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I decided to share with you a several hints which I believe will give you a chance to use better your time in Orlando this year.
Becasue it is not a technical article I decided to post it on LinkedIn. Please check it here: The Ultimate Guide to Making the Most of Sitecore Symposium 2019
If you use Unicorn to serialize your Sitecore’s items you probably at least once had to decide how to share a directory where serialized items are, between repository (solution) and your local Sitecore instance.
The most common solution is to store serialized items in the solution and just set the correct path to this directory in config files to let Sitecore instance read those.
Unfortunately, with this configuration, we need to adjust the path where items are, to every environment – who does like to remember about this?
If you do not want to do that, you can use “junction” which is just a different type of link. Thanks to the junction we can link the whole directory not a single file.
To create junction link you need to run following command from CMD:
mklink /J C:\inetpub\wwwroot\XXX\Data\Unicorn C:\Projects\XXX\App_Data\Unicorn
Where the first path is the place where your junction link will be created (wwwroot) and a second path is a place where your serialized items are (repository). That is it! So simple!
After the creation of a junction link, you will be able to use the same path on all environments!
EDIT: removed super early price and groups discount added – 06.06.2019
EDIT: added theme park discounts and swan & dolphin deal – 29.07.2019
EDIT: changed end date of early bird tickets – 05.08.2019
EDIT: removed early bird price – 20.08.2019
EDIT: added discount code – 21.08.2019
EDIT: removed discount code – 08.10.2019
Here we go again! Like last year, again this year I have decided to gather all Sitecore Symposium 2019 discounts in one place.
So if you do not want to lose your time on searching best deals – stay with me on my blog and just add this page to favorites!
If you want to check how I was updating the post last year – click a link at the end of this post.
You will receive an additional 100$ discount if you decide to use my unique discount code.
Use this link or just copy&paste code “LSKOWRONSKI” during your registration: https://sitecoresymposium2019.smarteventscloud.com/portal/registration/LSKOWRONSKI
It is nothing new – if you buy tickets sooner you will get a better price. This year Sitecore has prepared four price levels:
It means that if you will buy tickets now you will get
200$ discount ! In total 300$ with my discount code.
If you are MVP you should have own discount code – check your mailbox for email or community forum in MVP section.
Registration page is here: https://symposium.sitecore.com/registration
If you are coming with the team or you just want to organize with friends you can buy tickets together in a bigger group.
Currently, there are two levels of discount available:
Remember that: Tickets must be purchased together and cannot be combined with additional discounts.
To use that discount you have to start a registration process as for the single person and then select group ticket:
Theme park discountsThis year Sitecore prepared also special theme park discounts for attendees of Sitecore SYM. Check all details here: https://www.mydisneygroup.com/sitecore2019
Tickets with special deals are available in the following prices (you get also few interesting privileges which are usually additionally paid):
If you decided to buy those tickets without Sitecore’s deal – you would pay around 50-60$ more. I checked that on a standard purchase page (unfortunately because of my location I have different currency – do not have time to play with VPN ;))
Looks like a good deal for someone who wants to visit Disney Theme Parks!
If you are going to stay in Swan or Dolphin you can enjoy special deals which will save your time – if you decide to visit Walt Disney Wolrd.
On the list of benefits you will find:
Check all benefits here: https://www.swandolphin.com/aboutus/benefits.html
On Sitecore SYM website you can find a link to book hotel: https://www.swandolphin.com/groupres/SI3242/
From what I checked you will not save money on this but at least Sitecore prepared enough space for attendees. So use this link to book your room or choose a different hotel because there is not any other option to reserve a room in Swan and Dolphin resort in other booking systems.
Do not expect that other hotels will be much cheaper – in the time when Sitecore SYM will be held, Orlando will be visited by many different and bigger events.
Hopefully gathered information from this post will let you save some bucks to spend them in Orlando!
If you want to compare deals and prices with last year check my old article here: sitecore symposium 2018 all discounts in one place
I wrote an article about my experiences from Sitecore Helix Workshop held in Copenhagen this month (March 2019). This time as a test I decided to wrote that on LinkedIn as it is not strictly programming related post.
In the article, I am describing topics from the training and my opinion about the target group for this workshop.
Please check this article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sitecore-helix-training-do-you-need-lukasz-skowronski/
These days most of the customers decide to use Azure PaaS to host their production and non-production Sitecore environments because they are easy to maintain and cost efficient. Sitecore provides also own recommendations which define stricly Azure resources which should be used for defined amount of traffic. Check those recommendations here:
https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/043375
Thanks to those recommendations, Solution Architects responsible for architecture of final solution can feel safe – you know … ‘it has been recommended by Sitecore’.
And now … you are Solution Architect and you customer cannot use cloud solution … what to do, where to start?
The most obvious answer which comes in such case to the head is : “check documentation”.
I did that and below I will share what I found and what can be useful – maybe it will save your time and for sure will let me to remember what I found. In few places I assumed that we can try to use Sitecore’s Azure recommendations to calculate hardware requirements for VMs/Dedicated Servers.
What I found also in documentation is following text:
The recommended hardware requirements are for running the software on a single computer. For more information about running Sitecore on different kinds of hardware, consult your Sitecore partner or technical sales representative.
In case when you are working on the architecture for new Sitecore’s customer (or you are in the up-selling process) you can/should contact Sitecore Account Manager to get some help from their side – but remember – do not expect that someone will do your job.
When I was reading the documentation to find information about hardware requirements I found many important texts about software requirements and configuration. Please check them below:
From time to time someone can ask you also about the setup of client’s devices. So here you are:
Alright, you know already what I found. I hope you found something interesting for you.
The question is – how to build architecture based on data from previous paragraphs? That is hard – you probably still may have a feeling that we do not know enough to do that.
The first thing which I had checked before I started diagram with the servers was the diagram of database connections to check relations. Result of that check is available in my previous blog post: “All (almost) connections to databases in Sitecore 9.1“.
I recommend also to download and checked packages prepared by Sitecore in the “Download options for On Premise deployment” on download page https://dev.sitecore.net/Downloads/Sitecore_Experience_Platform/91/Sitecore_Experience_Platform_91_Initial_Release.aspx
When you unzip the packages you will find the smaller packages with configuration for all available nodes in the downloaded file.
After all that I was able to draw the diagrams which I also share with you – as maybe they will help someone.
WARNING: I am sharing that as an example – your final architecture can be different because of the different requirements of your customer – do not treat those diagrams as ‘the one and only correct’ architecture.
The first one is a diagram for standard Sitecore XP environment (click the image to open it in new tab – bigger size):
The second one is a diagram for Sitecore XP with JSS environment (click the image to open it in new tab – bigger size):
Basically that is all what I wanted to write today. If you would like to add something – please use comments section or find me on slack/twitter.
If you seek for tool to build own diagrams similar to those prepared by me – I recommend to check ‘draw.io’ tool available via Google Drive.