SDL India Tridion DX Summit 2019

Yet another successful, knowledgeable and full of fun SDL Tridion DX DEV Summit 2019,  where people from across the globe participated and shared their thoughts and knowledge.

I would like to thanks to the organizers SDL and all the sponsors and special thanks to all the members of the SDL India community, who made this event possible. People from the different regions joined in this event and shared their knowledge, experiences with others. The event was scheduled for 2 days, where more than 14 speakers participated and 16 sessions.

Highlights of this year SDL Tridion DX India Dev Summit   

Day 1, 29th March 2019

We started with celebrating the 10th anniversary of the MVP program where Sagar Hasamnis (Senior Director, SDL) presented his thoughts about this program and thanked the SDL community.

Jim Saunders (Chief Product Officer, SDL) Keynote speaker presented the vision and future of AI & The digital transformation of content he also demonstrates how this SDL helps us in the entire process from starting form Content Creator to Content Consumers.

After that, Ivo van de Lagemaat (Tridion DX Product Owner), he explained the SDL Tridion DX Roadmap and there was another session on the latest Extensions Management System where he explained the new Unified Extensions and its features, and how it will help in deployment and the best part is it will support the scale out. so if you have 2x CM and 4x Publishers it is a one-stop shop. I will be writing a separate blog on this starting with the Installation process, Features, and benefits.

Next speaker was Venu Ireddy (Solution Architect, SDL), Venu explained the features of DXA 2.1, and Search Module using Elastic Search and he also explained the difference between DXA 2.0 and 2.1.

After the amazing Lunch, it was Pankaj Gaur (Director, Content Bloom India) who started interacting with Audience with MentiMeter Game and then he presented how we can use SDL Tridion sites 9 feature Graphql with 8.5 also, we all loved it. 

The last two sessions were taken by Naveen (Senior Consultant, SDL)  presented the Tridion Docs, DD Module, and GUI using React and DXA  and Rajesh Kumar (Technical Architect, Global Solutions, SDL) presented the new Content API & GraphQL with React based Web application.

Day 2, 30th March 2019

SDL ecosystem from Wilhard Rass (VP Professional Services, SDL) gave us brief information about what is going on in the SDL Tridion world, what cloud service has to offer and about the Partners and their roles.

The Experience Manager DEMO and features this was explained by Venu Ireddy (Solution Architect, SDL). Content Editors are really going to like this new GUI.

After the first session on day 2, we decided to have some fun and we played “dumb-charade”.

Next, Presenter was Manish Mehmood(Technical Consultant, Content Bloom India), Manish showcase how to customize the exiting DXA Form Module.

I also got the opportunity to present and my topic was How to Scale-out Publishing in Tridion sites 9 using Split deployers (Deployers Endpoint, Deployer Workers, Redis, ActiveMQ).[here]

Mark Van der wal (Chief Architect Cloud Operations)  explained SDL cloud offerings, its advantages, and features.

Neetesh and Shalivahan (Technical Consultants, SDL) They explained the TridionDocs API integration this was the last session and we before all say goodbye, Event Closer by Sagar Hasamnis.   

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!

SDL Tridion Sites 9 Content API GraphQL with SDL WEB 8.5

Recently, One of our customers requested this, can we have new SDL Tridion Sites 9 feature GraphQL in SDL WEB 8.5. They have the following questions before we can proceed to POC.

The client is very excited about this new GraphQL feature as this will bring lots of improvement in their existing implementation. So, they wanted to know can we have this new feature in 8.5.

1. Can the CD side be upgraded to Sites 9 to have the GraphQL API, but the CM be left on Web 8.5?
2. Can only the content microservice be updated to Sites 9 (while leaving the Broker and Deployer on 8.5) 
3. Broker and Deployer also have to upgrade to 9?

We also need to think about downtown while we do all these. 

We did some investigation and come up with this idea/approach that we are not going to upgrade anything here just to have the new Content API feature (GraphQL).

So, We decided to Install only the Tridion Sites 9 Content Microservice and this will read the data from existing WEB 8.5 broker DB. NOTE:- We are still running the 8.5 services here no upgrade yet on CM or CD side.

With this approach, we were able to deliver what the client was requested from us. Now they are running their existing site using 8.5 content delivery and parallelly they started planning on building apps using 8.5 broker data using Tridion sites 9 GraphQL API. 

It was an interesting POC.

WEB 8.5 Content Service

Tridion Sites 9 Content Service running on same ENV and hitting 8.5 Broker to fetch the data.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing !!!

SDL Tridion Sites 9 New Feature - GraphQL

The New SDL Tridion sites 9 Content API uses GraphQL. GraphQL is a data fetching and Query Language for APIs. It was created by Facebook in 2012 and was open sourced in 2015.

Advantages of GraphQL

1. Instead of making multiple endpoints call in REST version here in the just single endpoint we can get the data(JSON).
2. Documentation is available online [click]
3. Online Community support [click]

GraphQL can be used with multiple deceives, like Facebook developed this to power their mobile application.GraphQL can be used in any application, web application or mobile app many different programming languages support GraphQL [learn more].

So, let get back to the content API, when you install the content API you will see a new endpoint.

content API

Now, let run some query to get the data but first, we need to install GraphQL client tool, I have GraphiQL installed [download]

Let's run some sample queries.

Page content

Page

Component Presentation

Component Presentation 

Publication

Publication

To learn more, how to structure GraphQL queries the documentation about GraphQL query is available on SDL docs site you can refer that.[link]

Happy coding and keep sharing !!!

SDL Tridion Sites 9 with DXA 2.0 on Windows 10

On Wednesday 7th NOV, SDL Announces the new release SDL Tridion Sites 9 and I got this opportunity to explore this new version and today we are going to install the SDL Tridion 9 on Windows 10 (Not Recommended/supported by SDL though).

The first Step is Install Database by running the PowerShell scripts. I have MSSQL Server 2016 SP2 Developer Edition installed on my local machine and the following DBs are installed.

Next is run the SDLTridionSites9.exe installer but this time from the command line.

Once the step is finished successfully you would able to browse the SDL Tridion Sites 9.

SDL Tridion Sites 9

Next Step is Installed the Content Delivery Microservice and for that go to the installation media folder and navigate to \Content Delivery\resources\quickinstall

First, we need to update the setenv.ps1 and after the run the quickinstall.ps1 

setenv

After the quickinstall.ps1 stop executing go and check the windows services to confirm the service are installed properly and they are running as well.

Microservice

and last the discovery-registration.jar to update the capabilities.

So we finally able to install SDL Tridion Sites 9 and all Microservice on Windows 10 but we also need to updte the Topology Manager to be able to start Publishing and for that, we need to open PowerShell in Administrator mode and run the following command in the sequence.

 > Add-TtmCdTopologyType -Id "TOPOLOGYTYPEID" -Name "TOPOLOGYTYPENAME" -EnvironmentPurposes “PURPOSES”  
 > Add-TtmCdEnvironment -Id "CDENVIRONMENTID" -EnvironmentPurpose "CDENVIRONMENTPURPOSE" -DiscoveryEndpointUrl "DISCOVERYENDPOINTURL"   
 > Add-TtmCdTopology -Id "TOPOLOGYID" -Name "TOPOLOGYNAME" -CdTopologyTypeId "TOPOLOGYTYPEID" -CdEnvironmentIds "CDENVIRONMENTIDS"  
 > Add-TtmWebsite -Id "WEBSITEID" -CdEnvironmentId "CDENVIRONMENTID" -BaseUrls “BASEURLS”  

Once that is done you can create a dummy publication create BPT map that BPT with Topology Type, create SG and page and test publishing.

I've installed the latest DXA CMS import, Downloaded the DXA .NET Framework and we also need DXA-Model-Service from SDL official GitHub, after some tweak in the code I was able to run the DXA web application.

DXA CMS import

DXA WEB Application 

Happy coding and Keep Sharing !!!

SDL Tridion Sites 9

SDL Tridion DX combines the strengths of SDL Tridion Sites 9 web content management, SDL Tridion Docs, and SDL Language services.

New Features in SDL Tridion Sites 9

1. Headless Customer Experience 
2. Dynamic content mashups with taxonomies
3. Experience optimization 
4. Regions for easy management of content-rich web pages
5. Quick and easy image editing
6. GraphQL-based content service
7. Docker container support for flexible deployment
8. SAML 2.0 support for single sign-on
9. Alibaba Cloud support for websites in China
10. Staged and rolling scenarios for smoother upgrades

Upgrade to SDL Tridion Sites 9

Upgrading to Sites 9 is easier to upgrade and it reduces risk and costs with zero downtime. The upgrade is available from Tridion 2013 SP1 HR2 and up.

Pre-Requisites for SDL Tridion Sites 9 CM and CD side

1. Content Manager supports Microsoft Windows server 2016 x64, .NET Framework 4.7.2, Java 8. IIS 10
2. The Content Delivery side is also known as UDP (Unified Delivery Platform) requires Windows server 2016, Linux/RHEL 6.9 and 7.4, .NET Framework 4.7.2 and Java 8.
3. Both CM and CD databases support SQL Server Azure, Amazon RDS, MS SQL Server 2016 SP1 / 2017

Stay tuned for more updates on Tridion 9 !!!

Configure Workers, ActiveMQ and Redis for Scalable Deployment in SDL WEB 8.5

This is in continuation of my previous blogs where we discussed how to install CM and publisher on a dedicated machine and then, we saw how we can implement scale out content deployment using workers, ActiveMQ and Redis. Today, we are going to see how to configure Workes, ActiveMQ and Redis.

To read more about last two blogs in this series:-

1. Scaling SDL WEB 8.5 Installing CM and Publisher on Dedicated Machines
2. Scaling Deployers in SDL WEB 8.5

In order to configure the scalable content deployment, we need Deployer(Endpoint) and Deployer-Worker.

Deployer Installation Media

Pre-requisites, we need to install ActiveMQ and Redis

1. How to install Redis please check my previous blogs.
2. Download the Apache ActiveMQ
1. Unzip the package in a suitable location and from command line execute command activemq start.
2. Open your browser and navigate to the Admin Console at http://localhost:8161

Next step is to configure Deployer-Endpoint and Deployer-Workers Microservices.

1. Both these services are required to update the deployer_conf.xml and Deployer-Workers required cd_storage_conf.xml.
2. In the Deployer-Endpoint installation media open deployer_conf.xml.
1. Here we need to update the <BinaryStorage> node and point this to Redis data store.

   

   Configure Redis in Deployer-Endpoint

2. we need to configure the <State> node. so that workers know where to update the status of a job and the endpoint knows from where to get the status of the job.

   

   Configure State

3. Next, is we need to configure ActiveMQ, we also need to make sure that all the other <Queue> entries related to FileSystem are commented out.

   

   Configure Apache ActiveMQ JMS

4. Save and close the deployer-conf.xml file and use this same file for Workers as well.
5. Next step is to configure the cd_storage_conf.xml for Deployer-Workers only.
1. Here we need to update the <Storage> node with the Broker Database details. The worker will deploy the content on this DB.
2. Update the License file path.
3. Save and close the file and we can use this same file on the second Deployer-Worker.
6. Now, we need to configure the ports for Deployer-Endpoint and Deployer-Workers.
7. Last run the installService.ps1 from the Deployer-Endpoint folder and from Deployer-Worker. You need to run the command more than once depending upon the number of Deployer-Workers you want.

   

   Deployer-Endpoint and Deployer-Workers are installed  

8. We have all the services configure and up-running.
9. The final step is to register your Deployer (Endpoint) with your Discovery Service and run the discovery-registration.jar.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing

Scaling Deployers in SDL WEB 8.5

This is in continuation of my previous post where we discussed how to set up Publisher and CM on a dedicated machine to improve the publishing efficiency click here to Read More.

Today we are going to see how to scale out Deployers, using multiple deployers and workers.

High-Level Achrciture diagram 

Steps:

1. Content is passed to the Deployer after a user Publishes an item in the CME.
2. The Deployer Endpoint passes the Transport Package (.zip file) to the defined Binary Storage (File System or Redis Database). We are using Redis right now.
3. The Deployer Endpoint also passes the item to the Queue in ActiveMQ (JMS).
4. ActiveMQ triggers an event that informs the Worker Deployers that a new package has been received.
5. The first available Worker Deployer picks up the job from the Queue and contacts the Binary Storage to get the respective Transport Package.
6. After rendering the Transport Package the Worker Deployer passes the item to the Broker Database.
7. The Deployer then gets the status of the job from the Broker Database, which is updated by the Worker Deployer responsible for that job.

In the next blog, we'll see how to configure Workers, ActiveMQ and Redis.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing 

Multiple Destination Publishing Using - MIRROR strategy in SDL WEB 8.5

What is Multiple Destination Publishing?

Multiple destination publishing means that the transport service can publish to multiple deployer destinations (if you have more than one deployer).

DEFAULT strategy means that there will be only one deployer only one URL is registered in discovery-service).

MIRROR strategy means that you can have more than one deployer (multiple URLs are registered in discovery-service) and transport service will send the package to all of the deployer URLs register in discovery service.

How to configure Multiple Destination Publishing?

We can do this by defining the strategy for the DeployerCapability which is registered in the Discovery Microservice cd_storage.conf.xml:

If you have set up multiple Content Deployer destinations, do the following in order to setup MIRROR strategy:

1. Ensure that this Role element has a Strategy attribute, set to MIRROR.
2. Inside the Role element, insert a Urls subsection, itself containing two or more Url subelements. Each Url element must have a Value attribute, set to the URL of the destination, and can have a DestinationName attribute, set to the name of this destination

Strategy Attribute 

This Role has one Capability URL (value DEFAULT, to be specified in the Url attribute) 

or multiple ones value MIRROR, to be specified in the URLs subsection. Defaults to DEFAULT is not specified.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing !!!

SDL Web Hackathon 2018 - Published Summary Plugin

Published Summary Alchemy-Plug In project has been conceptualized and initiated for SDL Tridion Developer Summit, Amsterdam Hackathon for the year 2018.

The entry for Hackathon has been entered with the team name - "CB Ke Cheete" and for the project "Published Summary" Alchemy plugin.

Team Members 
The team - "CB ke Cheete" - having meanings as "Cheetahs of CB", comprises of three young and dynamic Content Bloom professionals. The team has following members:

• Pankaj Gaur - Director, Content Bloom | SDL Certified Dev and BA | SDL Tridion/Web MVP
• Hem Kant - Consultant, Content Bloom | SDL Certified Dev and BA | SDL Web MVP
• Priyank Gupta - Consultant, Content Bloom | SDL Certified Dev

This plugin is intended to do the following:

1. Get all items within a publication, folder or structure group published to one or more Publishing Target Types.
• Let's say if we select Publication then the response will be all Published  Pages, Components, and Categories in that publication.
• If we select this plugin from Structure group, then we will have all the published pages in the structure group and same goes for Folder selection all Published ComponentTemplates and Components.
2. Republish, Unpublish and open a specific item.
3. Republish or Unpublish multiple items on their respective Publishing Target Types.
4. Export in CSV.
5. Filter based on Publishing Target Types, Item Type (Component, Pages etc.), and Published Date Range.
6. Sorting based on Title, Published Date, Published By, Targets, and TCM URIs.
7. Searching.
8. Summary of published building blocks across all publishing target types.

The Published Summary Alchemy Plug-in can help in following scenarios:

1. You want to export a list of all published items from Tridion for a specific website (or for a specific structure group/folder within a website) in CSV format.
2. You want to see/export all published items from Tridion for a specific Publishing Target Type and compare among all publishing target types for a specific CMS instance.
3. You need to know, what all need to be published from Tridion in order to make a specific website up and running similar to an existing website.
4. You need to know a summary of "how many" specific items are published from Tridion to individual publishing target types.
5. You need to know about "delta" of published items across publishing target types of a CMS instance.
6. You need to sync your non-live websites with the live websites in terms of content managed from Tridion.

Published Summary

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing !!!

Scaling SDL WEB 8.5 Installing CM and Publisher on Dedicated Machines

One of the biggest advantages of using SDL WEB (Tridion) is its scalability features. Last week, I was working on a task where I need to implement/Configure highly scalable SDL WEB 8.5 infrastructure.

Today, we are going to see one of them and that is "How to install CM and Publishers on Dedicated machines" to improve publishing efficiency.

Step I followed to configure CME and Publisher on a dedicated machine.

1. Install all the core components on your content manager server
2. Fill all the Database/ Website/ Topology related details.
3. Once your setup is completed and you are able to browse CME go to windows service and disable the following services from content manager server. 
1. Tridion Content Distributor Transport Service
2. Tridion Content Manager Publisher Service
3. This will stop the content manager server from doing the publishing

Set up Publisher servers

1. Run the installer again on Publisher servers.
2. Fill all the DB details and user accounts details.
3. Transfer the cd_transport_conf.xml file from Content Manager Server to the same location on the new Publisher Servers.
4. On Publisher servers we need to stop/disable the following services.
1. Tridion Content Manager Workflow Agent Service
2. Tridion Content Manager Service Host Service
3. Tridion Content Manager Search Indexer
4. Tridion Content Manager Batch Processor Service
5. Restart the following services 
1. Tridion Content Distributor Transport Service
2. Tridion Content Manager Publisher Service

Now, new publisher servers are ready to publish and transport the package to the deployers. We can scale this further depending upon the requirement. 

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing !!! 

SDL Web, Docker and Cloud Containerization

What are containers

•       Containers are a way to package software in a format that can run isolated on a shared operating system.

•       A container wraps an application in a complete package that contains everything to run the application – code, libraries, dependencies, runtimes.

•       A container image is a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings. Available for both Linux and Windows-based apps, the containerized software will always run the same, regardless of the environment

•       Containers isolate software from its surroundings, for example, differences between development and staging environments and help reduce conflicts between teams running different software on the same infrastructure.

What is Docker

•       Docker is a leading platform for Containerization of the application

•       Docker allows you to package all pieces of your application into a single container so that your application will run same everywhere without worrying about the environment dependency and complexities.

•       Docker is a tool that is designed to benefit both developers and system administrators, making it a part of many DevOps.

•       For developers, it means that they can focus on writing code without worrying about the system that it will ultimately be running on.

•       In a way, Docker is a bit like a virtual machine. But unlike a virtual machine, rather than creating a whole virtual operating system.

•       It is a tool designed to make it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. Containers allow a developer to package up an application with all of the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one package.

Containers Vs Virtual Machine

•       Containers are an abstraction at the app layer that packages code and dependencies together. 

•       Containers take up less space than VMs

•       Virtual machines (VMs) are an abstraction of physical hardware turning one server into many servers

•       Each VM includes a full copy of an operating system. VMs can also be slow to boot

Docker Advantages

•          Automation of repetitive and tedious deployment tasks.

•          Faster onboarding of new resource.

•          Faster shipment of new features and fixes without downtime.

•          Easy and real-time scaling of application.

•          Easy Distribution, Share, and Configuration of applications.

•          High security out of the box.

•          Improve efficiency of DevOps.

•          Modernize traditional apps faster and without investing huge without going through complete SDLC.

Docker Disadvantages

•          Better performance than Virtual Machines but slower than Bare-Metal.

•          Isolation and security are lesser as compared to the Virtual Machines.

•          Storing data such that it is available even after the container is shut down is quite complicated.

•       Not all applications benefit from containers – Cannot be blindly adopted for each and every application.

 Comparison between AWS, Google, and Azure Cloud Containerization

AWS Cloud – The AWS Cloud provides Amazon EC2 Container Services (Amazon ECS) which support container application and so let you run your Docker containers on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.

Google Cloud – Google offers Google Container Engine which lets you run Docker containers on Google Cloud.

MS Azure – Microsoft also offers Azure container service to allow deployment, management, and execution of Container applications.

Docker and SDL WEB 

With the release of SDL Web, the Dockerization becomes quite easy

SDL Web is quite Docker friendly because of the following:

·         Micro-service based architecture.

·         Parameterized config files.

             ·       License-free web application.

SDL WEB – Advantages of using Docker

•         Great time and effort saving for DevOps
•         Complexities of SDL CD Deployment is encapsulated and allows the non-Tridion experts to do the deployment.
•         Scaling of servers is quite easy.
•         The overall cost of resources will be optimized as compared to Virtual Machines.

Quick Links to learn more on SDL WEB with Docker.

http://hem-kant.blogspot.com/2017/08/how-to-customize-dxa-theme-step-2.html
http://hem-kant.blogspot.com/2017/11/storage-extension-using-elasticsearch-and-docker.html
http://hem-kant.blogspot.com/2018/03/run-sdl-dxa-inside-windows-docker.html

   Happy Coding and Keep Sharing !!!!

SDL WEB and TLS 1.2 or higher

Are you still using the SSL/early TLS protocols? 

Do you work with partners or customers who haven’t yet started the migration away from SSL/early TLS to a more secure encryption protocol? It's time to say goodbye to SSL/early TLS and reducing the risk of being breached.

On 30 June 2018?

30 June 2018 is the deadline for disabling SSL/early TLS and implementing a more secure encryption protocol – TLS 1.1 or higher (TLS v1.2 is strongly encouraged) in order to meet the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

What is TLS?

TLS stands for Transport Layer Security and is the successor to SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). However, both these terms are commonly thrown around a lot online and you might see them both referred to as simply SSL.  TLS provides secure communication between web browsers and servers. The connection itself is secure because symmetric cryptography is used to encrypt the data transmitted. The keys are uniquely generated for each connection and are based on a shared secret negotiated at the beginning of the session, also known as a TLS handshake. Many IP-based protocols, such as HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, FTP support TLS to encrypt data.

In my last project, we faced this issue where client's security and infra team enabled TLS 1.3 on servers and while implementing SDL WEB 8.5 we start getting this issue.

Issue because of TLS 1.3

After investigating and consulting it with SDL we've found the solution for this, SDL WEB 8.5 supports till 1.2 and for that, we need to make some adjustment in the registry. Below are the registry entry details that fixed the algorithm and TLS issue for us.

TLS 1.0

TLS 1.0 Client

TLS 1.1 Client

TLS 1.2 client

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v4.0.30319]"SchUseStrongCrypto"=dword:00000001

New Entry Required  

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v4.0.30319]"SchUseStrongCrypto"=dword:00000001

New Entry Required

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing !!!