Developing with Sitecore Foundry 3.0 - Tips for Success

Let me preface this post by saying that Roundedcube has a lot of Sitecore CMS implementations under our belt (we've actually lost count I think), but in the last year and a half we've been involved with a couple Sitecore Foundry implementations. We quickly realized that while the two products share a common foundation, developing a solution with Sitecore Foundry is a different beast than with Sitecore CMS. My hope is to share some of the most significant differences we've encountered to help you overcome the same issues in your solution development.

In case you don't already know, the Sitecore Foundry Solution is built for organizations having hundreds or even thousands of affiliated websites (i.e. franchises). Foundry allows these organizations to create and manage all of these websites with nearly the same effort as one while distributing the content editing to these affiliates and maintaining a centralized control of brand and strategy.

If you've worked with Sitecore Foundry in the past, it's important to first note there is a significant difference between Foundry 2.0 and Foundry 3.0. What we're discussing is 3.0, which is built on Sitecore 6 as opposed to 2.0, which was built on Sitecore 5.3.1. If you're familiar with Sitecore CMS, then you know that alone implies some significant differences and improvements.

Upgrading Website from Foundry Version 2 to Version 3

Let's first start with the prospect of upgrading an existing Foundry Solution from 2.0 to 3.0. For those of you who are familiar with the upgrade process for a Sitecore 5.3.1 instance to a Sitecore 6.x instance, the Foundry process is basically the same. The Sitecore Foundry upgrade process relies on the Sitecore CMS upgrade process but with a couple of extra steps. We recently used this process to upgrade an existing Foundry instance and encountered a few hurdles as lessons learned. One such lesson we learned is realizing that even though all of the security entities (users and roles) are upgraded, the new security domain for each site may not be configured correctly after an upgrade and will require some manual configuration. This issue prevented our content contributors from being able to log into the management area of the site to modify content. After properly setting up the required security roles and accounts manually for a Sitecore domain, our content contributors were able to login and manage their content again.

Page Editor vs. Content Editor

Since Foundry presents a totally different content management user experience - affiliate editors typically do not see the traditional Sitecore login page with Content Editor and Desktop options; rather they have a new login page that takes them directly to Page Editor mode. This presents a new perspective as it forces us as developers to make the Page Editor experience 100% user-friendly as you can't rely on the Content Editor UI. And overall, that's a good thing! The Page Editor is a valuable asset to the system overall. But it is something you must account for in effort, timeline and expectations. Depending on the intricacy of the website design, making everything editable via a rendering or UI control can be tricky. Several times we ran into JavaScript conflicts that only appeared once the HTML prototype provided by the design team was implemented into Sitecore. Significant pieces of code had to be re-worked to display correctly in edit mode.

Speaking of the editing experience, we found in several instances that we wanted to customize the Page Editor ribbon to optimize the editing experience. Fortunately, it was easier to add buttons (or "commands") and chunks to the Page Editor ribbon than it is to the Content Editor ribbon. Sitecore Foundry provides a nice option to add commands via a toolbar administration tree as opposed to adding directly to the Core database as you would with the CMS edition of the product. This also came in handy in terms of workflow since Foundry doesn't come with workflow enabled out-of-the-box. We were able to easily add workflow commands to the Page Editor ribbon as well as our new custom commands.

Security and Account Management

Sitecore's security changed drastically from Sitecore 5.3.1 to 6.1 by using the ASP.NET Membership Provider. In Foundry 2, which is based on Sitecore 5.3.1, users and roles were identified by the following convention "sitename.user" or "sitename.role." In version 3, it uses a new convention where each user/role actually has its own Sitecore domain to better separate security by site. This makes it easier to keep security confined to a domain architecturally and provide more separation...better organization.

We found these three areas (upgrading, use of page editor, security) to be the most noteworthy when getting acclimated to Sitecore Foundry. Sitecore Foundry is a very powerful solution, though still somewhat untapped in the marketplace so I hope this will be of help for those considering it as a solution for your organization. Recently, Roundedcube architected and developed a Foundry CMS solution for Feeding America and its network of over 200 food banks across the country. Since then, we've upgraded them to Foundry 3.0 and made some great enhancements to their solution. These new Sitecore Foundry 3 food bank websites are rolling our one-by-one throughout the year.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with Foundry as well - if there's an issue you solved another way or if you have any questions about anything I've mentioned here.

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/developing-with-sitecore-foundry-30-tips-for-success

Should video be your next "big thing?"

I've had the opportunity to attend three separate conferences this year, all with supposed industry experts ranging in skills from user experience, online marketing, web content management, social media and many more. It never fails that one of the experts at every conference at some point mentions, "Oh, you better get started with video ... it's the next big thing."

It was at that very moment that the presenter loses a great deal of credibility with me. Granted this happens with every new technology as indicated by Gartner's Hype Cycle but I think it's time to at least scratch the surface of this video conundrum. Not dissimilar to social media, I have a lot of people telling me, "We need video on our website" much the same way they were saying, "I need a Twitter account" twelve months ago. Before you jump in and buy yourself a thousand dollar camera, Final Cut Pro and a $5,000 MacBook Pro with 10 GB of RAM, let's discuss this a little bit.

Let's take this video for example:



Let me start by saying this is one of my favorite videos on the Net. Maybe because it reminds me of my younger years and the 93 games I owned for Atari, but this video has very little, if any, value to the average, everyday business user. Would you agree?

Next let's take a look at this video:



Toni Bowers from TechRepublic happens to be one of my favorite bloggers and helped me out a great deal when I was looking for my new job. Just read a couple posts from her blog and you'll see what I mean.

So I would ask, dear readers, which video holds more value? Now get past the point of the subject matter and focus just on the nature of content contained in the video. Here are your choices:

A) The one that has no intrinsic useful content but shows amazing video editing skills and creativity

or

B) The one that actually has real content

Discuss ...

My vote for the video that holds more value, independent of subject matter, is A. Why? They are using video for the right reason. They are taking content that cannot be expressed any other way, using the medium in which it was intended for and providing amazing content to boot. Video B is taking content that is much more suited for written blog post form and stuffing it into brightly colored wrapping paper in an effort to make sure they're following the trend of the next big thing.

I wonder how much money they spent producing that video? How much for the camera, the graphics, the green screen effects, not to mention the time it took to actually shoot the video with multiple takes. On top of that, then they have to have someone transcribe the video to make sure the search engines are able to suck up all of that content. Frankly, when I go to a page like this, I pause the video and read the transcript anyway.

Getting back to the heart of the matter ... do you need video on your site? That's a very good question but I would suggest coming up with your answer based on business value rather than desire. You see, I have a lot of "wants" and "needs" in my life and in many cases your website is the same way. So ask yourself this, "Do you want videos on your website or do your users want videos on your website?" If it's you - go get a second opinion. If it's your users - start calculating the business case.

What? You say you don't know if your users want video? Solve that problem and your video question may answer itself.

Let me know what you think. When is video the right answer? When is it unnecessary or overkill? If you're struggling with coming up with the answer, give me a call. I'd be happy to walk you through the process. If you've already made the decision to put video on your site, let's talk anyway. There are a number of factors to keep in mind when getting into the video arena. Everything from quality to production to SEO to content management and a hundred more variables you may not be considering today. I'll give you an hour of my time, for free, just to make sure you're headed in the right direction.

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/should-video-be-your-next-big-thing