As a long time Kentico developer and enthusiast, I have used and written many Kentico macros over the years. It’s actually one of my favorite parts of the platform. When executed correctly macros are great. However, when they don’t work, the situation can be more frustrating than just about anything I’ve encountered with Kentico. Because of my experience with macros, my colleagues at BizStream frequently come to me with the statement of: Help! My Kentico macro is not working. This common issue inspired me to create a flow chart / troubleshooting guide for what to do when a Kentico macro does not function as expected.

Sales and marketing teams love lead scoring because it helps them determine the sales-readiness of a lead. Or in another words, lead scoring allows sales team to assign points to leads in order to rank them in terms of "cold", "warm", or "hot". The more hot leads the better right?

The Kentico online marketing solution allows admins of a site to easily put a lead scoring system in place. It works by allowing a marketer or developer to create a rule that calculates a point value for each visitor's activity or behavior on the site. Defining these rules in Kentico is a pretty straightforward process, but there are a few gotchas. Whether or not you are currently using this functionality on your site, keep reading to find out some tips on how you can master Kentico lead scoring to benefit your organization.

The Kentico User Group (KUG) is intended to satisfy the hunger for knowledge among the Kentico developer / user community. The user community really falls into two audiences; Kentico license end users and Kentico Partners. The KUG offers monthly (or more) webinars that are free to attend and learn from. Like any community, the strength is based on active participation. With that goal in mind, the KUG has been reaching out to experienced Kentico develo;pers looking for content ideas and knowledge sharing opportunites. I was fortunate enough to be asked to participate in one of the webinars. On August 19^th, 2015 10:00 AM EST I will be presenting on the Kentico Online Marketing Solution API. Keep reading to find out which topics I will be covering.

A few people asked me to provide my presentation from the Kentico User Group webinar that I presented at this past week. I have attached the presentation to this blog post.  I think it went really well considering the amount of people that attended and the feedback that I received from it.

Remember there is a great tip in there for how to use the new Kentico 8.2 MacroRuleInstanceTranslator class to optimize your contact group rebuild time and lead scoring calculation time for when you have a large volume of contacts in your Kentico instance.

The deck is embedded and can be downloaded from this post after the jump. 

In this special episode of Kentico Rocks, Bryan Soltis and I were able to take advantage of the fact that we were physically in the same room. We were able to easily record an episode on the Kentico Developer Roadshow and some of the most recent updates to the Kentico product roadmap. Listen on to hear what the roadshow is all about, as well as, what you can start to expect from Kentico 9.0.

Digital Summit Detroit features over 40+ sessions on the latest digital trends & best practices from industry educators. The two day event is happening September 22^nd and 23^rd at the Max M. Fisher Music Center in Detroit Michigan.

Digital Summit gives digital professionals an opportunity to learn directly from the world’s digital industry experts on topics that include Marketing, UX & Design, Search, Content, Mobile, and more. Digital Summit Detroit is part of the Digital Summit series that runs in multiple locations across the country including, Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Phoenix, Raleigh, and Washington DC.

I am happy to be representing BizStream at the event as a speaker. This time I will be talking about one of my favorite topics, Marketing Automation. I am very excited to share my ideas of a few quick automation steps that should be easy for any marketer to add to their own site, plus get feedback from such a great group of experts and colleagues. BizStream and Kentico are sponsoring the event so If you are attending don’t forget to stop by the BizStream / Kentico booth. We have some fun planned for the booth that I can’t give away yet.  If you haven’t registered and are interested in attending make sure you take advantage of the $50 off registration promo code that we have made available.

Keep reading to see my entire session abstract. Make sure you follow along at the hashtag #DSD15 as well.

In this episode of Kentico Rocks, Bryan Soltis and I were able to catch up on what is happening in the Kentico development community. We cover a powerful new tool that every Kentico developer should know about, and we discuss the recent Kentico Developer Competition over on DevNet. We also were able to recap some of the Kentico Developer Roadshow events, and highlight some other events that Kentico has sponsored recently. Think of this episode as your one stop shop for what's recently happened in the community.

Dog Food Conference is a two day event focused on Microsoft tools and technologies. It is taking place in Columbus, OH on October 7th & 8th 2015. I am pretty excited to be able to speak at the event because the organizers expect to have over 800 developers and technologists attend. There isn't a better audience than that for me to address about some ideas and topics that I am pretty passionate about. Keep reading to find out about my Integrate & Automate Enterprise CMS Deployments session.

One of the things that I love about Kentico is that the platform and the people who work on it are very smart. Sometimes eerily smart. In tonight’s blog post I am going to describe a real world scenario where I thought I would have to customize the system to pull off a feature that I needed for my own purposes at Mcbeev.com.

As it turns out, I was wrong, no customization was required. The system was already built in a way that made my requirement dead simple to solve. Kentico never stops impressing me even after using it for 5+ years.

Keep reading to see how this quick tip will allow you to add and manage metadata to Kentico Media Library files without dropping into any code.

In just 18 short days from now, Kentico Connection 2015 will be upon the United States. The Kentico Connection conference is the premiere event for marketers, developers, partners, and/or end users who are looking to learn about the product or network with their peers. Hands down this is best event of the year when it comes to any current or new Kentico user.

This year the conference will be hosted at SeaWorld Orlando on November 8^th - 10^th. In my opinion that is a pretty good choice of locations for late fall, especially if you are living in balmy west Michigan like I am. I feel very honored to once again be given a speaking slot at the US version of the conference. This year Kentico has asked me to present in the Marketing track. I have a new presentation worked up that I feel should be very interesting for those in attendance.

Soon after the US edition ends, the conference heads to second-largest city in the Czech Republic, Brno. The 2015 Brno Kentico Connection event, which runs from November 23^rd – 25^th, will feature a new set of great speakers that I am excited to learn from. In Brno I will switching hats from marketing to technical and be speaking on the developer focused track.

Keep reading after the jump to see my full session abstracts for both the marketing and developer tracks.

Most people agree that the Kentico email marketing capabilities are pretty good. However, one web part we frequently have to "tweak" to get to match a custom design is the tried and true Newsletter Subscription web part. Couple that scenario with the fact that some of our clients ask us to do something a bit special when it comes to asking for a subscription conversion, and you have that making for an interesting set of requirements. This was the motivation that got me thinking it was time to create a new web part that my team and other developers could use to solve this situation. As a result, today I would like to introduce a new free web part for Kentico.

I just finished attending and speaking at the Kentico Connection conference in Orlando, FL. The annual conference once again showed that it is the premier event for Kentico developers, partners, and end clients. Just like past editions of the event, the conference was broken up into three tracks.

The Developer track focused on Kentico best practices and product improvements slated in Kentico 9. Next, there was a Marketing track which showcased customer success stories and real world marketing examples illustrated by some truly great Kentico solution partners. The last track was new this year, the Hands-on track. This new track was a welcome addition to the event and it allowed end clients, marketers and developers get their hands dirty with Kentico.

Throughout the conference, I wished I could be in two places at once because of the quality of each session was pretty high. I know I say this year after year, but it is a fact. The connection event truly is one of my favorite events of the year because there is so much to see and so many like-minded people to network with. This year BizStream was also well represented by myself and Bizstream's founder Mark Schmidt. We were happy to be a lanyard sponsor for the event.

Keep reading after the jump to find out more about what happened in sunny Orlando.

Kentico has supported multiple authentication methods for a long time now. I know this capability was in the older versions like 4.0, and 5.0, heck it may have even been there since version 2.0 or 3.0. Chances are if you have been developing on Kentico for any length of time you may have been tasked with configuring Kentico to do more than just Forms based authentication. That could be in the form of some sort of custom authentication, Single Sign On (SSO) authentication, or the next most likely, Windows Active Directory for Mixed Mode based authentication.

My team and I have done this exact thing many times. Most frequently it involves enabling what is commonly referred to as mixed mode authentication. In Kentico, mixed mode authentication lets you use both Forms based authentication as well as Windows AD based authentication. Even though I have done this specific task many times there always seems to be some sort of trick required to getting it to work correctly. Today I am going to share a tip that hopefully helps out any developer who needs to configure Kentico to utilize Windows AD for Mixed Mode authentication.

Another year has rolled by, and with it comes the chance to reflect on what has happened in the Kentico community and my own blog here at Mcbeev.com.

2015 started out with a bang, with the release of Kentico 8.2 in early January. Kentico 8.2 turned out to be one of the best releases of the year. All of our projects at BizStream quickly upgraded to this new version because of the increased performance and stability. I think everyone would agree that 8.2 rocked.

The year continued with all sorts of new activity for Kentico enthusiasts. The Kentico Developer Roadshow ran through 4 cities. We added a few new Kentico MVPs to the mix. Kentico DevNet itself saw a lot of new and interesting updates. And of course, the Kentico Connection conference in Melbourne, Orlando, Brno once again proved it is the premiere Kentico event of the year.

Finally 2015's biggest news must of course be that Kentico 9.0 was released this past November. Kentico 9 allows for faster website development through CI, Modularity improvements, and optimized auto scaling in the cloud. It also gives marketers a way to optimize campaigns for more insight into their results, and has better support for semantic content editing.

2015 was an excited year for sure. Now on to my best of lists for Kentico Related Posts.

Today I would like to share my thoughts and observations on the latest version of Kentico. Especially since I recently finished upgrading my site here at Mcbeev.com. That’s right my blog is now on the latest and greatest version as you read this.

Kentico 9.0 has been released officially for about a month and a half. However, I have actually had my hands on it for much longer. Thanks to being a Kentico MVP, I was actually lucky enough to be included in some of the preview builds of 9.0 for a few months prior to release. During the beta period I was tasked with giving as much feedback as possible to the Kentico product team and I tried my best to do so. As usual I basically let them know that they knocked it out of the park with this release.

Keep reading to learn more about the big and small changes that come with Kentico 9.0.

This is the second part to My First Impressions of Kentico 9. It finishes up my thoughts on some easy to miss changes in Kentico 9, plus what it was like to upgrade from Kentico 8 to Kentico 9. Make sure that you read the first part of the post before continuing.

Recently I was having a conversation with BizStream founder, Mark Schmidt, on how we could simplify the learning curve for using some of the custom functionality that we had created in one of our projects. Mark was on the side of adding custom labels into the pages where needed. I was on the side of trying to leverage the excellent help system that Kentico comes built with. The argument actually got quite heated, as it tends to do around the office, and we finally ended the argument without a real agreement.

The fact is that we frequently create custom modules in Kentico to handle any large customization need. Building your own modules is actually the preferred choice and Kentico best practice when it comes to adding in functionality to a site built with Kentico or the actual Kentico admin interface itself. But neither Mark nor I had actually taken the time to sit down and browse through the lesser known aspect of module development.

This morning I had a chance to do that, and it turns out there is a really simple solution to linking any helpful information or documentation to a custom module. The best part is that the solution was just a few clicks away. 

There are a few developer conferences that I will be presenting at in the next few days and weeks. The first one is actually coming up in just about a week from now. At the South Florida Code Camp I will be giving a new presentation that I am pretty excited about related to optimizing mobile pages of your site and/or cms. The SFCC event is happening on February 20th, 2016. It is billed as a free one day geekfest in Fort Lauderdale, FL on all things that developers are interested in .Net and beyond. Considering that right now as I write this it is 13 degrees in Michigan, a trip to Florida is going to be well worth it.  

The second event that I will be presenting at is the annual GR DevDay 2016. This is my second favorite of event of the year because it is right here in my back yard in Grand Rapids, MI (first favorite being Kentico Connection). DevDay is coming up March 12th, 2016. BizStream is once again a platinum sponsor for the whole GR DevDay and GR DevNight series. We really beleive this is the best event (and series of events) in West Michigan for developers.

If you are an ASP.NET developer from South Florida or Grand Rapids I hope to see you there. Keep reading to check out my abstract for these events.

In this episode of Kentico Rocks, Brian McKeiver and Bryan Soltis sit down and cover Macros in Kentico CMS. The discussion includes an overview, common use cases, best practices, tooling, and gotcha's for developers who are working with Macros in the CMS. Listen on find out how to best utilize this important aspect of developing websites with Kentico.

From time to time I get asked: What are the steps to upgrade to Kentico EMS from an existing Kentico CMS site? The technical answer is that upgrading only requires having the correct EMS license added to the installation of Kentico (which you can generate from the client portal). Once the license is in place, the system automatically enables the full feature set of Kentico. The easiest way to check if it worked is to look and see if all of the menu items (Contact management, Email marketing, Marketing automation, etc. etc.) show up for the On-line marketing category in the Kentico menu.

However, if you want to make sure everything is working perfectly, and get the fullest out of your Kentico EMS site there are few more things to consider. For instance, if you have upgraded from previous versions of Kentico like 5.5 R2, 6.0, or 7.0 some of the required features and settings didn’t yet exist and therefore can cause issues. Ensuring that the EMS functionality works correctly really does come in to play if you have had your Kentico CMS site running for a while.

As a result of upgrading many Kentico sites over the years, my team and I at BizStream have found that there are a few things that seem to be recurring issues, and honestly there are some items that we sometimes forgot to check or configure, when upgrading a Kentico 7.0 CMS site to a Kentico 8 or 9 EMS site. To solve this issue I have created a checklist to make this process easier for my team, and I thought it was worth sharing with the Kentico developer community. So today I am presenting my Upgrade Kentico CMS to Kentico EMS Checklist as a free downloadable pdf.