Dean OBrien

Technology 2025

Webinar: Using AI with Sitecore

I delivered a webinar to our IT department, where I explored various ways AI can enhance the user experience within the Sitecore platform. The focus was on demonstrating how even simple AI implementations can deliver substantial benefits.

Service Listener for SOLR

I created a simple service monitor, which when used in conjunction with the Application Insights module can send alerts if the service is ever down. More details on the blog summary page.

Custom Layout Service Module for Sitecore

This module provides endpoints to expose layout information, item detail and rendering content for consumption by a headless web app. The purpose was to provide an alternative route to explore headless, for those without the JSS module.

Added Alerting and Entra Authentication to Application Insights Module

I added alerting functionality to my Application Insights module, allowing it to monitor any application (including each sitecore xconnect instance) and fire alerts if specific criteria are reached. I also updated the module to use Entra authentication, instead of the legacy API key approach. More details on the blogs summary page.

Technology 2024

Search Analytics: Webinar

This is a recording of a presentation I gave to our Marketing department. The focus of the talk was to introduce the new analytics module. Showcasing how the module can be used to improve a users search experience on the site.

A Day with Sitecore Search

A look at my initial experiences with the Sitecore Search product (as a customer using it for first time).

Personalisation Demo Site

A simple site that sets up and showcases some basic personalisation within sitecore. This was to be the base project, that would have been converted to XM cloud by my mentee.

Domain not mapping through to Sitecore site in Kubernetes cluster

Sharing my experience troubleshooting this issue.

SUGCON 2023 – A composable future for Sitecore

Sharing my experience of attending SUGCON in Malaga. This article was also shared in the Sitecore developers newsletter.

Issues Migrating Data from Sitecore 9.3 to 10.1

Sharing my experience troubleshooting this issue.

MVP Application 2023 Summary

This page provides further detail, where one of the contributions listed below covers multiple pages. If also lists some contributions from Sitecore Stack Exchange.

Sitecore Page Recommender

A series of blog posts, looking at my experiences developing a Page Recommendation service. The code to accompany this can be found on "MVP Application 2023" summary page.

Unresponsive CM Instance after deployment

At look at how our misconfiguration of our CDN led to major performance issues

Sitecore: AlreadyExists, Contact. XdbContext Batch Execution Exception

A look at a major issue we faced with XConnect.

How to automate the building of SQL Snapshot images using scheduled tasks

Our approach to creating daily snapshot images of production databases

Presentation on Docker and Kubernetes

This is a recording of a presentation I was asked to give to our IT Department. The focus of the talk was to introduce the concepts of Docker and Kubernetes and how it can be used to host our Sitecore Environment.