DEV Community: Pieter Brinkman

Sitecore 9.3 – Core platform enhancements

Pieter Brinkman — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 12:50:13 +0000

For Sitecore 9.3 we made a significant amount of enhancements. During mysession at Sitecore Symposium I only had time to focus on on the top 5 of improvements for the core platform.

Sitecore 9.3 includes a large list of improvements. Sitecore’s ongoing improvements for the core platform are always around performance and increasing the easy-of-use for those who work with Sitecore every day.

The key performance improvements in 9.3 are made by reducing the amount of calls that Sitecore makes, optimizing Sitecore by making processes more efficient.

This blogpost will provide a list of improvements and enhancements for the Experience Platform -listed per product area- that are included in 9.3. The complete list of enhancements can be found in the official Sitecore 9.3 release notes.

This article is part of the Sitecore 9.3 what’s new blog post series.

Experience Editor

Functional improvements and enhancements

General link with search, Date and Datetime fields now have “Clear” buttons in the floating toolbar to clear the values.
When creating a new page in Experience Editor, the first available template is preselected by default to improve usability.
Image selection and Link dialogs are aligned with the similar functionality in Content Editor.
A new Context mode value is added for the Explore mode. If the user opens the Explore mode then ‘Sitecore.Context.PageMode’ is set to ‘IsExploring’
Standard link text is converted into links upon pasting or entering the text in the inline Rich Text Editor. For example “http://domain.com”, “https://domain.com” or name@domain.com will be converted to respective links.
Navigation and Control bars are now enabled by default, so that user can find the navigation functionality easier.

Content foundation

In 9.3 we have introduced Permission Enabled Search. Thisnew functionality allows customers to set the security permissions for thecontent they want to appear in search results by using the Sitecore Securitymodel. In case-specific users or roles do not have the Read permissions to theitem, this item would not appear in Search results for this user or role

Removing Obsoletes

This is one of my favorites, we’re cleaning up our code andremoving features that have been flagged as obsoleted. Including support forLucene and Nvelocity.

Migrate solutions that use Lucene to Solr this way your solution is easier to upgrade to Sitecore 9.3+

A huge number of obsoleted functionalities were removed from the product. That includes removing of the:

LuceneSearch provider
Sitecore.Nvelocity
Replaceddeprecated SQL data types

Additional improvements

Languageembedding not used for Media Links instead of “la” parameter
Abilityto add Dynamic Fields to Managed Schema for ContentSearch
BetterSecurity: now security headers set by default

Data Foundation, Storage & Reporting

Tracking: Session expiration batching support

By having the tracker do fewer requests and batching events before committing it, xConnect will have increased performance. Several improvements have been included with Sitecore 9.3 to improve performance for xConnect:

Web tracker supports sending expired session data to xConnect in batches .
Additional settings have been introduced to control the batch size and level of concurrent processing.
Reduces workload on the CD servers using less resources to save data to xConnect. The resources can be used for visitor requests.
Batching improves performance of xConnect and all underlying components.
Possible to have CD servers which do not perform any session expiration by adding ability to have dedicated session expiration servers.

Tracking: FocusedPerformance Improvements

Load last known contact together with Device in one request – Reduced the calls to xConnect by 3 times on session start
Reduce number of requests to Reference Data – Calls to the Reference data service are reduced to half.
Remove legacy facets from configuration – Reduce the amount of data saved in the session database
Optimize serialization code – Optimized the amount of data saved to session database

Cortex & Processing

Performance Improvement of Aggregation pipeline

Anew interaction aggregation pipeline that handles batches of interactions
Pipelineprovides an opportunity for the downstream components to write performanceoptimized aggregation processors.
PathAnalyzer already moved to the new pipeline with considerable performanceimprovements.

FocusedPerformance Improvements

Identifiedand fixed performance hot spots in Reference Data Service
Introducea cache of dimensions that have been already created
CombinedDefinition and DefinitionMoniker tables
Addedstored procedures for working with a single record

xConnect Storage

_Scalability Enhancement -“Split/Merge/Rebalancing” _

Customers should be able to scale in/out the shard cluster in order to be able to support collection varying of traffic
Change the number of Sql shards .

Note: Scalability Enhancements can only be used with SQL Azure. For more info read the article on the Sitecore documentation site.

GDPR – “Right-to-be-forgotten for interaction facets”

When Right-to-be-Forgotten is executed xConnect have functionality to remove all the sensitive information from the contact and remove all interactions facets and remove calculated facets.

Bug Fixing andOther improvements

Sitecore.XConnect.Collection.Model.PhoneNumber now supports AreaCode property
Log functionality has been extended for xConnect operations
XConnect client issues addressed where it returned null instead of a contact when empty.

And many more similar high-impact customer related bugs fixed. See the official releases notes for a complete list.

Data foundation

Providepossibility to switch off/on performance counters for XConnect/xDB/Cortexservices

Currently Sitecore default behavior is “Performance counters disabled by default”. xConnect Services are deployed with enabled counters that write info into App insights. As a result, customer pay money even though that are not interested in collecting counters.

XConnectSearchIndexer.exe should have a possibility tomonitor status

It is now extended with additional behavior:

1) with -rm flag (run and monitor) we canStart rebuild and monitor status on regular basis and terminate process onceindex is rebuilt

2) with -rr flag (request rebuild) we willjust start rebuilding

Stability – Have a Resume functionality for xconnectrebuild

We have implemented fault tolerance to the index rebuild process. In case of temporary infrastructure hiccups the rebuild will not be aborted and it will retry automatically. After a restart, the rebuild process will resume where it left off.

Stability – Change to PaaS deployments sending collectiontraffic to xc-collect instead of xc-search.

Various improvements to the stability of live indexing andrebuild in system under stress scenarios, allowing a faster rebuild:

Implementedbatching + parallelization during the rebuild synchronization stage
Reducedthe default of SplitRecordsThreshold from 25k to 1k
Reducedin half the ParallelizationDegree of the rebuild

Reporting

We want to ensure that our reports are accurate and matchindustry expectations.

To do so updated the Conversion rate in a way that it can’t be greater than 100%. We also included updates to bounce rate calculation for specific dimensions and implemented data confidence fixes.

The post Sitecore 9.3 – Core platform enhancements appeared first on PieterBrinkman.com.

Sitecore Symposium: What’s new in Sitecore Land (9.3)

Pieter Brinkman — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 09:24:13 +0000

Another great event comes to an end with Sitecore Symposium 2019. Almost 3.000 attendees gathered to learn more about Sitecore’s products, vision and roadmap.

For me this years Sitecore Symposium highlights the announcement that SaaS is coming and a new Machine Learning Service for auto personalization. Next to keynotes from Sitecore’s own Mark Frost, Paige O’Neill and Desta Price.

And let’s not forget about the legendary keynote from Earvin “Magic” Johnson, which I also had the pleasure to meet.

This year it was -again- my honor to announce and reveal more details about our upcoming release of Sitecore 9.3.

Since the presentation I’ve received lots of requests for slides, more info and speaker engagements. As a start the slides are now available on Notists. View What’s new in Sitecore land on Notist.

Notists also include my speaker schedule as I’m planned to deliver the presentation again in London (14 November) and Amsterdam (10 December). Feel free to reach out to me if you want to invite me to speak at your event.

My session was only 45 minutes and I tried to push in as much 9.3 features and improvements as I could, but 45 minutes where not enough to cover all updates and more details. More information and details on the Sitecore 9.3 release will be shared on my blog.

The session has also been recorded and will be released after editing is finished.

The post Sitecore Symposium: What’s new in Sitecore Land (9.3) appeared first on PieterBrinkman.com.

Sitecore 9.2 – Enhancements Highlights

Pieter Brinkman — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 13:54:47 +0000

Now the last of the 3 strategy pillars is enhancements and I want to show you how 9.2 will make day-to-day working with Sitecore a lot more comfortable.

You can see a true change in Sitecore as a company, we never have been so focused in enhancing the product. Focusing on making the platform work better for you by fixing bugs and enhancing existing features.

Our work on enhancing our platform is guided by the feedback we get from our customers, partners and analysts. You are not shy to tell us what is missing and what we can improve. We are listening and documenting everything we hear and see.

We have been working hard to enhance the platform as a whole, and we’ve made some great improvements in 9.2. We’re including over 220 customer fixes , and have also implemented over 150 customer requests! We have fixed 80 issues across multiple functionalities including Content Search, Publishing, Indexing, Caching and Security. So that goes to show that we are listening!

We’ve been optimizing the Link database and have introduced abstractions for the Job & schedule features, ensuring that we’re driving up the testability of the platform.

We’ve introduced configuration to allow for SSL offloading.

Next to all these enhancements there are a few key enhancements in 9.2 that I want to dig a little deeper into.

XDB Data purging

With quickly changing and growing data privacy regulations. Brands need the ability to control and purge all their customer data. The API methods will give granular hands-on control of customer record data. This will both meet data privacy regulations while providing the flexibility for organizations to purge data. Purging data will also help lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as you’ll be able to control your database storage size.

API to allow for maintenance and purging of data within xDB.
Meet regulatory criteria, such as GDPR.
Limit and reduce size of xDB.
Decrease rebuild time.

Robot Detection

The next enhancement I want to focus on is another pain point you’ve probably all felt before….. Robot detection.

Bots are getting smarter and are accounting for much more of internet traffic. Sitecore is committed to identifying the bots so marketing teams can focus on traffic that will produce value to the business.

Our Device Detection component is used to detect well-known bots, crawlers, spiders, robots, etc. by user agent based on the 51Degrees database, newly identified bots are added to the database frequently and used for robot detection without a need to restart the servers.

But we’re working on getting things right on our end as well, including improving 30+ Personalization rules related to robot triggering and improving analytics to filter.

Updating detection to identify new, malicious bots.
Improved 30+ Personalization rules triggered on robot traffic
Improve analytics to filter out bot traffic.

Yaml format for serialization

This is another great one, I’m sure we’ve all been through the pain of trying to diff the changes in a serialized Sitecore item, calling it painful is a bit of an understatement. Unicorn changed the format to YAML, which provided a much nicer experience and now with 9.2 we’re going to adopt that as the standard format for Sitecore item serialization.

Search Improvements

The next enhancement area I want to talk about it search as we’ve made a few changes there:

We’ve introduced a new Sitecore configuration role to simplify the configuration for Indexing.

I’m sure most people have moved over to Solr by now, but we still have some running Lucene. In order to start to move them of this it is now obsoleted in 9.2 and will be removed completely in the next major version.

Finally, we’ve improved our Azure Search implementation. I’m sure a lot of you have run into the painful 1k field limit that Azure Search imposes. Well, with 9.2 you can now whitelist a certain predefined set of fields which are defined in configuration. This enables the full control over the size of the index and gives the ability to overcome the 1k field limitation.

Tracker improvements

The final enhancement I want to talk about is with the Tracker.

Here we’ve made a number of improvements, including reducing the number of requests to xConnect by batching the request processing.

We’ve also introduced more control around how session ending is handled. You can now specify the concurrent threads that should be used to handle the session expiration.

On top of that you can also now setup a dedicated server to handle the sessions expiration process all together.

Reduced number requests to xConnect
Session:end improvements
Server role assignments

The enhancements improve how you both manage & search your content and analytics data, along with improvements on tracking how your customers are interacting with the platform. These enhancements make it easier and more comfortable for you to get value out of your data.

Our aim is for Sitecore to be a platform that you prefer to work on, a platform that supports you, a platform that doesn’t block or frustrate you during your day-to-day job.

Wrap-up

For me, enhancements are the key to success. Having a comfortable working environment, tools and platform is the foundation for a quicker time-to-market and the enabler of innovation. That will lead to more value and better results for our shared customers.

This article is the last part of the 9.2 blog series.

The post Sitecore 9.2 – Enhancements Highlights appeared first on PieterBrinkman.com.

Sitecore 9.2 – Time to Market Highlights

Pieter Brinkman — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 13:36:39 +0000

In a previous blog post I wrote about how the Sitecore strategy has three investment pillars and how this impacts your day-to-day job as a developer. We already covered innovation, let’s dive into the efficiency that you can get with our upcoming Time to Market improvements.

Sitecore 9.2 contains a number of efficiency improvements, but as with the previous section I’ve picked 3 key areas that will help you do your job more efficient and increase the time-to-market for our shared customers. Features that help you get up and running faster, features that will improve standardization between different implementations and features that will help the marketers in their day-to-day job.

Sitecore Install Assistant (SIA)

With the release of Sitecore 9 we’ve introduced Sitecore Installation Framework (SIF), a new way of installing Sitecore. SIF has been great for ITand DevOps, to automate the installation of Sitecore. We also received feedback that we needed to provide an easier installation experience for local development and the option to quickly spin-up an instance for less technical users.

In Sitecore 9.2 we will be releasing the Sitecore Install Assistant (SIA). SIA will be a User Interface that will help you install Sitecore, the current version is XP0 only. And it is targeted at non-technical users and casual developers to get them started more quickly.

It is a wrapper around SIF so it still uses all the power of JSON configuration + SIF Tasks.

The first release however is keyed specifically to XP0 so it is not something for everyone’s favorite custom SIF templates, but it will get there in a couple releases.

Active personalization report

Personalization is great, but how do you track all the personalization rules on your solution? How do you preview your rules? Maintenance of personalization on big solutions can be hard. Not anymore with the Active personalization report.

The Active personalization report will be the single place to find all the personalizations running on your sites. It provides easy access to setup new personalizations, and also preview and edit existing personalizations.

The three time-to-market improvements in 9.2 will bring you faster and simpler installations, improve implementation standardization with refinement of the Helix guidelines, and a much simpler way for you to manage the personalization that you have setup on your site.

I’m sure you can all agree that these features will help you and your customers execute your day-to-day job in a more efficient way and provide you with an opportunity to focus on the cool & fun things in your job and start innovating and adding business value for your customers.

This article is part of the 9.2 blog series.

The post Sitecore 9.2 – Time to Market Highlights appeared first on PieterBrinkman.com.

Sitecore 9.2 – Innovation Highlights

Pieter Brinkman — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 14:22:24 +0000

Every release contains several innovations. I want to focus on 3 innovations for different target audiences. I will cover something for the front-end developers, something for the back-end developers, and finally something for anyone who regularly uses the Sitecore editing tools.

Sitecore JSS

Sitecore JSS has been one of our major innovations in the past release and we continue to invest and innovate in the headless space.

With 9.2; JSS and SXA will work seamlessly together, with options like:

Multisite enabled data source management,
Reuse presentation across pages and sites, and
Enterprise level app governance, management and scaffolding.

In short, your JSS apps will now be able to benefit from all the platform enhancements that SXA offers. This will enable you to build JSS apps alongside one or multiple SXA sites all in the same platform instance.

Support for Sitecore Forms

With the 9.2 release, you can now display forms that were designed in the Sitecore Forms module within JSS applications. You can submit the forms data and trigger appropriate automation for each form. And of course, like all JSS features, we’re making sure that the Full Platform capabilities are preserved.

Sitecore Host

As mentioned during Sitecore Symposium 2018, we’ve been looking to standardize the way we’re handling common activities in all of our new microservices.

We’ve built a series of assemblies that handle these activities, these are things like logging, configuration, plugin management etc.

Last year at Sitecore Symposium 2018 we introduced the concept of the Sitecore Host. Sitecore Host standardizes the microservices architecture that will be at the core of all these common functionalities within the platform. This is great because it means that we’ll have uniformity across the platform, one approach to logging, one approach to configuration, and so on. This means that you don’t have to learn different technologies and approaches for each of the microservices, making your lives much simpler.

Sitecore Host updates

After Symposium we continued our efforts on Sitecore Host. Not only have we updated to the latest versions of 3^rd party libraries including .NET Core. We’ve also been working to improve the services that we have built against the host.

Sitecore Identity service improvements

The Sitecore Identity service was the first service that we launched running on Sitecore Host, back in 9.1 and we’ve got a few new improvements for 9.2. We’ve implemented single-sign out , so if you log out of one of our systems then you’ll be logged out of all of them. We have implemented token invalidation to ensure that access tokens will expire when users log out.

Finally, we’ve also added persistent storage of users and access tokens to ensure that users aren’t logged out if the Identity service is restarted.

Migration of existing Microservices

But that’s not all! We’ve mentioned how not only future services will run against the Host, but also that we want to move our existing Microservices over to the Host as well and that’s what we’re doing.

As of 9.2 the publishing engine will also be based on the Host. This means that it greatly improves installation and maintenance of this service moving forwards. Also, this better aligns the service with the rest of the platform.

All great news for the for our microservices-based future!

Horizon

Moving to the last innovation for the end-users. Horizon is the next generation experience for web content management.

So where are we with Horizon? We did multiple previews with partners, MVPs and UX research teams. We’ve received honest feedback and very positive feedback that confirms that we’re on the right path.

With 9.2 it’s time for the next phase. We’ll focus on adding new features, functions and improvements based on your input.

We also extended Horizon with;

Plug-in infrastructure to allow for extensibility.
Extend API Gateway to receive custom data.
Possible to customize the editor solutions.

We’re going to continue feedback loops, preview rounds and development during the next period, moving forward to Horizon’s initial release.

This article is part of the 9.2 blog series.

The post Sitecore 9.2 – Innovation Highlights appeared first on PieterBrinkman.com.

How the investment strategies of your favorite technology impacts your day-to-day job

Pieter Brinkman — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 07:51:16 +0000

Within every company, technology or project you need to decide focus areas for your investments of your time and money. At our company we have defined three focus areas in our continuous R&D investment strategy: Innovation, Time to Market and Enhancements.

These three strategies are similar for the most established platforms/languages and tools.

For me, the most important pillar is Enhancements. We want to reduce technical debt so that we are more efficient in delivering new innovations, not building upon a bad base

However, this is different for start-ups and new technologies, as they need to focus on innovation to drive adoption. Enhancement -reducing technical debt- will follow after the developer community is established. The community will then provide feedback and push the prioritization from innovation to enhancement.

It's critical for every technology/tool or platform to find the magical balance between innovation and enhancements. If you do not innovate you have no chance to survive the future. but if you don't enhance your core foundation you will be unable to innovate and have a very unhappy developers.

How does this impact you as a developer

During preparation for my sessions for our developer conferences in Europe and India I started brainstorming on how our strategic pillars impact the day-to-day job for the developer working with our software everyday. In this article I would like to share my thoughts and vision on how high-level strategic pillars are all tight together and how this affect you as a developer.

Although this article is written in the context of Sitecore the content should resonate with other software vendors, platforms, languages or technologies.

Innovation – Solutions to solve the problems of tomorrow

Starting with the first pillar – Innovation. Innovation is what makes a platform unique. There are a lot of content management systems, DX platforms, customer data platforms and commerce systems out there. We need to stand out with innovation, it is the innovation we bring that differentiate us.

What does this mean for you as a developer?

Innovation makes my technical heart go faster, it excites me, it opens new opportunities to create cutting edge solutions with new products that introduce exciting technologies to my day-to-day job. Some recent examples are Sitecore Cortex that brings the world of Machine Learning to your front door and Sitecore JSS that opens a whole new world of JavaScript development options.

I am aware that innovation sometimes forces you out of your comfort zone. But for me as a developer at heart this is what motivates me and keeps me sharp and motivated. I need the challenge of learning new things and I’m always eager to learn and keeping up with new trends.

Time to Market – Speed throughout the project lifecycle

When we talk about time-to-market , we’re talking about the entire lifecycle of the solutions. From installing, to upgrading, configuring, developing, deploying changes, scaling up, scaling down – it all needs to be fast, easy and reliable.

What does this mean for you as a developer?

Time to market is all about efficiency; how does the platform helps you to do your job more effectively. Providing you with an opportunity to focus on the cool & fun things in your job. Instead of building the same feature or component time-after-time, you can focus on building new features that add business value and create the opportunity to work with innovative technology.

Enhancements – Reduce technical debt

Our work on enhancing our platform is guided by the feedback we get from our customers, partners, analysts and our community. Our ecosystem and community are not shy in telling us what is missing and what we can improve. We’re listening, and we’re taking on board what we hear.

What does this mean for you as a developer?

Enhancements are all about comfort , making sure you have a working and comfortable working environment. Meaning that our platform should be the platform that you prefer to work on, a platform that supports you in doing your job and is not blocking or frustrating you.

What do you think?

I'm very interested to know your opinion on this, do you see similar focus and investments done in your favorite platforms/languages/tools?

Use your alarm for presence detection in your Home Automation setup

Pieter Brinkman — Sun, 28 Jul 2019 07:41:21 +0000

One of the great things about home automation is the possibility to activate scenes based on presence of people in the house. Having solid presence detection in your home is not easy to achieve. There are a lot of ways to do this, but most of them use ping your devices, using network connectivity, Bluetooth or GPS geo-fencing technology. These solutions might work for some use cases, but if your presence detection is based on devices will only work for known devices and people. Meaning you can never be 100% sure that no-one is home.

So do not , I repeat do not , trigger scenes that shut down all the lights if no-one is home based on phones. I’ve a great story about a baby sitter that called me very unhappy about all lights being turned off and also that every time she switched them on they went off again. This go back to one of the essential rules of home automation. Read the 7 tips for a successful home automation.

However, switching lights off when nobody is home or mimicking your presence with lights while you are on holiday are key benefits of home automation solution. A great way of doing this is by installing an alarm and read the status of the alarm, e.g. Fully Armed, partial armed or off.

Having this information in your home automation platform will help you automate and control your home based 100% accurate information of people being in your home, you will now know that;

When the alarm is fully armed , no-one is in the house (if there is anyone in the house you have another issue :-|).
When the alarm is partial armed the person(s) in the house are going to/are in or just getting in/out of bed.
When the alarm is disabled , people are actively living in the house.

Now you can use that information for all kinds of actions. For example; turn off all the lights when the alarm is fully armed and start a light scene that mimics your presence in your house, which is a great addition for your home security.

In my personal setup I use a Woonveilig / Egardia alarm. I picked this alarm because the hardware is solid, you can communicate directly with the alarm and the subscription is optional.

I’ve chosen not to fully integrate my alarm with my home automation or build my own custom alarm solution using z-wave modules. For security reasons I advise to keep the control of the alarm separated from your home automation setup.

Read and learn how to integrate Woonveilig / Egardia alarm with OpenHab using Node-Red [LINK]

The post Use your alarm for presence detection in your Home Automation setup appeared first on PieterBrinkman.com.

7 tips for a successful home automation

Pieter Brinkman — Tue, 28 May 2019 14:43:19 +0000

For the last eight years I’ve been busy improving with home automations, also called domotica. The time that I invest divers strongly per period, sometimes I don’t do anything for months, and then I find a new technology and I go all in with my spare time. In these years a lot of I’ve used a lot of different technologies, brands and platforms for my smart home.

I’m pretty happy with my current home automation setup and I got asked a lot by people that visited my house “How do I get started with home automation?”.

Let’s start with sharing my 7 rules for home-automations.

My requirements for a successful smart home

1. Keep it simple

Main requirement, people should not notice that you have home automation in place. Everything should work as is normal for your guests. The next two tips are about that. I would call this rule; think about the babysitter.

The main rule for home automation –> think about the babysitter

Your babysitter will not have your home automation app installed or interest to visit the mobile website. Also she wouldn’t be able to use your voice assistant as she doesn’t know the names of the lights. Make sure that every light is controllable by everyone that visits your house.

2. Maintain physical switches

Lights must be controllable by physical switches. Phones and apps are nice, but we still need physical switches. Why? Think about your parents (in-law) and the baby sitter.

3. Do not depend on internet

Lights and devices that are critical around the house should work if the internet or your network is down. The basic functionality should always workj and not dependent on any Home Automation host, platform or Hub.

4. Avoid batteries

Avoid battery powered devices, there is nothing more annoying than replacing batteries.

This is easier set than done, sometimes you need battery powered devices. But if you do so make sure you measure battery level and build alerts and notification when the battery level becomes critical.

5. Avoid presence detection or geofencing

Geo fencing or presence detection might be the first thing that you want to use. It was at least for me.

My advice do not use presence detection or geofencing to trigger scenes or automation. Using devices detection or geofencing with phones is great for knowing who is in the home. But do not , I repeat do not , trigger scenes that shut down all the lights if no-one is home based on phones. I’ve a great story about a baby sitter that called me very unhappy about all lights being turned off and also that every time she switched them on they went off again. This go back to the rule number 1; Think about the babysitter.

An easy solution for presence detection is using an alarm and check if the alarm is armed, but this is something for an additional blogpost.

6. Use an OpenSource software

Select an opensource platform for your home automation solution, avoid vendor lock-in. This way you’ll get the freedom of using and combining sensors and lights from different vendors, e.g. Philips Hue, all z-wave vendors, CaCu, mi-home, and hundreds more.

7. Start small and isolated

Home automation is great, yes it can be very rewarding for the family. You need to be aware that you will make mistakes in the beginning, you don’t want to make these mistakes with lights that are key for the day-to-day business for your family. Start in your office or on your desk, start by reading out sensors. Do a small proof of concept in a room or a light that isn’t used daily. We all know that you need more budget for additional home automation projects in the future, so you need buy-in from your family. Frustrating them at the start is not a good idea.

Any of these seven tips has a lot more details to share, I’m hoping to cover these in the near future.

The post 7 tips for a successful home automation appeared first on PieterBrinkman.com.

DEV Community: Pieter Brinkman

Sitecore 9.3 – Core platform enhancements

Experience Editor

Functional improvements and enhancements

Content foundation

Removing Obsoletes

Additional improvements

Data Foundation, Storage & Reporting

Tracking: Session expiration batching support

Cortex & Processing

Performance Improvement of Aggregation pipeline

FocusedPerformance Improvements

xConnect Storage

Bug Fixing andOther improvements

Data foundation

*Providepossibility to switch off/on performance counters for XConnect/xDB/Cortexservices *

XConnectSearchIndexer.exe should have a possibility tomonitor status

Stability – Have a Resume functionality for xconnectrebuild

Reporting

Sitecore Symposium: What’s new in Sitecore Land (9.3)

Sitecore 9.2 – Enhancements Highlights

XDB Data purging

Robot Detection

Yaml format for serialization

Search Improvements

Tracker improvements

Wrap-up

Sitecore 9.2 – Time to Market Highlights

Sitecore Install Assistant (SIA)

Active personalization report

Sitecore 9.2 – Innovation Highlights

Sitecore JSS

Sitecore Host

Sitecore Host updates

Sitecore Identity service improvements

Migration of existing Microservices

Horizon

How the investment strategies of your favorite technology impacts your day-to-day job

How does this impact you as a developer

Innovation – Solutions to solve the problems of tomorrow

What does this mean for you as a developer?

Time to Market – Speed throughout the project lifecycle

What does this mean for you as a developer?

Enhancements – Reduce technical debt

What does this mean for you as a developer?

What do you think?

Use your alarm for presence detection in your Home Automation setup

7 tips for a successful home automation

My requirements for a successful smart home

1. Keep it simple

2. Maintain physical switches

3. Do not depend on internet

4. Avoid batteries

5. Avoid presence detection or geofencing

6. Use an OpenSource software

7. Start small and isolated

Providepossibility to switch off/on performance counters for XConnect/xDB/Cortexservices