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Sitecore User Group Conference India 2019

Last month we hosted the very successful Sitecore User Group Conference 2019 (SUGCON) in India, this was our second SUGCON India. The event has been very successful in many ways and I want to share my view on the event.

First the number; I’m very happy to share that we had nearly 300 attendees during SUGCON India. During the days we had more than 35 sessions presented.  We had over the 100 attendees across our three workshops; Commerce, SxA and JSS- during the pre-conference workshop day.  We also managed to host a Sitecore certification opportunity for more than 70 developers.

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7 tips for a successful home automation

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.

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My home automation setup

Let’s start with the first post about home automation.  I’m pretty happy with my current home automation setup.  In this post I would like to share my current setup as on June 2019. This will be a endless work in progress posts, updated with links to more in depth articles.

Before we start with home automation I want to make you aware of following statement.

You will get no compliments or praises for your Home Automation, the best recognition you will get are the complaints when it is not working.

My home automation history

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 recently switched from Domoticz to OpenHab as my main home automation platform. Domoticz has always worked perfect for me, the reason for me to change was mainly to try something new. I really like working with OpenHab, but the learning curve is steep and it a more technical oriented solution. So if you don’t have a technical background or you’re new to home automation I would advise you to start with Domoticz or Homey (no personal experience with Homey).

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Install Node-Red on openHABian (openHABian PI)

Node-Red is available as an extension on Openhabian, this short post will explain you how to do this.

  1. Open Putty and start SSH session to your OpenHabian server. Login as with user Openhabian.
  2. Start the openHABian configuration tool

sudo openhabian-config

  1. In the openHABian configuration tool select Optional Components.
  2. In the optional components menu find NodeRED and press Enter. The installation of Node Red wil now start.
  3. Wait till the installation finalized and go to your browsers and visit your openHAB start page
    http://openhabianpi:8080

Node-Red will now be available in the start menu.

You are now ready to go and to start with Node-Red!

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Sharing is caring

During my professional career I’ve always been an advocate of sharing knowledge. Share what you’ve learned so others can learn from it, this way at the end we all get to a better end-results. However, I noticed that in my private live I have passions that I haven’t shared my learnings about.

Next to my wife, kids, family and friends I like to spend time on windsurfing and home automation. My goal is to start sharing my insights on these topics -family, kids and friends excluded :)- and perhaps help others making their choices or getting started.

Again this is a goal, so let’s reflect on how I did in a year… Life is all about setting the priorities, we’ll see if I can make this work :).

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Full headless experiences with Sitecore Omni™

In the keynote during Sitecore Symposium 2018 in Orlando we introduced Sitecore Omni™, a range of products that support headless scenarios for the different business needs in digital marketing.

Sitecore Omni™ supports all headless scenarios including all author and marketer functionality that the Sitecore Experience Cloud offers, including inline editing, analytics, personalization, multivariate testing and Sitecore Cortex machine learning.

Headless is often positioned and offered as the solution for your digital marketing challenges; digital marketing challenges that are becoming more and more critical to solve.

Customers are expecting seamless experiences on every channel, both online and offline. Because of the exponential growth of the channels the digital marketing channel is are getting more complex.  There is no silver bullet headless approach, there is no single headless solution that fits all.
In the real world there are different customers, with different digital marketing challenges and business cases. These challenges often need a different (headless) approaches.

A headless approach can be the used from solutions where the CMS is only the content hub for a static Progressive Web App, it can be used to track offline customer interaction with IoT or build a full powered native mobile app with tracking and personalization. For all these business cases is the headless approach the correct one, but you can understand that the technical requirements and implementation are completely different.

With Sitecore Omni we introduce a range of products that supports the different headless scenarios.

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