Siteworx Makes Finding Answers Easy

How do you search over 30 years’ worth of data located in multiple content repositories on server farms around the world? Siteworx faced this fascinating challenge and their solution generated much attention from the Sitecore Outstanding Solutions committee (see Sitecore Recognizes Outstanding CMS Projects for more information).

Siteworx’ approach to the requirement involved the use of the Solr search server (built with Lucene). Through Solr, Siteworx indexes content from the Sitecore solution, a legacy Wordpress blog and even Google Analytics data. By using Solr with with a very content-rich site, Siteworx provides essential end-user facilities such as search, faceted navigation and rich metadata options.

What’s the story with indexing Google Analytics data? It’s a really cool idea: Solr pulls in the top 5,000 records from the last 24 hours using the Google Analytics API. This associates Google’s browsing data with Sitecore content items. With this data in the index, Siteworx provides a powerful “Most Popular” search facet on the web site.

The Wordpress integration is also interesting. The Solr index is populated using a push approach. Siteworx developed a Wordpress plug-in that pushes content to the Solr index when a new blog post is published. This allows for the blog content to appear alongside Sitecore content when a visitor performs a search.

Another key piece of the search puzzle was metadata. Siteworx’ client had a complex site taxonomy with 500 available metadata elements. The challenge here was making sure that content was properly tagged using this extremely rich taxonomy. Before content is published, editors can click a “Regenerate” command in the Ribbon that parses the text of an article and identifies keyword matches. These keywords are then associated with the article content and actually appear as inline tags in the article.

Overall, what I admire here is Siteworx’ ingenuity in tackling some challenging requirements. The site they were building had 30,000 substantive articles. Visitors to the site depend on being able to find relevant articles in the topic areas they are researching. Through content aggregation using Solr and automated, rich meta-tagging, they were able to develop a highly usable site with outstanding searchability.

You can learn more about Siteworx at http://www.siteworx.com.

Hanson Dodge Rocked My World

.NET CMS implementation varies in its complexity. Some projects are pretty basic – maybe a unique look and feel to the site, but otherwise straight-up content management. Other implementations provide interesting challenges that can push the limits of many lesser CMS systems. Hanson Dodge’s Outstanding Solution falls into this latter category. Their slogan is “Active minds at work,” and, from what I saw in their Outstanding Solution application, this is an understatement.

The focus of this Outstanding Solution was a web site for a world leader in Sports Utility Transportation (see Sitecore Recognizes Outstanding CMS Projects for more information). Hanson Dodge did more cool stuff than I could possibly mention in a single blog post, so I’ll focus on two areas in particular: internationalization and application integration.

Let’s start with internationalization. As you may know, Sitecore starts off with multilingual capabilities, but a skilled partner can take the platform much, much further. Hanson Dodge was tasked with numerous internationalization requirements:

• Over 30 different languages for the site
• Independent language and country dimensions (i.e. think of a country as a market whose content can be viewed in any number of languages)
• Different product lines and site content by country
• Configurable fallback languages (i.e. if the content isn’t translated into language A, revert to language B)
• Country-driven pricing
• Multi-lingual Flash content

To deal with these requirements, Hanson Dodge used Sitecore’s extensible framework impressively. From extending Sitecore’s dictionary functionality to adding a custom language fallback feature to filtering market-specific content, Hanson Dodge repeatedly showed themselves to be .NET and Sitecore pros.

In terms of application integration, Hanson Dodge had a significant list of systems that needed to talk to each other:

• Coveo Enterprise Search
• Stibo STEP Product Information Management
• SpatialPoint Dealer Locator
• IP2Location GeoIP Lookup
• Shopatron E-commerce
• WebORB for .NET (for Adobe Flex integration)

Sound like a handful? The integrations were numerous and Hanson Dodge was able to leverage Sitecore’s extremely open architecture to plug in to system functionality as required. Particularly interesting was their use of Sitecore’s Data Provider abstraction layer to pull in content from the Stibo STEP system. This allowed them to integrate the STEP content in the authoring environment while publishing standard Sitecore items to the delivery environment (and thus shielding the STEP system from web site traffic).

I could go on about Hanson Dodge and their expertise with Sitecore, but I encourage you to talk to them directly about their projects. If you are considering a site with an international audience or where system integration is crucial, this Sitecore partner has the experience and expertise you need.

New Sitecore Outstanding Solutions Announced

This week, Sitecore recognized two partners as part of its Outstanding Solutions program for Q1 & Q2 of 2010. We are proud to recognize Hanson Dodge Creative and Siteworx for the outstanding work they have done for their clients. Sitecore had a great time working with these partners and reviewing their impressive solutions to some complex implementation requirements.

I will blog more extensively about each of these partners and their Outstanding Solutions. As a sneak preview, here are some of the challenges they faced:

• Search index aggregation (including content from non-Sitecore sources)
• Product Information Management (PIM) integration
• Dynamic content tagging based on an elaborate content taxonomy
• Multilingual functionality with fallback language capabilities
• Country-driven pricing
• Adobe Flex integration

I’ll give credit where it’s due in future posts and elaborate on each of these features (and more!). Stay tuned…

You can learn more about the Sitecore Outstanding Solutions program on the Sitecore.net site.