December 20, 2017

Tutorial for Tridion Powershell commands

In my last blog post, i demonstrated the setup of Powershell for beginners. Now i will discuss more commands of Tridion Powershell.

List of commands: following Power shell command will return all the commands available in Tridion Powershell module.

PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-Command -Module Tridion-CoreService

  • Clear-TridionCoreServiceSettings
  • Close-TridionCoreServiceClient  
  • Convert-TridionApplicationData  
  • Get-TridionUser - there is also Get-TridionUsers which is not listed by get-command
  • Disable-TridionUser             
  • Enable-TridionUser              
  • Get-TridionApplicationData      
  • Get-TridionCoreServiceClient    
  • Get-TridionCoreServiceSettings  
  • Get-TridionGroup                
  • Get-TridionGroups               
  • Get-TridionItem                 
  • Get-TridionPublications         
  • Get-TridionPublicationTarget    
  • Get-TridionPublicationTargets   
  • Get-TridionPublishTransaction                
  • New-TridionGroup                
  • New-TridionItem                 
  • New-TridionPublication          
  • New-TridionUser                 
  • Publish-TridionItem      
Lets try few of the commands to unleash power of Powershell 

Get-TridionPublications:
Above command it will list all the publication details with lots of additional information.  You can also filter the the number of fields to show and in nice format. below example show just Title, Id and PublicationType.








User Based Operations:


To get all users those are not currently active. PS module make is very easy to fetch those details and take action if required. Firstly all the Users are fetched then filtered on rows, then on columns respectively.

PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-TridionUsers | where  {$_.IsEnabled -eq $false} | select Title, IsEnabled, Description

Title                                                                 IsEnabled Description
-----                                                                 --------- -----------
SDLDEVCMS\rkum                                                      False Raj Kumar

Enabling all the disabled users at once:

Get-TridionUsers | where  {$_.IsEnabled -eq $false} | Enable-TridionUser

otherwise if you just use Enable-TridionUser command, you have to pass one by one to enable/Disable the users


Publish Transactions Operations:
To get the status of transactions, you manipulate the results on various parameters

Following command with list out all the failed transactions in publishing queue. 

Get-TridionPublishTransaction | where {$_.State -eq "Failed"} | select Title, Id, State

List out tranactions grouped by State

PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-TridionPublishTransaction | Group-object State




December 19, 2017

Load balancing DXA and CD servers in Web 8

With new micro-services architecture its very efficient to distribution of workloads of different servers. Dxa servers aka Presentation servers can be load balanced separately.



Features of above architecture:
  • Works best in fail-over scenarios. if any service is down other available can take the load
  • Presentation machines can be added or removed on the go without worrying about setting up the CD servers.
  • Its cost efficient scenario.

I tested above above on Microsoft Azure, presentation servers were load balanced on Application gateway.
and CD servers were load balanced using Azure Load balanced.

How does it work?

Settings:
  • DXA web.config is configured with IP address of Load-balancer for Discovery service.  
  • Required capabilities listed in Discovery service has URLs of Load balancer. 
  • Discovery DB is shared among all the discovery servers.
  • Load Balancer is aware of available nodes of services.
when request comes to Application gateway, AG get it processed from one of the available DXA server. if Dxa app is already loaded and request pages is already processed and cached it can be processed completly on DXA machine itself.

otherwise Discovery Service URL is hit which goes to internal load balancer. Load balancer get this executed from one of CD server. AS discovery had configured address of Load-balancer for Content Service, request once again go to LB. it then redirects it to available Content service node. so a request is completed.

With use of Akamai and other caching strategies e.g page caching or donut caching and other tridion caching techniques CD servers might get reduced load after first hit and boot time. DXA servers are easy to Auto-scale.

December 12, 2017

Introduction to Tridion Powershell

What is PowerShell:
Windows PowerShell is a Windows command-line shell designed especially for system administrators. Windows PowerShell includes an interactive prompt and a scripting environment that can be used independently or in combination.
Windows PowerShell is built on top of the .NET Framework common language runtime (CLR) and the .NET Framework, and accepts and returns .NET Framework objects. Its also extensible.

Introduction to Tridion Powershell:


Peter Kjaer has developed Tridion Powershell Module  which contains cmdlets that allow you to talk to the Tridion Content Manager using the Core Service. This is very powerful and fast way to access Tridion system without opening CME. It Currently supported Tridion versions: 2011 SP1, 2013 GA, 2013 SP1 and Web 8.

Setting up Tridion Powershell:

Open Powershell windows as administrator. 
iwr "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pkjaer/tridion-powershell-modules/master/CoreService/Installation/Install.ps1" | iex











Tridion Powershell module will be installed with above success message.

Verify Settings:
Run a command to test the environment. if there are issues in settings you may can following error



Get-TridionCoreServiceSettings will give you current settings its using. 
but ensure these settings are as per your environment

In my case, Coreservice was running at another port, so commands were failing. so you might have to update the setting as per need. 

Update Settings:

PS C:\Windows\system32> help set-TridionCoreServiceSettings

NAME
    Set-TridionCoreServiceSettings

SYNOPSIS
    Changes the settings used to connect to the Core Service.
when 
SYNTAX
    Set-TridionCoreServiceSettings [[-HostName] <String>] [[-Version] <String>] [[-Credential] <PSCredential>]
    [[-ConnectionType] <String>] [[-ConnectionSendTimeout] <String>] [-Persist] [<CommonParameters>]

Following command changes the hostName on my environment. You can update as per your enviornnment.

Set-TridionCoreServiceSettings -HostName localhost:91

after the setting are done, retry following command

Get-TridionPublications to get list of publications in the system.

December 08, 2017

Whats up SDL

SDL Web 8.5 was last major release by Sdl around start of this year. This year has been very challenging in IT for everyone. SDL ranked as Challenger in Gartner's magic quadrant. Sdl sold its  non-core products: “Social Intelligence, Campaigns, and SDL Fredhopper to focus on core.

SDL is working hard and there are number of changes happening under the hood, and impressive Roadmap.

Lets start with Major change:


SDL Tridion DX


SDL rebrands SDL Web to SDL Tridion Sites and SDL Knowledge Center to SDL Tridion Docs, and "Tridion" is back and i am so happy like any other community member.



SDL Tridion DX combines SDL Tridion Sites (WCM) and  DITA-based Structured Content Management (SDL Tridion Docs) and translation technology supported by artificial intelligence (AI)

Check Press release for more information on above

Graphene UI: is awesome, Check this Future UX & UI blogs to check the impressive work that is happening. I am impressed!!

GraphQL services: GraphQL will be replacing OData services.

Integration & connectors: As per connector strategy SDL is developing connectors for lots of products, tools and services.
e.g Sales force marketing cloud, Marketo, Microsoft dynamics, Experience Regions, SDL ETS on AWS and many more eg. Image Editing with in CMS

Salesforce Community Cloud integration: this is just released check out.(updated after release)

DXA Form Builder Modules:


Form builder is always requested by clients but SDL gets X in the capability matrix, , but i just to get know Niclas Cedermalm from SDL just released form builder DXA module with name "Alpaca Forms", Also its open source. I am writing it here for community awareness. i will write a separate blog on it. It currently supports DXA 1.7 more supporting version later.

HTML5 forms module is based on Twitter Bootstrap and Alpaca.JS which uses JSON and inturn used to generate form on Delivery side.

Forms are CMS component like any other component and can be added to pages. End Points can be configured to APIs. Customization is also possible as you can write your custom code to pass data to required ice. The Forms DXA module also comes with a built-in controller that can send form data to different endpoint such as DB, e-mail and CRM.

Personalization:
SDL is redesigning the whole experience for personalization and it looks very promising.

Prescriptive Personalization:  this is based on predefined  rules by author.
Adaptive Personalization: Machine language based personalization.