Sitecore 9 released this week and with it comes a whole new installation process. Gone are the days you could just download the web root and restore some dbs or just run the installation gui and enter a db connection string. Sitecore 9 has some fairly fundamental architectural changes with multiple IIS entries and and some windows services to go with it. Server roles are now also being properly configured rather than updating config files to match what it says in an excel doc.

Along with these changes, the installation process has moved to be based on powershell scripts, which on one hand has made things a bit harder, but it also brings great positives that the process can now be customized with scripts that are repeatable without the risk of mistakes.

Here's my tips for a smooth local installation (production installs are different to a local install).

Tip #1 - Check the Prerequisites and Requirements

It sounds obvious but when presented with a new toy you want to play with it as fast as possible, and with a 49 page document the urge is there to skip to the installation and hope for the best.

Skipping however is likely to result in install failures as the installer relies on modules such as Web Deploy and the right version of SQL Server which were not needed for the version you may already have installed.

Tip #2 - Make sure you have the right versions

You may have SQL and Solr but are they the right version?

SQL Express 2016

Sitecore 9 supports SQL Server 2014 SP2 and SQL Server 2016. Now that SQL Server 2017 is out, actually finding the link for 2016 express has become a challenge, but here it is.

Download SQL Server 2016 Express

Solr 6.6.1

Sirecore 9 supports Solr version 6.6.1. I typically use Bitnami Solr as it's a lot easier to install than doing Solr on it's own. Like SQL though the latest version is newer than what Sitecore supports and finding the link to the older one can be a bit of a challenge.

Download Bitnami Solr 6.6.1

Tip #3 - Solr requires SSL

By default Solr does not install with SSL turned on, but without it your install will fail. More specifically it will fail trying to start an xConnect service.

Enabling SSL for Solr

To create a self-signed certificate for Solr we can use the JDK Keytool which if you've installed Solr you should already have installed.

Note: These instructions are based on this guide from Apache and this blog post from Jason St-Cyr.

1. Open command prompt
2. Change to the Solr ‘etc’ directory

3. Execute the keygentool command

This will generate the keystore with a password of ‘secret’ as valid for localhost and 127.0.0.1. You can add other DNS and IPs as desired, or skip hostname verification.

4. Convert generated JKS to PKCS12

5. Enter password when prompted. The password ‘secret’ was used in the previous step. Remember to use your password instead if you changed it in the keygen command parameters.

6. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the ‘etc’ directory (“{SOLR_HOME}\server\etc”)

7. Double-click on the generated ‘p12’ file (solr-ssl.keystore.p12 if you used the default parameters from the previous steps)

8. In the wizard, specify the following values (there will be some extras you can ignore):

Store Location: Local Machine

File name: Leave as provided

Password: secret

Certificate Store: Trusted Root Certification Authorities

Remember to use your password instead if you changed it during the previous steps.

9. Open the solr.in.cmd file for editing (e.g. {SOLR_HOME}\bin\solr.in.cmd)

10. Un-comment the SSL settings:

11. Restart SOLR to pick up the changes.

Tip #4 - Close management studio

I'm not sure if this was a one off thing, but with management studio open my installation failed with a single user access issue.

Tip #5 - Check the logs

The installation script will output logs to the folder it runs in. If your installation fails it will reference a log file. To find out why the installation failed or get some more info go and check the log referenced.

This blog is generally aimed at developers whereas the contents of this post could be categorized as a topic for marketers, but I've decided to include it as its likely something a Sitecore dev could get asked about and its also quite useful to know about.

Out the box Sitecore's Experience Analytics comes with a set of pre-configured reports to give insights into the sites visitors. Previously I blogged about Populating the internal search report in Sitecore which unless done will probably lead to someone asking why it's blank. Another report which initially won't show any data is downloads.

Located under behavior there is actually now two reports relating to downloads. The Assets report and the Downloads report.

Assets, in Sitecores words - "Describes your marketing assets or content used to attract contacts to your website and increase their engagement with your organization."

Downloads - "Describes your specific assets, their download activity, and their value."

These reports are populated by assigning a download event to a piece of media and organizing it as a marketing asset.

Adding a download event to an item

Sitecore doesn't know which items you think are important to track as downloads so content editors need to mark them manually.

Go to the Media Library

Select the item you want to track as a download

From the ribbon select the Analyze tab and click Attributes

Select download form the list of events

Remember to publish your changes.

Categorizing an Asset

By assigning a marketing asset type to your items they can be grouped for analysis. Such as grouping downloads into categories like white paper and product brochure.

Before you assign a marketing asset to an item you will first need to create your assets. On the Sitecore Launchpad, open the Marketing Control Panel.

Go to Assets which is located under Taxonomies.

Create your set of Asset Groups and Assets within each. In this example I've created a group called Content and Assets called Instruction Manual and Product Brochure.

Navigate to the item you want to assign the asset to and select the relevant asset in the marketing asset field.

Publish all your changes.

The result

Now you've set a download event and a marketing asset, the assets and downloads reports will start populating.

Going Further

The concept of having to tag every download as a download may seem a little tedious and also prone to being missed in the future. If all your downloads are PDF's and you want to track all PDF's as a download, one way to make life easier is to update the standard values on the PDF template item (/sitecore/templates/System/Media/Unversioned/Pdf) so that it always has the attribute of download. The content authors will still need to do the marketing asset categorization, but at least this gives them 1 less thing to do.

Out the box Sitecore ships with a number of reports pre-configured. Some of these will show data without you doing anything. e.g. The pages report will automatically start showing the top entry and exit pages as a page view is something Sitecore can track.

Other's like the internal search report will just show a message of no data to display, which can be confusing/frustrating for your users. Particularly when they've just spent money on a license fee to get great analytics data only to see a blank report.

The reason it doesn't show any information is relatively straight forward. Sitecore doesn't know how your site search is going to work and therefore it can't do the data capture part of the process. That part of the process however is actually quite simple to do.

Sitecore has a set of page events that can be registered in the analytics tracker. Some of these like Page Visited will be handled by Sitecore. In this instance the one we are interested in is Search and will we have to register it manually.

To register the search event use some code like this (note, there is a constant that references the item id of the search event). The query parameter should be populated with the search term the user entered.

Now after triggering the code to be called a few times, your internal search report should start to be populated like this.