Tech Blog Menu

One of my responsibilities, as a client executive for our Coveo for Sitecore user-base, is to help our clients optimize the value of their Coveo deployment, by leveraging all the features offered by our platform. I have unfortunately seen too many examples of customers exploiting only the search mechanisms of Coveo, passing by the opportunity to ramp up their experience from Advanced Enterprise Search to actual relevance and insight provider. A few ingredients can act as catalysts for this transition, among others, the Usage Analytics platform and the Coveo Machine Learning solution. This blog post relates the story of a real Coveo for Sitecore Cloud client, which we will conveniently call Client X, starting their journey towards automated, highly relevant content.

Coveo for Sitecore 4.0 was released this spring and allowed Coveo for Sitecore users to move their index to the cloud, reducing maintenance effort and opening the way for the advanced cloud features, such as Coveo Machine Learning and the query pipelines. Integrating Coveo for Sitecore to your Sitecore solution is now easier than ever. You can download the package directly on the Coveo website and follow the installation wizard in Sitecore. This is great to try the product with a trial organization, but how do you manage a paid license? I received several questions in the past few months about environment setup and license management. In this blog post, I will try to clarify a few things.

The Coveo Cloud Push API is a must-have feature that allows Coveo Cloud to index on-premise content management systems, including metadata and security permissions. While most content management systems include a built-in search engine, they are often underpowered, incapable of combining content from multiple repositories, and lack advanced features like Coveo's Usage Analytics and Coveo Machine Learning.

The Coveo R&D delegation just came back from Dreamforce in San Francisco and we had a fantastic week. Coveo sends a pretty large contingent every year, which includes part of our teams working directly or indirectly on our Coveo for Salesforce product. One thing of great importance to me is that we finally got to announce our upcoming freemium offering, which will allow our customers and partners to use Coveo’s advanced UIs, Usage Analytics, and machine learning based ranking at a very low price (even for free, in some cases!). I’ve been working on this project on and off for almost a year now (starting from a late night prototype), and it has since grown into a full product. I can’t wait to see people using this in the field.

In July 2016, the Coveo Search UI, also known as the Coveo JavaScript Search Framework, became open-source. This means that, from now on, anyone will be able to go on GitHub, take the Coveo Search UI, and modify the code itself to adapt it to their own needs.

The excellent Sitecore PowerShell Extension allows you to return items from your index and display its properties in a friendly manner, all of this at a much faster speed than using the Content Search API. This is, of course, just one function of that rich extension.

When I try to code, I always ask myself what’s right and what’s wrong about software quality. Sometimes, those questions aren’t easy to answer, but as software developers, we must answer them. Over my short time (4 years) as a developer, I developed certain universal and basic interrogations. I found some by reading online and others by questioning myself. When answered correctly, they can give you a hint at the quality of a software.

We recently decided to move our functional tests stack from python to Java, mainly to make coding them easier (our project’s backend is coded in Java) and thus increase the number of tests getting written. We needed a few things to make this possible and one of them was a complete and comprehensive Java client for the Usage Analytics API. Since a lot of the Java API clients we use internaly are built with Netflix’s Feign, I decided to give it a go.

We have many interns right now at Coveo. For the summer, this process starts in February when we get over one hundred applications through multiple universities. All those applications had one thing in common, The Resume. Over the years, I’ve read hundreds of them and have therefore accumulated a good list of what you should and shouldn’t do.

When writing JavaScript, I spend a lot of time fixing simple mistakes. Unlike compiled languages you are more likely to make mistakes. It is easy for syntax errors to sneak into your code without realizing it until you actually try and run your code. How many times have I got an undefined variable because I refactored some code and forgot to rename that variable. Even though it has been more than 5 years since I wrote my first Hello World. The feeling remains the same – Why did I make this mistake again ?