SymSoft Solutions Powers California’s GenAI Revolution with Axyom Assist at CDTFA
SACRAMENTO, CA – May 14, 2025 Recently, Governor Newsom announced California’s first-in-nation deployment of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies to improve government efficiency. As part of this effort, SymSoft Solutions is proud to highlight our successful...
An Update on Real Use Cases for Generative AI in The State of California
The past few months have been an exciting time for us at SymSoft as we explore various use cases for Generative Artificial Intelligence in California. During this period, we’ve observed that many decision-makers often compare Generative AI to intelligent...
A look behind Large Language Models (LLM) benchmarks
A problem which we are commonly faced with at Axyom regards which LLM to use for various downstream tasks. While there are a range of evaluations, it’s not always clear which ones to look at and which will be relevant for your task. In this blog post, I will cover a...
Browser (Web) based Notifications using Azure Notification Hub
Azure Notification Hub is a scalable push notification service that allows sending messages to multiple platforms, including Web Push (VAPID), Apple Push Notification Service (APNs), and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Recently, we integrated web browser based push...
Leveraging Azure AD B2C as an Identity Access Manager
Azure Active Directory B2C (Business-to-Consumer) is a custom identity management solution provided by Microsoft Azure as part of Microsoft Entra. It is designed to handle authentication for millions of users with auto-scaling capabilities and built-in security...
Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2024!
Understanding Color Contrast on Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2024 Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is an annual event celebrated on the third Thursday of May, dedicated to raising awareness about digital accessibility. It’s a day to reflect on the...
CA GovOps Press Release: California Signs Partnerships to Utilize GenAI
PRESS RELEASE: California Signs Partnerships to Utilize GenAI (Click here for Official GovOps Press Release) Date: May 9, 2024 WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Leading companies will utilize cutting-edge technology for five specific challenges, working with state teams on how...
Why Government Website UX Matters?
Why Government Website UX Matters? Summary: Multiple case studies (provided below) demonstrate that better User Experience leads to better digital transaction completion rates. Great UX help constituents complete what they need fast and at their convenience. User...
Five Simple Steps to Improve Government Website User Experience
Five Simple Steps to Improve Government Website User Experience Summary: Creating an excellent government website user experience is not unattainable, but it requires consistency and organizational commitment. Regularly review website analytics Learn how people use...
7 Government Websites with the Best UX Design
If you already read our comprehensive article on Government Website Best Practices: User Experience, you know that we reviewed and rated more than 300 government websites for page speed performance, accessibility, technology, and user experience (UX). Subscribe to our...
Government Websites Best Practices: User Experience
Government Websites Best Practices: User Experience Design Summary: Top-performing websites combine simple and engaging custom visual design, easy navigation, plain language writing, smooth interactions, website-optimized branding, and high-quality graphics. Summary...
Agile Project Management and Organizational Partnership in an Intranet Project
This article is the second part of our Department of Water Resources’ Intranet case study that Bianca Sievers, Kevin See, and Bhavik Patel presented at Sitecore Symposium 2020. In case you missed it, read the previous part about Intranet business opportunities and how...
What to Consider When Planning a Government Website Redesign
Incorporating relevant tasks and deliverables when planning a website redesign or implementation project will significantly impact the overall project approach and outcomes. While identifying most of the features, requirements, and deliverables is a straight-forward...
Government Websites Best Practices: Performance
Numerous studies in the private sector have demonstrated that website speed performance is a critical factor to improved conversions due to a more convenient user experience. Although government websites usually don’t feature e-commerce functionalities, the website...
How to Sort Sitecore Solr Filters in Alphabetical Order
Sitecore Solr provides an abundance of advanced search features, but even without implementing anything as advanced as stemming, or search term suggestions, Solr’s default algorithm provides excellent relevancy in the search results. We’ve implemented Sitecore Solr in...
Intranet Business Opportunities and How to Identify Them
Organizations and businesses in recent years have sought ways to increase the productivity of their workforces, and eliminate barriers to communication. One way of doing so has been implementation of intranets. These private computer networks have the look and feel of...
Design Systems for Enterprises (Benefits, Challenges, and Best Practices)
Design systems have emerged as a popular tool for organizations in recent years because of their ability to support business goals and communicate brand values by providing a unified and consistent design language to work with. With this integrated set of tools and...
Digital Product Design Tools We Love
About three years ago, the SymSoft Design team started to design our products and client solutions in an increasingly systematic fashion, looking at the whole map of the interface, rather than individual pages or components. We didn’t know back then that this would...Sitecore error “Attempted to load invalid xml” or “ERROR First 200 characters: >”
When we were migrating from Sitecore 8.2 to 9.1.1 we found the following exception in our AppInsights Logs. Also, non-admin users were reporting that they would receive a fatal error that looks like the following: We weren’t sure what was happening but in the...Update Contact using FXM javascript API
Deprecated: preg_replace_callback(): Passing null to parameter #3 ($subject) of type array|string is deprecated in /web/apps/www_symsoftsolutions_com/wp-content/themes/Divi/includes/builder/feature/dynamic-content.php on line 1958
Sitecore 9.X Intranet Login using Azure Active Directory
Summary I am using Sitecore for a Multisite that is already hosting two publicly available sites. We wanted to create a new intranet site using the same instance of Sitecore. Since this is an internal site one of the requirements was to secure all content using Azure...Solr POST request not working in Sitecore 9.1
We recently had to upgrade one of our client’s Sitecore website from version 8.2 to 9.1. During the upgrade we noticed that a POST request that was being used for one of the search components stopped working. The following error was being written to the Sitecore logs:...Advanced Search Experience with Sitecore and Solr
Google-like search experience is so ubiquitous nowadays, that as end users we hardly ever notice it. It allows us to misspell words, expand our exploration beyond the initial scope, or simply provide answers to specific questions. Yet, those familiar with the Tesler’s...Tips to Make Sitecore load faster on development machines
I have found during my experience with Sitecore that it can take a long time to load when the system first initializes (Happens after publishing code or changing a configuration). This becomes frustrating for developers who are creating the website as for testing they...Five Factors that Make Products Usable
The terms usability and user experience (UX) appeared in the early 90’s and since then you can hear more and more people talking about them or referring to them as a “must have” in the design of a software solution. And they cannot be more right. It is a common...Sitecore 9 Analytics Aggregation Stops Abruptly
We recently performed an upgrade from Sitecore 8.2 to 9.0.1 and at first, all was working smoothly. We installed everything in a modified XP3 configuration. After a small incident where SQL Server was down for some time, we noticed that analytics aggregation stopped...Using Sitecore’s custom index to implement an exact search based on keywords
Recently during one of our projects there was a need to perform a search on a content item based on a “Keywords” field. This field was of type single line text and it had contained a list of keywords separated by commas. The keywords could be a single word or a...Configuring testing in Sitecore Workflow
Sitecore A/B and Multivariate testing can help content authors improve their web content by performing a statistical analysis based on the data captured by Sitecore Analytics. Results obtained from Content testing can help better organize web content as well as...Implement Multilingual with item level Language fallback
This article describes how to enable Item level language fallback for your item or template in Sitecore XP 8.1 or later versions. Item level language fallback feature enables an ’empty’ item version in a given language to completely fall back to another...Sitecore 9 Upgrade and Preview Publishing Target Site
We recently performed a successful upgrade and migration from Sitecore 8 to 9. It went quite well, but wasn’t without challenges. Some examples of those challenges were the migration of custom dynamic placeholders (which now come out-of-the-box with Sitecore 9),...Quick Upgrade from Sitecore 8 to 9
Okay, so I’ll just start off with the disclaimer: None of what is mentioned in this blog post is officially supported by Sitecore. Sitecore has official upgrade documentation that you should follow if you’re looking to go the supported path. With that over, I should...“Reach” Statistic Issue in Sitecore 8
After a recent deployment of Sitecore 8.2 for one of our customers, we noticed that the “Reach” statistic when you open the “Personalized Experience” dialog in the Experience Editor was showing some numbers that were rather odd. According to Sitecore documentation,...
5 moves digital project managers can make to help prevent website redesign project failures
It’s no secret that a large percentage of digital transformations fall short of expectations or outright fail. Many blog posts have been written about why companies struggle with digital transformation. Website redesign projects are a form of digital...Basic SAML SSO with Sitecore 8
Sitecore 9 comes with nifty new configurations for federated authentication using a variety of identity providers, including SAML providers. If you’re stuck on Sitecore 8 for a little while, though, SAML authentication is still a custom implementation. With the right...