New release of Sitecore Intranet Portal

It is now official, the anticipated update of our Sitecore Intranet Portal solution passed the last QA cycles and is ready for download on SDN.

Read the release blog post from our Product Manager.

The SIP 2.2 release adresses a few issues that improves the overall performance and experience of working with the product. I know this for a fact, because I demonstrated it a few weeks ago to a client who are handing in the PO as we speak. Previously at similar demos, I would demonstrate the 2.1 release  which wasn't a bad product at all, but this release just makes a better demo. The release is more intuitive, easier to administrate and of course still offers strong integrations with 3rd party backend systems.

So thank you very much to the SIP team for a job well done!

More SIP info available on the main website.

I am planning to publish a movie which shows the nice features this release has to offer. Including topics like AD integration, ease-of-use, creating skins etc. So stay tuned.

Oslo makes it 5 weeks in a row

Yesterday I was in Oslo with a colleague to attend a few meetings. This trip is the fifth trip in five weeks I have been on. Thats right, I've been in and out of Copenhagen Airport's departure hall every week for five weeks. Unfortunately the security guys haven't seemed to recognize me so I could skip in line.

One thing I wonder is, why other people in the security line seem to not understand the simple concept of the security check. I mean you're going through a metal detector, so it might be wise to remove coins, wallets, belt etc first. Maybe I am asking to much?
   Enough nagging for now, I usually have time for coffee before departure anyway, despite the slow move through airport security.

 

Oslo is quite a nice city in case you haven't had the chance to visit. Especially downtown is quite nice, but thats a whole other story.

 

After arriving in Oslo, we went to meet existing customer UDI regarding some projects. UDI is responsible for immigration, seeking asylum and similar important topics for foreigners who want to live in Norway. One thing on the agenda was the option to improve the search experience for their visitors, a topic that is not directly related to Sitecore, but very important for the overall experience of any website. So we discussed the options (Sitecore recommends a broad range of search tools) and also talked about future projects.

After meeting the very nice people at UDI, we had a quick lunch before visiting a partner prospect whom we met briefly at this years WPC in Houston.

This partner is a very interesting prospect for us, given their size and reputation in Norway. So we went over the business aspects of being a Sitecore partner, and of course what our solution offers them and their customers.

Gartner and CMS Wire already shared some nice reviews of our latest version, but I of course showed our cool editing and patent pending usability features first, before going into details with the (enhancend) .Net 2.0 based security model, the content based structure, the available free modules (seo, webforms, AD integration etc) and so on. Hopefully we can come to an agreement with this new partner, and have even more customers in Norway benefit from using Sitecore in the future.

Thats it for now, but time will tell where my next trip is heading. But both Israel and Belgium is on the radar...

Fine tuning in Basel

Tomorrow I'm doing a demo for a company located in Basel, Switzerland. This demo has been scheduled since the beginning of August, so you know the audience is expecting a killer demo. So apart from my trustworthy slide-deck that uncovers Sitecore and the API, I felt I had to finetune my stuff a bit.

A blog post from a colleague gave me a good idea of what to improve on my Nicam demo-site. Thanks to Alex Shyba for pointing out that little detail about enabling the Rich-Text Editor to filter MS Word  content by your own definition during copy/paste. This is not a new thing in Sitecore version 6, but the way it works OOTB have changed a bit. Nevertheless you can in a very simple manner tune the editor to do what you expect, whenever you are copying content from MS Word.

Another thing I want to present is the SEO module. This one was ported to version 6 a long time ago, but still I hadnt implemented it on the Nicam site. Shame on me. Quick trip to SDN to download the module, and about 3 minutes of installing. Easy.

One last thing I corrected while i was at it, was to display the bold, italic and underline buttons in the Rich-Text Editor. It seems we went a few steps to far when doing the version 6 release (internally known as "the simplicity" release). I personally know that I can just use the wellknown keyboard shortcuts in the editor, but not all editors know this. And frankly how bad can it be to display a few extra buttons?!?

The steps taken to "re-insert" these 3 buttons in the editor are very simple. Open up the core database, navigate to System -> Settings -> HTML Editor Profiles -> Rich Text Default -> Toolbar 1. Right-click and insert an HTML Editor button item. To insert a "BOLD" button simply name your new item 'Bold' and also write ' bold' in the 'click' field (yes, it is that simple. The editor backend code is already done, Sitecore is just not exposing the actual button until you force it to).

 

 

So now my Nicam site, running on version 6, is exposing a bit more functionality and easy of use. Perfection can always be improved...