A Website by Richard Feich

Seems obvious doesn’t it? Well, it’s branded with my name; that’s a clue.  All of the opinions, thoughts, photography, artwork, and code presented on this website are solely mine [unless otherwise stated].  I do not represent any businesses, organizations, or my employer in this regard. I do not to make money  and have no commercial interests with this website. This website is simply a platform for self expression.

If you have issues with the content of this website, feel free to log-in and post comments (be polite) or send me an email; there is a contact form on the “About” page. Please do not contact my family, friends, or my employer with issues regarding this website – that’s not cool.

 The information on this website is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

I reserve the right to publish or delete [for any reason] comments posted on this website. All comments will be approved before publication.

All original content is copyrighted. All content is subject to change without notice.

You should not drive or operate machinery while reading this blog. Your actual mileage may vary.

[I’ll write a better disclaimer later; but this gets to the main point for now]

This beach is absolutely beautiful; great for swimming and snorkeling. Early morning we would see surfers catching waves on the other side out a bit where the waves break. In the winter the south shore [where Poipu lives] is generally calmer while the north shore roars with intensity, we have seen it. The sand on this beach is golden and very soft…you just love to wiggle your toes in it. Right now it’s about 5 degrees in Chicagoland, and it snowed almost every day this month so far. I want to go back to Kauai! This shot was taken in the morning just after an early breakfest at the Sheraton. For a better view, enlarge your browser window and “click it”.

“click-it for the big picture”

While in Kauai we stayed at the Sheraton which embraces the Poipu Beach on the south shore. The Poipu Beach is arguably one of the very best beaches on the island; totally user-friendly, especially in the winter. It consists of three beautiful crescents of golden sand accented with black lava rocks. The shot below was taken just near west edge of the beach; painted with a beautiful sunset accompanied by a warm tropical breeze while I enjoyed a Mai Tai…perfection! Today in Chicagoland it’s -25 to -30 degrees fahrenheit with the wind chill-factor — ouch!

I wish you all the very best; and many more to come. Lookin’ forward to tippin’ a few with ya. Have a good one!

Aloha. I recently returned from a fantastic vacation on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. This was my first visit; I fell in love with this place. This trip was a spiritually significant experience for me.

The photo below was taken while hiking on the Kalalau trail which provided a spectacular view of the Kalalau Valley along the Na Pali coast on the north shore of the island.  Please click the image for a larger view (900 x 602):

“click it”

Imagine a straight forward informational website of around 25 pages including a few special features like an events calendar, publications section, contact form, and a simple membership management piece with maybe 40 members…and yes, it has an intergrated Content Management System — Sitecore. Sitecore is like an iceberg where the end-User Interface is just the “tip” as they say. The CMS functionality and databases (8 in this case) which exist below the surface is massive.  This relatively simple informational website built with Sitecore requires more then 5 Gigabytes of disk space, yes that’s right 5 GB. Something to consider when building with this system.

Lately I have been involved with migrating websites from one production server to another. All of these websites are CMS applications with databases on the back-end; implemented with Microsoft Technologies. This post will discuss the database aspect of website migration. There are a number of different methods to copy or move a database: detach-move-attach, backup-move-restore, export-import, DTS, Copy Database Wizard. Since we are not only moving the databases, we are also upgrading from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005, I decided to give Copy Database Wizard (CDW) a try…it’s a tool under SQL Management Studio full version. In theory CDW sounds great, but in practice you’ll pull your hair out getting it to work in some cases. CDW is very finicky about set-up, permissions, etc.

Preparation

• Check the source database ownership. If needed, change it to an account with sysadmin membership. For this example I used the sa account. To change DB ownership execute the following code in Query Analyzer:

use [currentdatabase]
go
sp_changedbowner 'yourusername', 'true'
go

• Check the source database for orphaned users and resolve or delete them. Here is an excellent article about orphaned users along with a Stored Procedure for identifying them:
  http://vyaskn.tripod.com/troubleshooting_orphan_users.htm
  Orphaned users will cause a failure at the destination during the DB copy.
• On the source server add an entry to the LMHOSTS database file which is the IP address and NTLM name of the destination server. For additional info: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314108
• To avoid data loss or inconsistency, you must be sure there are no active sessions attached to the database being moved or copied. It’s probably a good idea to do it off-hours and take the website off line during the migration.
• Make sure the SQL Server Agent has the proper user account setting…should be set to the Local System Account (NT AUTHORITY\System).

Process

1. Login to the destination server with admin credentials, fire-up Management studio and the CDW tool. Right click on a db, CWD is under tasks. CDW will step you through various screens to build the SSIS[DTS] package.
2. Specify the Source SQL Server by name or IP, use SQL Server Authentication, enter credentials of the saaccount – ID and password.
3. Specify the SQL Destination by name or IP, use SQL Server Authentication, enter sa account credentials of the sa account — ID and password.
4. Select Transfer Method, use the SQL Management Object method. This will allow the DBs to stay online and operational during the copy.
5. Select databases to be copied — use the copy checkbox…don’t move it.
6. Configure destination database. For this example I just used the default destination name and location. I also selected “drop any database at destination if one exists” to overwrite it.
7. Select the database objects. Leave the logins selected and nothing else. This will bring over the logins, so your connection strings should work at the destination with only a server name change.
8. Configure Package screen. Select logging options. Sometimes it’s good to direct logging to a file for better debugging.
9. Schedule package or run immediately — I have been just running immediately.
10. Verify choices — go back if needed.
11. Run the job — all steps should be all green [pass] or study the log file if debugging is needed.
12. Refresh Management Studio database list. Right click top server node and select refresh. The new databases should now appear. Check tables, users, etc.
13. Run sp_updatestats against the database on the destination server to
    update statistics and make sure that the copied database is performing optimally.
14. Update connection strings and test application.

The Ridges Sanctuary in Door County, Wisconsin is one of my favorite places visit with Mother Nature.

The Good:

• Built with native ASP.NET V2.0,  C#, XML, and XSLT
• An excellent and well documented API 
• A highly customizable system built upon an open development platform
• An active developer network with a responsive online forum
• A beautiful Windows-like desktop delivered over the web to your browser…with ribbon menus, smooth gradations, dimensional icons, and right-click context menus. This fancy interface is used to build and manage the website and it’s content by both developers and business users.
• Handles multiple languages well
• Good cache control and excellent front-end performance
• Good support for Web Standards
• Highly granular security control
• Customizable workflow

The Bad:

• Poor plugin [modules] architecture. What modules are available, are typically painful to install, and almost impossible to uninstall; and further more, many of the modules are buggy and poorly implemented.
• Out-of-the-box, Sitecore provides almost no Website/CMS functionality. You’ll have to build everthing, templates, layouts, navigation element, etc. As I said in a previous post “Sitecore is not a CMS, it’s a framework to build a CMS”.
• The beautiful Windows-like desktop is massively heavy which requires a high bandwidth connection and powerful desktop equipment.
• The developer interface is anything but intuitive, it’s complex, confusing, and sometimes buggy. It has serious usability issues…it’s designed by geeks for geeks. I love the core architectual concepts of Sitecore (templates, masters, layouts, renderings, etc) and how websites are constructed using these concepts; however, building a website through this interface is frustrating to say the least. Fortunately, the business user interface can be customized and simplified to be more usable and somewhat intuative.
• Managing security on large websites can be painfully difficult for developers and insane for business users.

The Ugly:

• A massive footprint. An out-of-the-box install will consume 543 MB of disk space with 24,057 files and 587 folders; also the system requires 6 databases. After this massive install, hit the website with a browser only to be greeted with a single blank white web-page page with the black text “Sitecore Welcome to Sitecore”.
• The administration side of this system is extremely heavy for web delivery.  With beautiful graphics driven with Ajax, Sitecore gives the impression of  Windows desktop which leads you to expect certain level of behavior and performance which simply the system can not fully deliver.
• Creating and managing multiple independentwebsites is a complete nightmare with or without the multi-site manager. Forget it; it’s not worth the pain. In-spite of what the folks at Sitcore might say, Sitecore is NOT a very good multi-site system – I learned this the hard way.

Conclusion:

After evaluating dozens of systems available on the market, Sitecore does in fact standout as being one of the better systems for many reasons. However, this system does have its place in your tool belt and is certainly not recommended for all types of websites. Sitecore is best suited for a large corporate portals, or institution websites, etc. Larger scale projects with many authors and editors requiring workflow. Sitecore can work well for multiple relatedwebsites which can share management function, templates, layouts, security, etc. I personal would not recommend Sitecore for small business brochureware websites or anything small scale, where simplicity is an important factor…Sitecore might work; but its a huge overkill.

Sitecore [out-of-the-box] is not as much a CMS, as it is a framework for building a CMS.

I am currently involved with a Sitecore CMS/website development, and I have a lot to say about this complex system, as well as about my development experience with this system. The topic of many future posts…stay tuned.