To upgrade or not to upgrade * updated

Greetings!

One of our partners asked me yesterday about my thoughts on upgrading. Whether Sitecore recommends upgrading to 6.4 as of now or not. Also, just stumbled upon this great discussion here on Kim Hornung’s blog!

This is quite an interesting and thought provoking question, and I don’t think there could be a single answer to that and I also think that Sitecore has been doing a great job not forcing customer’s to upgrade. At the end of the day, it is your customer’s requirements and expectations that should drive the decision. With Sitecore’s successful hotfix process, if you have an issue that is a showstopper, you can request a quick hotfix from the Customer Service rather than upgrading your whole infrastructure!

Here is a decision tree that encompass everything that I generally suggest to customers and partners.

Click on the image to expand.

Please note that this is not an official recommendation from Sitecore. Rather, these are my personal thoughts on the subject.

With 6.3.1 being recommended, I’ve updated the image.

New Year, New Sitecore Blog

I have been thinking about this for a while, and finally decided to create another Sitecore blog on our Community area dedicated to sharing my experiences in the field working closely with implementation partners:

http://www.sitecore.net/AlexShyba

My ambitious plan is too continue sharing anything deeply technical here while the new blog would be a place where technical meets business half way.

Hope you enjoy it!

Sitecore User Group in San Francisco / Bay Area

I would like to announce the formation of the first and only Sitecore User Group in the Bay Area.

My vision is to create a dedicated community for passionate Sitecore developers and end users devoted to learning new things and sharing experience about everything related to Sitecore CMS. Anybody can join. You can be either a beginner or experienced Sitecore developer, or end user.

Since Sitecore USA is headquartered in San Francisco, you have an amazing opportunity to get new information about the product directly from the vendor and get to meet the Sitecore folks!

The user group’s home is here. Join us!

8 Reasons to Use New Search in Sitecore

Greetings,

Back in 2010 at the first Dreamcore conference, I was honored to present on two topics: ”Data Retrieval Techniques with Sitecore” and “Using Lucene.NET with Sitecore”.

If you have not seen any of those, download the slides and check them out. I consider myself being a data guy, so that’s why I really enjoyed presenting on these topics. Not sure why, but I love everything about data access, and absolutely adore what Microsoft did with Entity Framework 4, especially the oData stuff. There is something truly exciting in seeing your data flow and materialize in one shape or another.

Anyways, back to the topic. During my presentation on Lucene/Sitecore marriage, I was showing that Sitecore actually has two (!!!) implementation of Lucene.NET. One is a legacy, what we call “old” search. Everything within Sitecore.Data.Indexing namespace is considered to be “old” search. It is configured and implemented differently, though it uses the same Lucene.NET dll. There is also the “new” search which is represented by a few classes within Sitecore.Search namespace.

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Sitecore Product URLs Amazon Style

If you are a Sitecore CMS developer and you love shopping on Amazon, you probably had the same thought: what would it take to re-create Amazon.com in Sitecore? Completely from scratch. Ok, maybe it’s just me.

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