Enabling Verndale's Verndale.ImpersonateUsers package in Episerver's Foundation CMS Application

I recently needed to enable user impersonation for a prospective customer who wanted a better way to preview personalization for more complex scenarios where the in-editor Visitor Group Preview wasn't quite sufficient. This is for a portal, where every user would be authenticated, so a fantastic workaround would be to simply impersonate a user. This may not solve for behavioral personalization, but theirs is primarily built around roles and profiles.

For example, what if we want to preview the home page as a member who belongs to the Human Resources team AND who also happens to be a new hire (< 30 days). If you had a visitor group that required both, and targeted it, that might work. But in this case, these are two separate visitor groups.

My chosen best option was to use a tool built by one of Episerver's best partners, Verndale. Aptly named Verndale.ImpersonateUsers. It's worth mentioning that Verndale has put a LOT of really nice add-ons in the marketplace and they're worth checking out.

There were a couple of bumps getting impersonation to work in Foundation, so here's how to get up and running.

Delivering Static HTML5 Apps from Zip Files in Episerver's Media Library using Partial Routing

Yeah, so the title seems like a mouthful but it's really quite simple. A prospective customer of mine wanted to know if we could provide a better way of uploading some in-house developed HTML5 apps (large, searchable libraries of content made by another team, but I won't go too deep into why they're not just putting that content directly into the CMS).

Their current solution involves a drawn-out process of replicating folders in SharePoint, uploading each folder's files, go back, rinse, & repeat. Unfortunately, these apps are also updated every few weeks which means that the whole process must be repeated for every app, every month, every year. Sounds like a lot of work to me, so I wrote up a quick proof-of-concept solution that I think tidies up the process nicely.

For this project, I'm going to use Foundation as the base site and add in a couple of models and a partial router to get these things working. Let's get started!

Personalize Content by Your Visitor's Current Weather Conditions

Over the past couple of years this need has come up in more and more of my demos and I decided to formalize some demo-ware code I had written previously.

Personalization based on weather isn't a new idea. There's some weather integration in the Alloy Demo Kit repo and I have seen weather personalization in other demos. However, it's high time this was just as easy and available as any other criteria samples.

Once you start to propose the idea - and start building it - the number of cases for this personalization start to grow dramatically.

Windows 2008 Support is Ending; What's Next for Ektron Customers?

With the end of support for Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 coming up in early 2020, customers of both Episerver and Ektron platforms may find themselves somewhat relieved to know that there are positive options that will help you move past this concern and onto a more up-to-date system with more capabilities and, for some, a more reliable and consistent upgrade path.

My colleague, David Knipe, wrote a wonderful piece addressing EOL for Windows 2008 for Episerver customers running older versions, so, naturally, I decided to piggy-back on his awesome work (as usual) and provide similar coverage for Ektron customers. For implications of retiring support for a specific version of Windows, here are David's comments.

If you are running an older version of Episerver then your site may be running on a version of Windows that is affected. This means you may be in a situation where Microsoft does not support the operating system your Episerver site is running. This means the operating system itself may be vulnerable to security threats or bugs in Windows that will not be fixed. 

If you are running a recent version of Episerver then you are probably not affected, however some older versions of Episerver could run on Windows Server 2008 so you will need to check if you are affected using the list below.

Ektron customers who are running older versions or perhaps have updated the CMS without simultaneously updating the server operating system to newer versions, similar concerns will apply.

The following Ektron versions will be directly impacted:

• Ektron CMS 8.0.x
• Ektron CMS 8.5
• Ektron CMS 8.6

The following Ektron versions may be affected. These versions support Windows 2012, allowing you to buy a little more time. Windows 2012 support is currently scheduled to expire in October of 2023.

• Ektron CMS 8.7
• Ektron CMS 9.0 
• Ektron CMS 9.1
• Ektron CMS 9.2

Versions listed above include all patches and service packs.

If you are running on an older version of Ektron than 8.0, then you may already be affected by an end-of-life for your current operating system and therefore be more open to vulnerabilities that are unlikely to be patched by Microsoft.

Your Options for Ektron

Upgrade. At time of writing, the only Ektron version supported on the latest version of Windows (2016) is Ektron CMS 9.3, released on June 26, 2018. If you plan to stay on Ektron, then I recommend initiating a plan to ensure you're on the latest version of Ektron running on Windows 2016 servers by January 24, 2020.

Accept the risk. Sunsetting support is not the same as shutting the server off. Both the server and your version of Ektron will continue to run and operate. However, you will assume ever-increasing risk by running your digital applications in an environment that will no longer receive security patches and updates.

Your Options for Episerver

If you're running one of the versions of Ektron impacted by the sunsetting of Windows 2008 and are interested in the move to Episerver, then you should develop a plan for moving your digital applications to Episerver by January 24, 2020. 

Doing less, for example, applying a minor upgrade to Ektron and putting it onto Windows 2012 servers, is a simple way to buy some time but may be wasted effort and capital if you plan to move to Episerver anyway.

When you move to Episerver, you have two options:

1. Migrate to the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud Service. The cloud service removes the need and risk of maintaining your own servers and ensuring they're up-to-date while making it easier to upgrade and adopt the latest Episerver has to offer in CMS, Commerce, Email, and Personalization in an entirely Episerver-managed cloud.
2. Migrate to the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud using your own infrastructure, whether hosted internally or through a 3rd party provider. This model is similar to self-hosting Ektron in that you (again) accept the responsibility for ensuring all systems are kept up-to-date. 

What Should You Do Now?

Contact your Episerver Account Manager or, if you don't know who your Account Manager may be, then your local Episerver office.

Sign Up for the Ascend 2018 2nd Annual "Nerd Crawl"

Last year, I put together a little group to hit the town during Episerver Ascend 2017. At the time, I was working with our partner, Brightfind, and managed to pull together about 15 people to join me on a tour of the pubs and sports bars in walking distance of the resort.

This year... wow has this little enterprise grown! I sit here now typing about a get-together that has officially doubled in size (so far) and, well, I'd love to have more of you join in on the fun.

If you're already sold on joining, follow the magic hyperlink. If you'd like to know more, read on!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/episerver-ascend-nerd-crawl-non-nerds-welcome-tickets-43725474070

Making Episerver Categories More...Useful.

Episerver's categories work fine for what they do, but they're crammed into the legacy Admin area and, compared to the rest of the platform, feel a bit dated to me.

Coming from the Ektron world, the comparative Taxonomy functionality was very front-and-center. While Ektron's eventually came to be over-used (and abused) in any number of implementations, categorization of content using pre-defined lists and structures is still important to many organizations.

If you need the hierarchy, then Episerver's Category property works well for that. But sometimes I don't really need hierarchy so much as I need to manage somewhat flat lists of categories - not all of which are really applicable to all content.

In addition, I may sometimes want to allow multiple selections from that list while at other times it needs to be an exclusive selection. Enter ISelectionFactory.

What follows is a bit of a thought experiment that shows how to use an external data source to feed a selection factory while experimenting with using Episerver Categories as the source.

Hijacking Episerver Find's Unified Search Text

I'm going to sort of build onto @kennygutierrez's recent quick-tip post regarding limiting indexing with your developer Find index with a Find tip of my own.

In the past few weeks, I've had a need to inject my own logic into how Find aggregates text for its UnifiedSearch. I won't get into the specifics of what I was doing (it would raise some questions as well as some eyebrows, to be honest), but I'd like to share the solution I found in the Episerver forums (sorry that I didn't save which post and therefore can't credit the poster, though I certainly owe them a drink).

There will only be a couple of short code snippets with this as it's really an elegantly simple, yet quite powerful solution.