STOP! Collaborate and Listen
Further to the news flash of the IBM & HCL deal last week – listen in on a video interview with HCL’s C Vijayakumar, Prateek Aggarwal & Darren Oberst on why this is a great deal for HCL, customers and partners.
There is an annoying 30 second advert at the begining of the clip
I woke up to the news that HCL tech are going to acquire select IBM software products – This is big news
IBM already had a partnership with HCL where they would develop the code for IBM – Notes and Domino were among this group.
HCL have injected a massive amount of enthusiasm with thier aggressive development plans and release cycle for Notes/Domino which has given the Community a shot in the arm that it needed.
But the news was trickling out slowly and a lot of Domino customers are already moving mail off the platform – HCL are not backwards in coming forwards and they have budget to market – ICS was a tiny fish in a very big IBM pond so now it may get the attention it deserves.
This deal is still ongoing and may not be completed until mid 2019 and is subject to change, but these are the solutions on the table
Of course there was already a partnership set up for some of these products, when the deal goes through these will be HCL products not IBMs.
I am super excited for this .. all of the tech I have worked with over the last 20 years from an IBM standpoint is in this list – I am especially excited about the future of Commerce. I spend 8 happy years as a WebSphere Commerce admin and consultant and it is still my favourite product to work with (I may need to brush up on some commerce skills now) .. We have already seen the possitive impact of HCL working with Notes and Domino and the new products they are spinning out of it (HCL Places being one of them). I have high hopes for Connections, Commerce and Portal – I am really looking forward to seeing what the furture will hold.
The press release can be found here
and the Register’s take on the deal
I have been a little quiet of late .. this is mostly due to losing my dad back in October.
I want to thank everyone for all the support, for the hugs and the tears. I really do have the best group of friends who can help me get through the worst of times.
My dad is awesome, we almost shared a birthday and he will always be a massive part of me. He taught me to fight for what I believed in, my work ethic, to teach myself and my love of all things tech – he will always be my hero and I am missing a part of me now he is gone.
I had some time off and have been busy with some exciting new challanges which I hope to blog about soon. I have been to another conference and I am about to head off to the BCC office in Germany for a week – So its back to normal.
Hope you have enjoyed the break from me – as I am back with a vengance and will be back up to speed with my sharing and blogging.
So a quick round up of #soccnx
Connections isn’t dead.. Long live Connections. And although the emphasis recently has been on the Domino 10 there is lots of work in the Connections space happening.
IBM are planning on releasing CRs instead of big releases. The plan is twice a year for on prem and up to quarterly, as most customers find it way easier to implement a fixpack change than a full migration/update to a new version. This is a great idea and I do agree that it’s the best way forward.
Connections customizer is the way to go for changing things – look and feel, functionality and it is possible to make huge changes without touching the underlying code – but its Linux only same as the component pack (type ahead, orient me and elastic search) – and an extra box (or 2) for windows customers will be required. It is very powerful and although I was sceptical to begin with I agree this is the way to go. It may involve some extra skills being required for Connections admins and a bit of sell to get the extra hardware, but worth it.
No news on docs, really but CR3 if3 of docs is the latest and it will be updated in the same way as connections.
Connections 6 CR3 has a bunch of cool changes for the look and feel including extra community file views and some cool visualisation features – this will be tested as soon as i get a chance.
Lots of emphasis on using the component pack (Linux only as above) but this has replaced the pink vision previously.
Other news – the awesome guys at ISW have a new version of boards coming – this quarter for cloud, next quarter for on prem – which includes new views for boards including a calander view. Can’t wait to see this.
Ephox is now Tiny not as in small as in the tiny editor. New versions of textbox.io and the tiny editor will be available soon for Connections and other Web apps – exciting times & the aussie party is back at Think 🙂
The guys at AppFusions have a great set of tools for integrating teams that work in. Connections and Office365 – I want to give this a try as I can see many customers that could benefit. Hogne gave a great presentation on this which I will share the slides from.
So all in all its been great.. The community is thriving.. Connections is alive and kicking and long may it continue
Here are the full list of videos from the Connections adoption month campaign from IBM.
IBM Connections Tip #1 – Build your network
IBM Connections Tip #2 – Advertise your skills
IBM Connections Tip #3 – Update your status every day
IBM Connections Tip #4 – Bookmark in Connections
IBM Connections Tip #5 – Stop sending files in emails
IBM Connections Tip #6 – Stop doing work in emails!
IBM Connections Tip #7 – Co-create with Wikis!
IBM Connections Tip #8 – Create a self help forum
IBM Connections Tip #9 – Follow wisely!
IBM Connections Tip #10 – Check your activity stream daily
IBM Connections Tip #11 – Only create mission driven communities
IBM Connections Tip #12 – Lead by Example
So we are half of the way though Connections Adoptions month (july 2018) and if you have been following the IBM_ICSsupport twitter account, you will have noticed some videos and tips these have also been posted over on the Connections Cloud Collaboration blog.
These videos are between 1 and 2 mins each and are bite size chunks on the 12 Winning social habbits with IBM Connections. I have collated these videos into a list (which I will append with all of the videos once they are published) and any of the other social posts around this subject.
The videos are great ways of introducing users on how IBM Connections can help with their day to day tasks. Personally I spend a lot of time in IBM Connections, the internal BCC one, Customer Connections systems, IBM in the Cloud (NA and CE Connections Cloud), the ICON UK Cloud Connections – I use connections a lot! There are so many times that we have shown how doing some of these simple tasks can help make people more productive – there has been many “AHA!” moments 🙂
Grab the videos, share the images (in a number of langages) and get your users engaging .. 😀 If you think there are languages missing let us know and we can ask IBM to translate the graphics.
Happy collaborating
IBM Connections Tip #1 – Build your network
IBM Connections Tip #2 – Advertise your skills
IBM Connections Tip #3 – Update your status every day
IBM Connections Tip #4 – Bookmark in Connections
IBM Connections Tip #5 – Stop sending files in emails
IBM Connections Tip #6 – Stop doing work in emails!
IBM Connections Tip #7 – Co-create with Wikis!
I have been a little quiet on the blog as I have been working on a number of Connections related projects and today I see that IBM have designated July as IBM Connections Adoptions month. You can read a brief post about it here.
IBM have produced a fantastic info graphic – (the link to download the large PDF is attached to the image) – we winning social habbits with IBM Connecitons
I have written about this over on the BCC blog as we have lots of articles to help with adoption and offer connections services.
I LOVE IBM Connections – and have done since it was first thrown in my direction as “you know about that WebSphere stuff” almost 10 years ago now. I use connections every day, my customers love it and so do our ICS community .. lets lead the way with showing this awesome software some love and helping people get stuff done.
It has come around really quickly – it feels like only a few days ago that we were at Think or Social Connections 13, but It is that time of year again and Engage is almost upon us.
On Tuesday & Wednesday 22-23 May approx 400 people will be setting sail on the SS Rotterdam for Europe’s biggest ICS user group.
It is looking to be a packed agenda with !
Tim & I will be speaking on Wednesday (23rd) morning at 8am !! (thanks Theo) – Best practises for deploying Verse on Premise (VoP) – find out more on our BCC Events page.
Here is the amazing venue for the conference – more information can be found on the Engage page – hope to see you there 🙂
At IBM Think back in March, the Connections Offering Management team promised us some information to help with GDPR compliency. The Connections Cloud information has been available for a while and the On-Premises docuemtation was on the way.
Today my friend and fellow IBM Champion Roberto alerted me to the technotes that are available.
IBM Connections: http://bit.ly/cnxGDPR
IBM Docs: http://bit.ly/docsGDPR
There is a new section in each of the knowledgebases entitled Managing personal data in accordance with GDPR – see here for Connections and here for Docs (note the docs section mostly points to the Connections KB).
The technotes refer to a number of standard tasks that should be configured as part of the install and configuration process – such as using SSL for HTTP traffic, disabling anonymous access etc.
I am sure that this information will evolve as time goes on, but its a great start.
There was much shouting this morning when I realised that all of my RDP sessions were failing due to a pesky little error. They worked no problem at all yesterday, then I remembered .. windows updated last night!!
Said error was all but useless .. as everyone knows you can’t copy the url it shows in that dialog box.
A quick google resolved this with a very simple reg change.
reg add "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\CredSSP\Parameters" /f /v AllowEncryptionOracle /t REG_DWORD /d 2
I ran this with elevated privilege on my Windows 10 desktop and as if by magic I can now RDP again.
There are more fixes coming both Client and Server to resolve this, but the reg change will keep me going until Microsoft release those.