Coveo for Sitecore 5: A New Era Has Begun, The Era Of The Command Center. Part II

If you read the Part I, you know that a new era has begun. And the HYPE is real. The Coveo for Sitecore Command Center will revolutionize the way people interact with a search and relevance provider when using Sitecore. No more configuration files editing, no more Sitecore indexing manager, etc. You can do all this in just one place, and using a more than friendly UI.

In this blog post, I’ll give you all the details I have about every single section present on the Command Center. Go grab your popcorn and let’s go to the action!

 

The Indexing Manager

Indexes

This is one of my favorite sections. Do you remember the old times when you used to open the Sitecore Indexing Manager to rebuild your Coveo indexes? Almost no feedback at all? If something went wrong, the log files were your only friend? That’s now in the past.

Feel free to rebuild those indexes individually or in bulk and be delighted by the amount of live information you receive during the rebuild operation. Basically, no more “Why is my Coveo index taking forever to rebuild until it timeout?“. Now you know exactly on which phase the process is blocked.

Not to mention that you can easily double check the number of documents on each index, the indexing strategy that they are using, how many crawlers they have, each crawler root and even the database name that it’s being indexed. A lot of information at just one place.

 

Fields

This is another game changer. I love this section. Not only you have this super useful fields usage summary which tells you how close you are from your fields limit and offers a Clean Up Unused Fields button that you can use if you are too close from it, but you can also see which Sitecore template fields are being indexed by Coveo and add or remove those fields without opening a single config file. Not to mention that on this same section you can still see if a given field is a facet, sortable and/or free text searchable. You tell me, isn’t this amazing?

 

Security

This is where you should go if you want to change something or trigger an action which is related to the security of your Coveo for Sitecore package. Do you want to start indexing the Sitecore permissions on your items? Go there. Change the Sitecore credentials that you provided to Coveo during the installation? This is the place.

There are a bunch of other useful features that you can find here. But my favorite part is all those very informative tooltips. You should really spend some time here reading them and increasing your Coveo for Sitecore game.

 

Relevance Manager

Relevance Tools

As you guys know, Coveo is all about relevance. Being able to index content and search it later is cool, but what differentiates Coveo from its competitors is how good the ranking (especially over time) of those results is.

When using Coveo + Sitecore you still have all the capabilities that Coveo offers on its Cloud Platform, such as the usage analytics, machine learning, and query pipelines. Anyone using Coveo should master and be leveraging those three concepts. Trust me when I say that if you are not doing it, you are losing the most important part of this product.

That’s why Coveo added these three shortcuts to the Coveo Cloud Platform on the Command Center. Make sure you spend a good amount of time learning these concepts and applying them to reach the full potential of your search experience.

 

Coveo Cloud Manager

Configuration

Basically, every single configuration which is not related to security will be present in this section. Pretty easy to remember, right? So let’s say that in the future you want to change a Coveo configuration and don’t know exactly where to find it in the Command Center. Is it a security config? Go to the Security section. Otherwise, the current Configuration section is the place to go.

 

What’s next?

Please note that this blog post was written based on the first release of the brand new Coveo for Sitecore 5 (version 5.0.140.19). Even if the initial version of the Command Center is very impressive, I’m sure that there is a lot more to come during 2019. So all I can tell you is keep your eyes open make sure you follow me on twitter since I’ll post there any new blog post about Sitecore + Coveo as soon as they are out! Thank you for reading and see you soon!

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