One of my responsibilities, as a client executive for our Coveo for Sitecore user-base, is to help our clients optimize the value of their Coveo deployment, by leveraging all the features offered by our platform. I have unfortunately seen too many examples of customers exploiting only the search mechanisms of Coveo, passing by the opportunity to ramp up their experience from Advanced Enterprise Search to actual relevance and insight provider. A few ingredients can act as catalysts for this transition, among others, the Usage Analytics platform and our machine-learning solution, Reveal. This blog post relates the story of a real Coveo for Sitecore Cloud client, which we will conveniently call Client X, starting their journey towards automated, highly relevant content.
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Taming the Coveo Usage Analytics Platform and Coveo Reveal
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Debugging Salesforce Lightning Components
For almost a year, Coveo has been offering Lightning components in Salesforce as part of its search offering. Over time, we had to develop new ways to debug these components both inside and outside of a developer environment. Here are some of the tips and tricks that we discovered along the way.
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Applying Site Search Best Practices using Sitecore Part 1
A few months ago, the Coveo for Sitecore Product and Marketing teams released an eBook on Site Search Best Practices. The guide is great for high level planning, but when it comes to execution, there are some gaps that need to be filled. In this series of blog posts, I will go over each of the 19 points and explain in details how to implement them properly.
I will be using Coveo for Sitecore 4.0.450 in a Sitecore 8.0 MVC environment. Take note that everything listed below can also be done in Web Forms, but will require a different syntax.
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Setup webpack for multiple dependent project
In the past few months, I’ve been discovering Webpack, and how to use it to improve the development process in our team.
A problem I ran into was how to setup multiple projects dependent on one another, in different repositories. I wanted to make sure that the development environment was as painless as possible.
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Creating Previews of Your Secured Sitecore Content
In your Sitecore content tree, you may have secured items that you would like to present to anonymous users without the items’ content being displayed. The following blogpost introduces a method that will allow you to do just that.
This is done by creating stripped down values of secured items at indexing time and are made searchable by anonymous users while being filtered out at query time for connected users, who will see the secured content as usual. The ItemLimitedViewProcessor described below will give you a way of implementing this.
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My first Visual Studio Code extension (vsforce)
Our experience creating our first Visual Studio Code extension, details about the vsforce extension, and information that would have been useful when starting its development.
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Applying Site Search Best Practices using Sitecore Part 2
For those of you who missed part 1, this series of blogs is to provide technical details on each of the best practices mentioned in the Best Practices for Site Search eBook.
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Applying Site Search Best Practices using Sitecore Part 3
This is the third installment on my journey to cover all the best practices listed in the Best Practices for Site Search eBook. The goal of this series is to explain in details how to apply each best practice using Coveo for Sitecore V4.
If you missed the previous posts, you can find the full series here.
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Coveo Blitz 2017
7th edition
After months of preparation, the seventh edition of Coveo Blitz was held on January 7th 2017. As was the case in the last few years, the contest was held in our Quebec City office. Participants like to see our offices and the work environment we offer - oh, and here’s a scoop: next year, it will be held in our brand new offices!
A total of 58 students from 6 universities and colleges participated this year. We opened the registration on October 18th and all the available places (15 teams of 4) were filled by November 3rd.
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Automate Adding a Coveo Search Box In a Page Using Sitecore PowerShell Extensions
The Sitecore PowerShell Extensions is an amazing tool every Sitecore developer should learn to use. I recently started playing with it, my first goal being to find a solution to the popular request: automate adding a Coveo search box in a page.
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Applying Site Search Best Practices using Sitecore Part 4
This is the last part of my long adventure to cover all the best practices listed in the Best Practices for Site Search eBook. The previous parts can be found here.
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Building a resource locator
This is the first blog post of a new series entitled “Build it with Coveo.”. The serie will present innovative use cases for the Coveo Platform, always including full code samples.
Coveo customers use the platform in a multitude of ways. Many in the consulting and resource management business often ask us if our search technology could help them better match resources and project.
Use case:
What if you want to find the best peer/employee with knowledge around “Artificial Intelligence.”? What if you need to add constraints such as “available for the next two months.”?
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A story of TypeScript, webpack, and code splitting
In my last blog post, I talked about how we use webpack at Coveo, to improve our development process.
One of the most powerful feature offered by it is code splitting.
I’ll try to explain how we are leveraging it inside our project, and combining it with TypeScript.
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Automate your infrastructure
In my life, I really love to automate recurring tasks. In my private life, I’ve been conceptualizing, building, and developing my home automation for many years. At work, I automate everything: scripts, servers, deployments, etc. And now in the cloud, I am automating the infrastructure.
It is not a new thing; automation is old, but it’s not in all data centers or cloud infrastructures. Let’s see why you would have to automate your infrastructure, except because it’s cool. There are other points to consider.
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Randomizing Results from a Coveo Index
After reading the title of this post, you were probably wondering the same thing everyone asked us while working on this project:
Why?
And you would be right. Why would we want to remove Coveo’s most useful features: Machine Learning, sorting, and automatically-tuned relevancy?
There are 4 reasons:
- For fun
- To try to get different results each time you execute a query
- To test what we could achieve with the current infrastructure and tools
- But yeah, mostly for fun
This post will cover the road we had to walk to achieve such results.
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Deploy Kubernetes in Production Automatically with Kops, Jenkins, and Terraform
Kubernetes: one hip word we see everywhere in the Cloud developer and Devops world. With reasons: Kubernetes does solve problems (and creates others) and simplify a lot of things. In this post we’ll explore how we deployed k8s to production automatically with help from Terraform, Jenkins, and Kops.
At Coveo, we decided that Kubernetes was the tool of choice to run our docker containers in production. This is replacing a “homemade” setup with AWS Opsworks and dockers. It will save money and resources, and enable faster deployments.
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Creating secured item previews in Sitecore
Recently, I had to work on an interesting use case where my client wanted to display teasers of premium content to anonymous users in Sitecore. Once the users found what they were looking for, they were either redirected to a login page or to a subscribing page. No secrets, the strategy behind it is to increase conversion rates.
After working on the project, I realized that the business needs behind their request was fairly common. People want to show partial items to anonymous users, but still want them to be relevant and easy to find. Let me introduce you the CreateSecuredItemPreview solution.
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AWS Redshift best practices, tips and tricks
Over the last 4 years, I have been part of the team that builds the Usage Analytics solution here at Coveo. This solution is based on AWS Redshift, a petabyte scale columnar store. We were early adopters of this data warehousing solution and while it is an awesome product today, I probably don’t need to tell you that we hit some bumps along the way. Here are some of the tips, tricks, and overall best practices we gathered during those years.
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Search Best Practices Part 1 - The Search Box
Organizations are becoming more and more aware of the importance of offering a good search experience on their website. From an increase in purchases on ecommerce websites to getting fewer cases on their support and community websites, companies are realizing that helping users find what they want faster and more easily results in a greater overall user experience.
In this series of blog posts, I will explain why having a good search experience is vital for any website. This blog post will tell you about the importance of the search box.
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AWS Redshift best practices, tips and tricks - part 2
In my last post, I shared some of the wisdom I gathered over the 4 years I’ve worked with AWS Redshift. Since I’m not one for long blog posts, I decided to keep some for a second post. Here goes!
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