Category: Sitecore

Navigating Sitecore Security: Unveiling Azure Firewall Challenges

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In the realm of enterprise applications, the firewall stands as a pivotal guardian against potential threats. This blog delves into a specific scenario where Sitecore support facilitated the implementation of Web Application Firewall (WAF) on Microsoft Azure for a Sitecore Managed Website. With WAF in place, access to the App Service was restricted solely to the Firewall’s IP, resulting in a 403 Forbidden error. The intricacies of pinpointing the exact rule causing this restriction within Azure Firewall are explored.

Simple Web Architecture:

Note: This diagram is created only to explain the basic scenario for this blog post.
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Fortifying Sitecore Web Applications: 7 Best Security Practices & Solutions

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In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, ensuring the security of your web applications is paramount. This holds especially true for platforms like Sitecore, a powerful content management system used by many organizations worldwide. To protect your Sitecore web applications from potential threats and vulnerabilities, it’s essential to implement robust security standards. In this blog, we will delve into the key aspects of security standards for Sitecore web applications and explore the best practices to fortify your digital assets.

Security Standards – Sitecore Web Application

Security plays an indispensable role in safeguarding any .NET application, ensuring the perpetual safety and integrity of your servers and applications. Regular employment of security tools and site scans is essential to ascertain that best practices are consistently upheld, preserving the sanctity of your website and environments.

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Oracle Eloqua Pros and Cons | Sitecore Integration | Eloqua Series | Part 8

nikkipunjabi 1 Comment

Our Eloqua Series is coming to an end, where we’ll discuss Eloqua’s pros and cons as well as the integration with Sitecore CMS.

Listing all the blogs of the Eloqua Series:
Oracle Eloqua Reports to Google Spreadsheets | Eloqua Series | Part 7
10 Email Marketing Best Practices | Eloqua Series | Part 6
Eloqua Insight | Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) | Eloqua Series | Part 5
Custom Data Objects [CDO] | Eloqua Series | Part 4
Eloqua Forms | Oracle Eloqua Series | Part 3
Email Campaigns | Oracle Eloqua Series | Part 2
Oracle Eloqua – Marketing Automation Review | Part 1

Oracle Eloqua

Eloqua is one of the leading email marketing platforms. Below are the Pros and Cons of Eloqua.

Pros:
API Integrations – Eloqua Rest API integration is incredibly straightforward to set up and customize with any system. The main approach for the integration should be Forms, as I stated in an earlier blog post. There are two types of integration with Eloqua, one for the Sitecore Forms and the second for System forms or fixed forms like registration, login, newsletter subscription, etc,. In our case, we have a Sitecore Submit Action called “Submit to Eloqua” that is linked to Eloqua. We construct a form on Sitecore Forms, and the exact same form is built on Eloqua. We then connect the two forms using the Sitecore Submit Action, passing the correct Eloqua Form ID and other fields in the necessary JSON format. And for System forms obviously, we need Developers to set up a one-time configuration.

Bulk API Integration – Earlier I created the utility to transfer the users in Bulk from the SQL database to Eloqua. It was really easy to understand and implement the Bulk API Integration. This is used to send large amounts of data to Eloqua. I also created a scheduler that runs every day at midnight and sends the daily new users to Eloqua.

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Sitecore Submit Action – Send Notification Email using Sitecore Dispatch Manager

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I’m going to walk you through how to use Sitecore Dispatch Manager to implement Send Notification Email for Submit Action in Sitecore Form Submissions.

Let’s go ahead and create Form Submit Action.

Sitecore Item Path: /sitecore/system/Settings/Forms/Submit Actions/Send Notification Email

Add “Send Notification Email” action on the Submit button.

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TypeScript with Sitecore JSS in less than 30 minutes

nikkipunjabi 1 Comment

Hello friends,

Since you’re here, I assume you’d like to enable TypeScript with the Sitecore JSS application. It’s easy and simple.

We can say that ‘TypeScript is like JavaScript, but with types.’ It helps make our code easier to read and avoid errors that could become debugging nightmares.

Here are a few of the advantages of TypeScript:

  • Great tooling support with IntelliSense
  • The ability to compile down to a version of JavaScript that runs on all browsers
  • Typescript is purely object-oriented programming which means it is a programming paradigm based on the concepts of objects.
  • One of the biggest advantages of Typescript is its code completion and intelligence.

In order to enable TypeScript with Sitecore JSS application, see the video tutorials below:

TypeScript with Sitecore JSS – Part – 1:

TypeScript with Sitecore JSS – Part – 2:

To stay updated, like and subscribe to my YouTube channel for more Sitecore tutorials.

[Source references]:

While creating my videos, I referenced two good blog posts from the Sitecore community:

Happy Coding!

5 Sitecore Interview Tips by Nilesh Thakkar

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Are you looking for a change and preparing for an Interview OR Do you need any tips for Sitecore Interview?

If so, then you must watch this video before appearing for an Interview. I got a chance to have a quick chat with Nilesh about the interview tips and see what he says in the video.

Here are the Top 5 Tips shared by Nilesh Thakkar:

  1. Know More About Your Interviewer
  2. Show Your Problem Solving Skills
  3. Know How Sitecore Works Behind The Scenes
  4. Show Your Right Attitude
  5. How Do You Handle Conflicting Situation?

Happy Job Hunting!

Sitecore Watch Face | Google Wear OS

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After buying Google Wear OS-powered smartwatch, an idea came to my mind to personalize the watch face with Sitecore logo.

As it’s round, a watch face will definitely fit the round dial.

Wear OS Watch Face App is now on the Play Store for you as well, if you are having Google Wear-OS powered smartwatch — go and check out this simply designed watch face.

Sitecore Watch Face

On your watch Play Store, search for Sitecore and you’ll find Sitecore Watch Face.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nikkipunjabi.sitecorewatchfaces&rdid=com.nikkipunjabi.sitecorewatchfaces

If you know Android Development and would like to contribute, you are free to play around with the project.

https://github.com/nikkipunjabi/SitecoreWatchFace

The comment section is open for your suggestions/feedback. 🙂

Enjoy Sitecore Watch Face!  😉

Automate Sitecore Workflow Approval Process and Email Report

nikkipunjabi 1 Comment

Automation is the key to tech. It is the process by which tasks which were previously done by humans, are performed entirely by machines. In this post, I shall take you through how to automate Sitecore Workflow Approval for a more efficient way of working.

Why do you need Auto Approve?

Every project has a different set of requirements, and one of the requirements I was tasked to do was to automate the Workflow approval process. You may think, what is the purpose of having a workflow if you want things to be approved automatically. Well, as mentioned earlier, there are different scenarios that may deem such a requirement necessary.

It is not because of the risk in approving content that may be incorrect. It is due to that fact that there are a lot of items in the workflow coming in from the translation agency and in order to verify the content, it requires physical approval to push on to Stage. The automation to be implemented here will help us to know that translations are coming in and send it to the respective content team member to verify. Once verification is done, then in one simple, a user can push it Live.

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Sitecore and GatherContent Integration | Part-2 | Challenges and Solution

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In an earlier post, I wrote an overview on Sitecore and GatherContent Integration Overview and the challenges we faced. In this post, you’ll see many other challenges that we faced with GatherContent and Sitecore Integration and how to crack them.

I got the source code of GatherContent Module thanks to the devs. It’s also available on GitHub.

We faced many challenges with it, but we managed to fix the issues one by one and get it to work. Some of them were fixed by the GatherContent Dev Team.

Most of the changes were done in GatherContent.Connector.SitecoreRepositories project.

Challenges:

  1. Different folder structure
  2. Zero-width space
  3. Blank space in GatherContent
  4. Sitecore General link, Number and Checkbox support
  5. Alt Text for Images
  6. Redirect Rule Issue

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