April 2018 – Unravel Sitecore!

April 27, 2018

Coveo Cloud Learnings – Part 2

Last week, I kick started a planned series in effort to pour over my side of story using Coveo Cloud platform first hand. You can read more on the initial piece here

I am hoping this series will help any one starting a Coveo cloud implementation in making appropriate choices along the way based on project and requirements on hand. I would also post catches/gotchas that I experienced along this journey as well.

Now, let us move on to more. After the initial steps, there are more choices to make such as below. I wish I could say – go with your gut, lol. Always go by a thoughtful and knowledgeable call on each of these. When in question, use rock solid support from Coveo and Sitecore team. You can ping on slack channel or load a Q&A here . More than likely, if your decision is a basic one, there could be one already out there. 🙂

Ensure to squeeze out as much as you can from the OOTB product, Coveo Cloud offers Machine learning and AI that could help users find relevant results. So, embrace it and try to make it work to your architecture and timing. In our case, we thought query suggestions are very important. But, what to do when there is not enough data available on Coveo Analytics that would get back ML query suggestions. Ensure you always have a back up plan! We turned on result suggestions with Omnibox component as a back up. Although, be very careful and diligent to drop this off as these queries are accounted towards the quota you signed up for with Coveo.

A parallel note on ML/Query Suggestions and reminder to ensure to change the tuning parameters on your test sandbox to test your ML query suggestions. If you leave them to default, it might or not bring up query suggestions. If you do not know where to find them, go to your Coveo Administration console either via sitecore or direct link if you have one on you, then, click on Query Pipelines under Search section, pick a model you want to tune the settings on and you will see the screen below

I also was curious to see and test the ML query suggestions, so, I followed the instructions noted here and could quickly create a new report of my own way to track if there are any ML query suggestions available on my model.

https://onlinehelp.coveo.com/en/cloud/reviewing_suggested_queries_by_coveo_machine_learning.htm

Our Architecture was subtly different as it uses older/legacy Sitecore version to push all the data on to Cloud index using Push API. We had to ensure we are following all the good practices as much as we can to ensure Coveo can then perform and do it’s thing on relevancy. Here is a good Q&A link and responses I got when I was eyeing and planning to ensure we are covered with this Architectural decisions we have in play.
https://answers.coveo.com/questions/14602/best-practices-when-using-push-api.html

Another little POC that I had to do on my side to ensure our Architecture decisions will not have any unknown risk on main requirements. One such requirement was to have Coveo Stand Alone search box to be available and working on older version of Sitecore site and it would then redirect to the new version of Sitecore search page that was built off of Coveo components and JS framework. Initially, I had hiccups due to CORS issue as the domain was not matching, but, later all was cool when we had set up load balancer to swap between old and new sitecore versions. Below is Q&A reference for this step as well, if you are curious
https://answers.coveo.com/questions/14985/can-we-have-a-coveo-component-html-on-a-site-while.html

Next up, I will add my notes around how we built the components and used underscore and any other caveats we encountered during the same.

That is all for now folks, if you need more information on this subtly different architecture we have in play, feel free to drop in a comment. Have a great weekend! You all deserve it. 🙂

April 23, 2018

Coveo Cloud Learnings – Part 1

I am super excited to share my experiences with you as I rolled up my sleeve to play with super cool search tool out there, Coveo Cloud!

Before I got this chance to work intimately with this platform, I did hear a lot and read a lot. Was wondering and anticipating, when will I get to actually do hands on and I really wished to do that before I head out to Coveo Impact at SanFrancisco this year. Between, crazy excited to hear all the awesome new things and also geared up to participate in their Hackathon event as well. Know more about their event here below

http://impact.coveo.com/

Now, I plan to write up my experiences with Coveo cloud first hand, the project is near completion on my end and I think this is the perfect time to reflect on all the set of challenges we had while pulling off a simple yet complex due to Architecture decisions involved on the project.

First things first, when you are about to start implementation on Coveo for Sitecore platform, decide on your version and framework you plan to use. This goes long way to ensure you picked the correct version that supports all your other related third party components and ensure it is indeed a right step towards desired search experience.

On this project, we chose December 2017 version matching the Sitecore version we are using on this instance. My first comment on getting Coveo for Sitecore up and running on my local and other environments is “Piece of Cake”. Compared to challenges, hiccups I and my fellow team members had with on premise version of Coveo, this was a total opposite. It took me less than an hour as opposed two full days(give or take) with on-premise version. It was an awesome feeling to see the green quite quickly this time.

While you are at this step in your project, also, decide which version of JS framework would you like to use. I would vote for Hive as it is new, more robust and modular, but, it highly depends on project of course. You can see compatibility and more decision factors here on their documentation.

https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SitecoreV4/What%27s+New+In+Coveo+for+Sitecore+4

While I was doing the steps or while trying to understand the new platform, I tried comparing and contrasting to the knowledge I had working with their on-premise version. It did help me a lot actually trying to figure – “How is this different from before?”

Some helpful notes on Installation and Set up with Cloud. Do note that your sitecore indexes, both, master and web would be now on Cloud and so are your logs, content browser and other cool things you were used to pulling up from port 8081, it should now all be located on Coveo Cloud Console. Also, understand that some features are now abstracted out, like you can not turn off and on the live monitoring on indexes for instance. One important thing to realize is all your index rebuilds are queued in some fashion which you may not have control over, so, talk to your Coveo consultant or drop in a support ticket if you encounter some delays more than usual on your rebuilds.

On our end, we always ensure to use cloud sandbox(trial) for all our lower environments. Note that there could be some limit on number of indexes on Sandbox, so, check with your Coveo rep when in question.

One subtle catch I would like to mention is – after installation of Coveo for Sitecore and hooking up proper Coveo Sandbox configuration and a full site publish, I did see the web index on the cloud from Sitecore perspective, but, note that master did need a manual rebuild by going in to your Indexing Manager on Sitecore Control Panel.

If you got time on you, explore the Coveo Cloud Administration Console, it has different and clearly named sections that should give you fair idea on which is what, but, it is definitely worth going over this as you drill deep in to Cloud Implementation.

Also, note that with Cloud you can build sample search pages on the fly, it is a cool feature to test some of the fields you have on your index or could be a custom build external index that you would like to target, but, if your implementation calls for some thing more complex, I would recommend to house your search pages within your sitecore instance by customizing the components and adding them to your presentation plus creating the templates.

So, you installed Coveo For Sitecore cloud version, got all green in diagnostics, sitecore indexes in check and could see your items and indexed data on cloud console content browser. Did I hear that right? That is it, we can now jump right ahead and do some cool stuff that is made possible by the platform.

My next blog will focus on more challenges, gotchas and learning we had during this wave of time. Also, will expound on choices we made at each step as well.

References/Helpful Resources for Coveo For Sitecore Cloud

Installation guide:
https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SitecoreV4/Installing+Coveo+for+Sitecore

Architecture and Beyond
https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SitecoreV4/Understanding+the+Architecture+of+Coveo+for+Sitecore

Framework Choice

https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SitecoreV4/What%27s+New+In+Coveo+for+Sitecore+4

Coveo Impact

http://impact.coveo.com/

Versions

https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SitecoreV4/Downloads

April 17, 2018

Sitecore 9 Installation, My Quest to not give up

I know, I am super late! It has just been a super crazy month on my end due to typical deadlines and crunch times, but, would like to post this before we get on to more awesome things in the coming future. The speed at which we are racing, within next two months, I believe Sitecore 9 and anything to do with it would be called essentials. 🙂

I had made a note on my last blog here that I will update every one on one unique caveat and many more known devils I had faced while getting the taste of latest and greatest. Now, below are the my n different things I had to do to see the beautiful lady on my favorite browser and oh boy! I hopped with joy when I finally did see her. She looked more gorgeous than ever and yes, I knew I was in the game when I got a glimpse of her.

While I was hitting so many problems and walls, there were so many blogs and findings that helped me debug each and move forward. Beautiful community!
Except for one issue that stood strong between me and my new toy, just in case if you run in to this, hopefully it will help you and save few pesky hours of debugging.

I used the most favorite and easiest way to get Solr up and running on my local by running a pre-made script noted here – https://gist.github.com/jermdavis/8d8a79f680505f1074153f02f70b9105
Had to get my SQL 2016 as that was stated as a pre-requisite and wanted to ensure I do not miss any thing
Also, ensured I get latest version of powershell by installing updates and patches on my windows. Those things you put off because you simply do not want to restart your computer. lol, I repented it like always.
Also, ensure you have everything noted up on pre-requisites in installation guide. Sitecore is not being funny and yep everything noted here is indeed a pre-requisite and is needed including modification of any registry entries to avoid some super weird SQL issues.

Now, after I did all this and followed through a lot of blogs, I still could not overcome one final error on my end on running the powershell script. I failed and tried again like I do not remember how many times and I also kind of lost count on how many hours I had spent googling if I missed anything else.

Below, was the error I was seeing on the powershell.

“Xconnect windows service fails to start”

My first thought based on many reads was my license file is not legit and is not authorized to be used with Sitecore 9.0+. And that is what I saw all over the web for an error such as above. But, after I heard from some one else who used exact same license as I did was successful in setting up the site, kind of huge burst of a bubble there, I could literally hear a pop. I went to event viewer and checked all the errors, I could see a message that license was accepted, so, that was not it.

Now, I was at verge of giving up as I was totally numb and super freakishly tired. I am obviously doing something very silly, just could not point what.

While browsing the community, forums, blogs for similar errors, I did find one clue that helped me realize what is it that xconnect was not liking and hence not starting causing the powershell to crash on me.

https://community.sitecore.net/developers/f/5/t/8398

On this thread here, something caught my eye, though this was not the issue I was having on hand, it was worth the shot of running service manually to see if the error on command prompt does give some insight on what the issue is. So, I went to the location where exe is located on my inetpub and gave it a whirl. I saw an error message relating to format exception on Solr URL. Crazy right! I did check to ensure my solr url I had configured quite easily on my step #1 is correct. But, why does it not like it, so, when you configure Solr and try to browse to the url, it actually appends a hash to it by inherent redirect. That was the URL i had copied to my install script. It looked like – https://solr:8983/solr/#/

Apparently, xconnect service does not like the url of such format though it is actually a working Solr url. So, pay attention to your url of Solr on PS script. It should look like
https://solr:8983/solr

Once, I did this all was well and I could spin up a Sitecore 9.0+ site on my local.

Hope this helps some one else for easy way of debugging such type of issues!