Configuring video settings in EPiServer Relate+

2010-01-12T11:44:03.0000000Z

I have recently worked on a project using standard out-of-box EPiServer Relate+ website and templates. As every module is very well written and integrated, the only missing piece was the video upload settings.

It took me a while to find out how to get these settings and update the site so that end user can upload video. I thought it will be a good idea to write up a small blog post.

Steps

Step 1. Navigate to http://world.episerver.com/System/Video-Service/ and login with your usual world.episerver.com account

Step 2. Select register account as shown below

Step 3. The next screen will show your information, make sure all the required fields are there and click 'Next' (I have removed my auto generated email address)

Step 4: Read and Check the 'Terms & Condition' box. As I am using it for demo purposes, I would select the development license.

Step 5: If your account is successfully created, you would be shown a confirmation page with <cdnProvider> settings at the bottom of the page.

Step 6: Open your EPiServer Relate+ web.config and find the <cdnProvider> node and replace the accessKey and secretAccessKey values with the actual values generated at the end of the process.

Tips

Navigate to the actual site and try uploading any video. The video service modules converts well known movie formats like mp4,mpeg into Flash format so it may take a while to upload your video and it will depend upon your system, network traffic and video file size.

Secondly, video files may not appear instantly on the page so just be patient.

EpiChatty – your personal EPiServer assistant – Gadget

2009-11-18T15:14:18.0000000Z

Hi, here is my small contribution to the Gadget competition. Meet EpiChatty, your personal assistant (chat bot) that can give you help and information about EPiServer CMS. It could serve as a help desk assistant to EPiServer CMS editors / administrators / developers / designers and to content editors.

The main idea behind this is to have Google Talk client embedded as a gadget on dashboard and run EPiChatty as a console application which can interact with the user and give appropriate response.

Google Talk implements Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) protocol which essentially exchange messages using XML between clients and servers. More information about this protocol can be found here and more information about Google Talk API can be found at here

As Google do not provide any C# implementation of XMPP protocol and as I am primarily a C# developer,(not brave enough to try Google’s java based implementation for this protocol), so I have to look for different options. After bit more research, I found out that agsXMPP is an open source SDK / library for the XMPP protocol which is written in managed C# and is dedicated to .NET and Mono technologies. More information about this SDK can be found here .

With all my components in place, I have to learn basics about the new protocol (which I have never used before) and also use the SDK to implement it (easy). It took a while to do a ‘hello world’ kind of code, as Google server require a different port (5222) than 80 to be open as well so that it could communicate. Once I figured that out with help from support team at agsXMPP, next thing was to implement the automated behaviour for the asked questions.

There are several ways that this could be implemented, but I went for the XML based approach. I have stored questions and answers in a set patterned way so that if user ask ‘what is’ or ‘how to’ or any ‘generic’ question, a patterned would be matched and answer would be returned. The main reason behind this approach was its simplicity and extendibility.

Here is the screen shot how the EPiChatty gadget will look like on dashboard

The gadget view contains embedded Google Talk client and the controller simply returns the view. The login it will redirect to central Google account services where you could login and then it will return you back to the dashboard.

once login you can ask ‘what is’ or ‘how to’ or ‘generic’ questions

Here is the screen shot of the console application showing that EPiChatty is available to chat

I have made the EPiChatty as a console application so that it could run separately from the main application as a light weight process in background. In case you want to start chatting and test it out, send an invite to epichatty@googlemail.com . I will be hosting it till the end of December 2009 and then EPiChatty will be on long vacations.

Source files contain every thing apart from the password for the EPiChatty Google’s account. If you would like to host your own, you can create a new Google account and replace the username and password in console application and run the console application.

Source

Blog posts by Naveed Ahmad

Configuring video settings in EPiServer Relate+

EpiChatty – your personal EPiServer assistant – Gadget