 was released along with Sitecore 9.1 on November 28th 2018. Sitecore Universal Tracker is an API first, a micro-service-based tracking service to track actions from mobile apps, IoT, AR, VR and other emerging channels.

Sitecore 9.1 was released today (November 28th 2018) and I wanted to take this opportunity to cater to a specific need that we get asked about. How do non-Sitecore developers install Sitecore when they get the Developer Trial license. I hope this video helps that group.

A Nor’easter is coming, blowing these three musketeers to a #Sitecore user group near you!

Kamruz Jaman, Mike Reynolds and Akshay Sura are going on a Sitecore User Group tour in the north east starting December 11th 2018. The following are the dates and links.

In this post we will look at how to extend a SellableItem’s Schema, in this case a Variant in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.0.2. There are many ways to extend a SellableItem but this one concentrates on how to do it via code. With Sitecore Commerce, moving data between instances is challenging and to avoid this, a code based solution makes a lot of sense.

In this post we will look at how to remove the sample projects from the Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.0.2 (Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.SDK.2.2.72).

This past weekend I was playing with the Azure IoT hub and decided to load test it to see how much throughput can be achieved.

Our Sitecore Symposium 2018 talk from Orlando. How to create customer loyalty programs using Sitecore Experience Commerce and Email Experience Manager?

Akshay Sura and Jason Wilkerson are going on a Sitecore User Group Tour in Europe starting October 24th to November 2nd.

In this video I am going to walk you through how to use the SiteCron module to run Sitecore Commerce Engine Minions. Sitecore jobs along with Sitecore Commerce Minions run on an interval basis. If you need a way to accurately run your Minions based on CRON expressions or at a specific date and time, you would need to use SiteCron. Here is come code:

In this post we will look at how to display the custom contact facets in the Sitecore Experience Profile. We looked at the posts by Jonathan Robbins AKA ISlayTitans (Obviously he likes slaying Titans) and we needed to customize it for Sitecore 9.

In this post we will look at how to create a custom personalization rule to run based on the current user’s points. Based on the previous blog posts, we already update a user with their points on a scheduled basis.

Kamruz and I are presenting at the Sitecore Symposium on Wednesday October 10th at 10AM. Our presentation topic is:
How to create customer loyalty programs using Sitecore Experience Commerce and Email Experience Manager.

In this video I am going to walk you through how to use xConnect in a Sitecore Commerce Engine solution.

In this video I am going to walk you through how to create a contact facet in xDB and use xConnect to add that facet value for an existing contact in Sitecore 9 Update 2.

In this video I am going to walk you through how to create a Sitecore Commerce Minion for Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) 9 Update 2.

In this video I am going to walk you through the second part of creating a custom Loyalty plugin for Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) 9 Update 2. We will work on the Sitecore Commerce Experience Accelerator (SXA) side of the project and extend commerce to show the points for the Order.

In this video I am going to walk you through creating a custom Loyalty plugin for Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) 9 Update 2. We will work on the engine side of the project and extend commerce to calculate and show the points for the Order entity and the order lines.

Sitecore Commerce Base solution for Visual Studio 2017 has been released on GitHub for Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 Update 2. As I have been working on a few Commerce solutions, I realized that Sitecore Experience Commerce provides an out of the box Visual Studio 2017 solution in the SDK zip file.

In this video I am going to walk you through setting up your development environment for debugging Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) 9 Update 2. As you are writing custom code to work in Sitecore Commerce Engine, you would also need to debug and test your code. For this purpose, it would help if you setup your solution to run the engine instance with your custom code. We will walk through:

This week Kamruz Jaman and I were in San Franciso for the Sitecore Commerce (XC) Developer 300 training. We are glad that we were the first public class in the world to take the Commerce 300 course. So first handful to certify!

In this video I am going to walk you through installing Sitecore Habitat Home and Habitat Home Commerce on Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) 9 Update 2.

In this video I am going to walk you through installing Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 Update 1. Previously in one of our Unofficial Sitecore Training, we went through installing Sitecore 9 using SIF.