New Insights from Our Team
Articles about our people, expertise, research and best practices, including insights from ten years of simplifying complexity and building digital products that improve people’s lives.
by Maricarmen E. Teran Vela | Sep 17, 2018 | User Experience Design
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...
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 10, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
by Pushkal Shetty | Aug 24, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
by Rohit Surve | Aug 21, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
by Pravin Suryavanshi | Aug 17, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
by Bhavik Patel | Aug 15, 2018 | Sitecore
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),...
by Bhavik Patel | Jul 31, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
by Bhavik Patel | Jun 24, 2018 | Sitecore
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,...
by Abdul Farooqui | Jun 5, 2018 | Sitecore, User Experience Design
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...
by Bhavik Patel | Mar 10, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
by Abdul Farooqui | Mar 5, 2018 | User Experience Design
We’ve all seen rants from wounded designers complaining about the fate of their concepts at the hands of unappreciative clients—“They wouldn’t know good design if it hit them in the face” or “Another bad client ruining my design”. The feedback is in, and someone is...
by Marko Dugonjic | Feb 22, 2018 | User Experience Design
As we previously established, including customers really is a key component of user-centered design that leads to better performing websites. However, randomly testing interfaces with no prior planning is likely to result in disappointing outcomes. Hence, why it’s...
by Marko Dugonjic | Feb 12, 2018 | User Experience Design
Many current design research methods can help teams and organizations to successfully validate interaction, the usability of an user interface and the findability of content. While some research methods are quite exact and quantifiable, others can be less refined....
by Marko Dugonjic | Feb 2, 2018 | User Experience Design
It’s no secret that the high performing website redesigns come with a lot of moving parts. More so in the enterprise-level projects with a range of content interdependencies and numerous subject matter experts. Multiply this with diverse audiences that modern...
by Marko Dugonjic | Jan 31, 2018 | Accessibility
Designing and developing governmental websites means keeping one eye on accessibility at all times. We’d argue that this should be the case on any type of project, because accessibility compliance is not just another regulation we ought to meet, but a true need for...
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 29, 2017 | Sitecore
We use Rendering Parameters a whole lot in our implementations, because we like to follow the idea of separation of content and presentation. Basically, content is content, and visual options for displaying that content shouldn’t be kept with the content (i.e. fields...
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 20, 2017 | Sitecore
After content migration for a recent project, we noticed that certain components were throwing errors on the page once content was migrated. Note that we were using GatherContent, a really nice tool to prepare content for migration while implementation of the Sitecore...
by Bhavik Patel | Jun 20, 2017 | Sitecore
As many of you know, Sitecore’s Content Search API does a great job of hiding the complexities of Lucene, thus providing a quick way for implementers to provide search functionality to their end users when building Sitecore websites. Wrapping search in this way also...
by Bhavik Patel | May 3, 2017 | Sitecore
This blog post is a little bit high-level, but provides some ideas for capturing context data when filling out Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM) forms. When I say context data, I mean certain things related to the user’s current context on the website (like the User ID,...
by Abdul Farooqui | Feb 16, 2017 | Culture
Summary: In a busy web development office, it’s important to have a consistent communication flow to foster collaboration in the workplace. Having a connected team Here at Symsoft, we have weekly team discussions to talk about what kind of work we’re doing, and swap...
by Bhavik Patel | Feb 9, 2017 | Sitecore
With Sitecore’s Search API, boosting by date range may seem like a simple a straightforward thing to do. Well, it is if you choose the right (or, rather, suggested) way to do it. Let’s start with the way in which it will not work: dateBoostPredicate =...
by Bhavik Patel | Dec 28, 2016 | Sitecore
I’m sure that many of you have worked with Experience Editor and have used Sitecore’s built-in functionality to spawn a “Field Editor” modal window in order to allow users to edit more complex fields (such as Multilist or Treelist fields). This is a simple and...
by Bhavik Patel | Dec 27, 2016 | Sitecore
As I was working on a project recently, I realized that when using GlassMapper in events that are triggered remotely (in my case, the publish:end:remote event), I was getting a fairly odd error that looked like this: Failed to map to property '' on type '' It was also...
by Abdul Farooqui | Dec 1, 2016 | User Experience Design
“Keeping the “technical hat” on for too long makes you forget how other folks (especially non-technical) people see things. The design sprint helped me to step back and look at building functionality from a business (non-technical) point of view.” – Bhavik Patel,...
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 1, 2016 | Sitecore
UPDATE: As of July 2016, Amazon RDS fully supports backup and restoration of MS SQL Server backup files. See https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rds-for-sql-server-support-for-native-backuprestore-to-amazon-s3/ for more information about that. Considering this,...
by Bhavik Patel | Apr 8, 2016 | Sitecore
How do you turn off analytics in Sitecore 8.1? I’ve been asked this question many times now, so I’ll write a quick post about it. In previous versions of Sitecore 8 (prior to 8.1), this setting was in Sitecore.Analytics.config and was called “Analytics.Enabled”. In...
by Bhavik Patel | Mar 25, 2016 | Sitecore
Sitecore’s Links database is actually a very useful tool when you are dealing with a lot of data and have to come up with creative ways to get information from Sitecore quickly. In one of our recent encounters, we had to present a list of items that were related to...
by Xing Liu | Feb 19, 2016 | Sitecore
In our previous Sitecore application, we sometimes need to have a custom computed index field based on the business requirements. For example, we might need an extra field for faceting purpose of certain data template. In order to have a custom index field, you need...
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 23, 2015 | Sitecore
If you’re an avid Sitecore developer, you’ll quickly realize that the initial load times for Sitecore 8 are a bit longer than in previous versions of Sitecore. This is primarily due to a new addition to Sitecore’s “initialize” pipeline, namely “PrecompileSpeakViews”....
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 16, 2015 | Sitecore
In versions of Sitecore prior to 7.5, many of us have used parameters in Sitecore’s controls (i.e. sc:image) to alter the size of an image. All works well if you use this strategy for image resizing. However, in some cases, we request the URL to a media item...
by Xing Liu | Nov 13, 2015 | Sitecore
This blog post will describe the steps on how to create controller rendering in Sitecore MVC. One of the benefits of using controller rendering is to set aside the complex logic in the MVC controller. First, you need to create a definition item in the Sitecore tree....
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 15, 2015 | Sitecore
While performing a large Sitecore upgrade, we ran across an issue during the step that required us to rebuild the search indexes. It seemed that after a few minutes of working as it should, the index rebuilding process would stop abruptly. Initially, we didn’t even...
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 8, 2015 | Sitecore
For those of you who have been using our SymCal Event Calendar Module for Sitecore 6 and 7, we have recently uploaded a new version of the module that supports Sitecore 8. We also understand that Sitecore’s support for both ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC developers means...
by Bhavik Patel | Aug 7, 2015 | Sitecore
If you’re using Sitecore 7.2 (or 7.5), you’ll notice that the traditional interface for browsing through media items has been improved. What was once the traditional SHEER version of the media browse/upload user interface has now become a more attractive SPEAK version...
by Bhavik Patel | Jul 3, 2015 | Sitecore
When you install a default Sitecore 7 instance, you will notice that there is a “Sample Workflow” already configured for you. The final step of this workflow has an “Auto Publish” action, which automatically publishes an item once it reaches the final step of...
by Bhavik Patel | May 11, 2015 | Sitecore
One of the most important aspects of maintaining a WYSIWYG editing experience is to make sure that the CSS that is used for your website is the same CSS that is used for your rich text editor. In Sitecore, this is pretty easy to accomplish through configuration....
by Xing Liu | Feb 3, 2015 | Sitecore
In Sitecore, since it handles the media items through media url, there are query string parameters to control the media item’s properties. Below are some of them for images: w: Width in pixels h: Height in pixels mw: Maximum width in pixels mh: Maximum height in...
by Xing Liu | Jan 5, 2015 | Sitecore
We all know that placeholders are an integral part of Sitecore, allowing us to add various components on a page that we have developed. You can even nest placeholders, so that a component placed in one placeholder can offer another placeholder that can house even more...
by Bhavik Patel | Dec 23, 2014 | Sitecore
It is often an expensive task to manually publish both code and content for a Sitecore site manually to an integration environment. Usually, a person is assigned to be a “build master”, responsible for checking out and compiling code, making sure that everything works...
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 28, 2014 | Sitecore
One very useful Glass Mapper method is called GlassCast. This method is essentially used to convert a regular Sitecore.Data.Items.Item into an Glass Mapper object that you have created. It’s really handy when you have issued queries in your code for certain...
by Xing Liu | Nov 21, 2014 | Sitecore
In the Form Designer property panel, there is an option “CSS Class ” for you to choose which css class to apply. Shown as the screenshot below: You can add additional custom class names to this dropdown list by adding Extended List Item to the following path:...
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 14, 2014 | Sitecore
Because Sitecore is a CMS that supports multiple languages, you may often notice that links generated from code have the language specified in the link (for example, ‘en’). If you don’t want the language embedded in generated links, you can disable that...
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 7, 2014 | Sitecore
Sitecore’s Web Form for Marketers module comes with its own analytics, in addition to those provided by Sitecore. You can access those analytics by highlighting a particular form and clicking the ‘Form Reports’ button in the Content Editor ribbon. See the screenshot...
by Bhavik Patel | Oct 31, 2014 | Sitecore
We are strong proponents of allowing content authors to perform all of their authoring tasks using nothing but the Page Editor. However, you have to be familiar with the permissions required to perform certain actions in the Page Editor. Here are some quick points on...
by Bhavik Patel | Oct 24, 2014 | Sitecore
I ran across an issue last week while working on a project. I had set up role based access to certain content items in the Sitecore tree, with inheritance for child items. However, I noticed that users that were members of that role did not have permissions to change...
by Bhavik Patel | Oct 17, 2014 | Sitecore
Before we begin, the first question you may ask is: what is Glass Mapper? Simply put, it is an ORM tool. Traditional ORM tools (like NHibernate, or Entity Framework) connect to databases, and model classes in your Visual Studio project around objects that exist in...
by Xing Liu | Oct 17, 2014 | Sitecore
If you have a sublayout that needs to get the URL of a media item, such as an image (item[“Image”]), here is a quick tip on how you can get that media URL. Item item = Sitecore.Context.Item; Sitecore.Data.Fields.ImageField imgField =...
