What ever happens – Lotusphere is still the best name for the conference

I’ve been thinking ….

…… dangerous I know  – but with all the talk of the brands going away and the software group becoming a big happy mish-mash of products and solutions and the much chat around “if there is no Lotus what is Lotusphere going to be called” chat – to be it still makes perfect sense to call the Annual Conference – LOTUSPHERE

So the bit of IBM that was Lotus the brand is now IBM Collaboration Solutions – which kind of makes sense as we have Lotus Domino and Notes, The WebSphere based products like Connections and Portal/WCM and Quickr that can be either and Sametime that uses both – all very Collaborative .. but calling our Annual Conference any thing other than Lotusphere just seems dumb.

Just look at it for a minute … Lotus …. Sphere

LOTUS (web)SPHERE

LOTUSPHERE

Please IBM .. do what you must with Brands, Product names and marketing (ok may be not marketing but we can live in hope eh;) )
 
BUT the conference name is perfect  – everyone knows Lotusphere, what goes on at Lotusphere mostly stays at Lotusphere (and twitter and facebook and youtube) – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it

Social Connections 1 – Thank You

I would like to say a Thank you to all that supported the first Social Connections user group in London on Monday 4th July.

There was a fantastic turn out of 50 people on the day and 120 watching the sessions on-line.

  • Thank you to all the speakers – sessions and presentations will be available (watch the Social Connections site for details)
  • Thanks to all that assisted in the setting up and running of the event
  • To the boys at the Salvations Army for a fantastic venue, AV and streaming service – you are amazing
  • To our sponsors – Portal, Ascendant and Collaboration Matters
  • To everyone that attended – We couldn’t do it without you

We are planning on meeting approx every 6 months and would love some feedback on what sessions you would like to see, location, format etc.

So once again a big thank you from all of us

IBM Champion – honoured and humbled

I am deeply honoured and humbled to have been chosen as one of the 50 Worldwide Champions for IBM Collaboration Solutions.

I wanted to echo the thanks of all the other IBM Champions to the selection and organising committee, the wonderful people who nominated me and to the rest of the community for being generally awesome and inspiring me to follow in your footsteps.

The full list of champions can be found here : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/champions/

Thank you SO much – I will keep up the good work

IBM is 100 today

Today International Business Machines – IBM – is 100 years old …

There are some mile stones dear to me ..

1970 – when I was born – the database as we know it was invented

1988 – the AS400 was invented – anyone that knows me well knows of the love I have the AS400 (iSeries, System i, i5, i and now Power 7) machines most of my career in IT has been involved with these fantastic machines.

1997 – eBusiness .. I spent 7 years working with IBM’s e-business products (WebSphere Commerce) loved it loved it …

and now we are on to Smarter Planet, the IBM Dublin labs are working on Smarter Cities, IBM Watson  and now we are a Social Business …

I am looking forward to the next years of IBM … 🙂

Announcing the first IBM Connections user group!

I am delighted to announce that today we are launching:

Social Connections – the IBM Connections user group

Initially based in the UK (but open to members world-wide) Social Connections aims to be the place where individuals with an interest in IBM Connections can come to meet, share knowledge, develop best practices, discuss adoption strategies and to generally build a network of key folks with a similar focus.

We will try to be customer-focused, enabling organisations that are using the product to share their experiences and to ask for advice from others.  Partners and IBMers will be welcome, but we will try to always satisfy the needs of customers first.

Organised by a panel of willing individuals from around the Connections community in the UK (including  Stuart McIntyre from Collaboration matters, me (Sharon Bellamy of City University), Simon Vaughan of Cardiff University and Jon Mell of IBM), the group will organise two main events each year (targeted for late Spring and late Autumn) in the form of meetings held primarily on customer sites.  With a mix of business and technical sessions, plus plenty of chance for networking, we hope they will be fun events with real business value.

Today, we are also announcing details of our inaugural event, Social Connections 1, scheduled for 4th July 2011 in London.

Thanks to the gracious assistance of Mark Calleran and his organisation, the event will be held at The Salvation Army‘s international headquarters just adjacent to the Millennium Bridge in the centre of London.

Image:Announcing the first IBM Connections user group!

The event will start at 9:30 and run through to 17:00, and feature a selection of the very best speakers from IBM, customers and partners.  We will have a mix of business-focused sessions, customer case studies and technical deep-dives in order to satisfy all tastes, including an IBM keynote.  Best of all, we will ensure that there is plenty of time for networking and sharing of experiences and tips for successful Connections deployments.

Registration will be opening soon, and we’ll be on the lookout for both sponsors and session abstracts over the next couple of weeks.

Come join us!

gotchas, UKLUG, and TWiL

I haven’t blogged for a while … (again) .. mainly because I have been a busy little Shaz

I spent a few days at UKLUG in Manchester – which was brilliant I must say. I spent some time with friends old and new – as always it was fantastic to spend time with Darren and Lisa Duke and the lovely yellow wearing Mat Newman – but was also good to see some of the other Loti that I don’t socialise with in my normal working life.

UKLUG was actually very good – I attended a couple of sessions on Domino which was useful as I will be gaining some Domino infrastructure over the next few months. One of the best sessions was Lisa and Stuart’s Social inside and outside the firewall – 1 slide, 48 doughnuts and an audience with many questions.

The Live recording of This Week in Lotus was great as well – live TWiLs are always great – we gave away many This Week In Lotus Shirts as well 🙂

I seriously hope I make it to Lotusphere 2012 – or whatever its called – just for the relationships alone it’s worth any penny – to the point where I may try and fund myself going.

Talking of TWiL – there has been some great ones over the past few weeks – including the latest one ( episode 54 ) – with Paul Mooney – Whatever happens with the brands or colours I really hope we keep TWiL – Coming from mainly a WebSphere background its the place I go to – to catch up with what is going  on in the collaboration world of Lotus and IBM.

A gotcha I have discovered this week to do with Portal Patching. When patching portal 7.0.0.0 to 7.0.0.1 if running portal on windows you MUST remove the services before installing or un-installing the patch – if you don’t remove the service, the patching will fail!

and now am back to installing a portal / wcm dev environment to test my patching process .. O the joy 😀  

Sharon doesn’t do pauses


This Week in Lotus 050 – Managing IBM collaboration tools. ’Does that mean Microsoft has it right all along?’

This discussion was fascinating … and I am very glad that Stuart and Darren invited me to be a part of this.

I had an issue a few weeks ago where a Community owner of a Lotus Connections Community deleted the forums widget –  realised that deleting it – well actually meant it was gone.

In the user’s defence, they wanted to make the forum read only and thought that removing it from the community would mean it would be retained elsewhere.
My poor distraught user did actually say that the system warned that it was going to delete it – The user in question is not dumb, They are intelligent,  switched on and web-savvy, yet still they managed to delete something that actually warned them it was going to be deleted.

My initial reaction was “how can anyone be so STUPID?” I huffed and puffed and once my initial mood of “muppet” had worn off I thought about it in more detail.
Maybe for community widgets the error message needs to be more specific, users need to realise that deleting means not just from the community but GONE – this is not apparent it seems – some work may need to be done here.

The user in question called me in a panic once the widget had been deleted and realised that the information contained in said widget was not available outside of the community.
I tried to play the “sorry – it’s gone” card, but this was possibly the most important thing ever stored on the Connections environment – Consultation feedback about our Vice Chancellors vision for where the University is heading for the next 5 years,

I started taking a serious look into how I would get this information back – I thought it would be a chore .. but do-able, It wasn’t as straight forward as I had hoped.

Communities are a fantastic thing inside connections – having a collection of people collaborating on a certain subject, or a bunch of like minded people just *shooting the breeze* getting ideas out and sharing knowledge. Many of the users here love the fact they can customise their own communities by adding removing and hiding widgets – fabulous for the users .. nightmare for the admins.

On the whole Disaster Recovery isn’t an issue – we all have the multi-tier, multi-layed system covered with the DB, AppServer, WebServer, File system, OS covered.

Its the incremental one file, one widget, a wiki page which seems to be the biggest headache – heaven forbid you remove a whole community as that is a whole lot of hurt that you don’t want to visit.

The single applications that sit outside connections are pretty hard to restore bits of as it is .. there is the DB to consider – tables for the actual application, things stored in the file system, dependancies, triggers or key to other DB’s  – which makes it pretty tough to work out exactly what you would need to restore at any given point in time – chances are something is going to be lost in a restore.

Communities brings a whole new level of complexity to the party – as well as the community application there are the 6 or so widgets to add as well leading to some very complex relationships between the DB tables in ways that will make your brain dribble out of your ears, as well as complex relationships to the file system. I personally haven’t found any decent documentation on restoring sections of a community or a whole community.

The fact that connections relies so heavily on the database and it’s ties to the file system I am really surprised that at least the DB relationships aren’t documented.

After working with WebSphere Commerce (on as/400, iSeries) in my previous employer (IBM Premier Business Partner) we had much the same issues. WebSphere Commerce is the only other IBM product that I have come across in my 10 years of being involved with this stuff, which has such a heavy dependancy on it’s DB relationships.

We spent about 5 years working with IBM to make the documentation better and assisting with beta programs, testing next versions of WCS and giving IBM all the feedback possible to help with making the product and documentation as great as possible.

One of the best things about the commerce documentation was the reference section – particularly the Database reference section. Each table listed with a description of the table and information on each field there is also index and constraint information and information on which tables and constraints reference the table you are looking at (see images at the end of the post)

By all means just having information about the DB is not going to be enough, but it is a start. Connections is such a complicated piece of software – and as it improves and is easier to customise – it’s going to get more complicated. BUT Connections is sold as an enterprise ready application and for it to be totally successful it needs to have enterprise ready documentation on administering the back up and recovery of features and individual files, folders and pages.

Whether this is handled by “soft delete”, admin commands, or a 3rd party application – it needs to be looked at as a matter of urgency.

In the end to allow the user to get access to the information deleted it was easier to restore the entire DB to new DB instance, build a stand-alone Connections server to point to the DB, do a small amount of DB manipulating and the user copied the forum questions and responses off in PDF format and has since uploaded them back to the files sections of their community. All in all that took approximately  2 days – just to retrieve 28 pages of information – a pain, a lot of hassle, but that appeared to be the fastest way at the time.

I would be more than happy to discuss my experiences with attempting to restore, and experiences around similar issues seen in Commerce if it will help in anyway. I am sure there are other members of the Connections community that would be happy to assist too. Connections is a fantastic product, lets make it better but helping us poor admins out 🙂

example of commerce documentation

example of commerce documentation

example of commerce documentation

WebSphere User Group 23 march

WebSphere User Group 23rd March 2011

I was really looking forward to the WebSphere User Group – I haven’t been immersed in fellow WebSphere geeks for a while (other than Dave Hay) so It would be great to catch up with some other purple people. 3 of us from City went – as well as me, Anu my line manager (who is a portal/wcm guru) and Julia the “new girl” who is a WebSphere admin and is picking up all the *tech* we use.


The day was pretty full on with lots to do. Bedfont is a great location for these kinds of things, but it’s a pig to get to unless you drive there – which isn’t really an option for me where I live, but I managed to get there in one peace (thanks to Anu for giving me a lift half way).

The day kicked off at 9 with coffee and nibbles from about 8:30am. The great thing about it being in an IBM location is you always get reasonable coffee and bickies and there is plenty of it. After getting up at 4am I am in need of coffee.

Lots of good tracks – as the WebSphere Integration User Group (formally the MQ user group) were assisting there was plenty of good sessions. 2 WebSphere App server tracks, OSGi. WebSphere ESB, Deployment, Development, Customer Experience, Java SIG, MQ/MB, BPM and 2 Portal tracks (which is where I spent most of my day).

The 2 Portal dedicated  tracks were very good, with subjects ranging from case studies, to development, to use cases. The first of these sessions was around creating a social portal experience using Lotus Connections (ahh my new favourite WebSphere based product). Anu and I both took a lot away from this and Julia picked up a lot around the Connections and Portal side. I learnt something new about using a WebSphere cookie to redirect – so it was WIN all round.

At the coffee break I hooked up with my mentor and long suffering old boss Mr Bleddyn Williams and had a right good natter about Commerce, TAM and a million other things we used to do when I worked with him (it’s good to talk).

I then hit what sounded like the most boring session ever – “Class Loading and debugging Class Loader memory leaks in WAS”. I can hear you all yawning – stop – it was REALLY interesting. When you are doing a lot of in house development class loading issues can be a real pain in the bum. I am not a developer, but from an Admin point of view this session was really helpful. There was a class loading 101 and then a demo of some free tooling to assist with the diagnosis of CL issues. It was fantastic ..

There was a not bad lunch – although not quite enough of it. It seems that although there wasn’t as many people as I would have thought there was going to be (about a couple of hundred I guesstimate) – they were a hungry bunch (horde of locust) – and lunch disappeared VERY fast. the Lunch time hour was actually pretty good as I got to meet up with lots of WAS people I have been out of touch with for the past couple of years.

We then hit a great session on test driven development and then my good friend and fellow geek – Mr Dave Hay’s session on using the Google search appliance with Portal and WCM – which was absolutely brilliant – although we don’t use the google search appliance here – we do use a 3rd part search so it’s given us some good ideas about using search. It’s always good to catch up with Mr Hay .. I can geek away to my hearts content talking about as400 (iSeries, i5, systemi – it’s still a 400 to us), Commerce and other geeky goodness without being looked at like I have 3 heads.

At the end of the day beer and cake – although everyone disappeared pretty early. In fact the last people there were all the ISSL people the old Loti 🙂

Although the day was good .. these are things I think would have made it better

No Commerce Tracks AT ALL – come on WUG organisers, Commerce is a big thing, yes its a bit specialised but you could have squeezed in 1 or 2 commerce sessions. By having none you are excluding a big audience (until recently there were no Portal tracks either so good on you for doing these)

There were far too many IBM speakers – although the IBMers that did talk were great .. as it is a user group, I would have expected lots of BP’s, Customers etc. to be presenting.

Not enough social interaction – no #hashtag specified in the opening session. There were lots of people taking notes and tweeting, but no way to follow what they were doing.

Twitter ID’s on Name Badges – all conferences should have this now, so MANY people use twitter – give us a way to know who we all are 🙂

Not a real community built up around WebSphere unlike Lotus – Although the WUG has been going for 10 years and most people do know each other there isn’t the same sense of community – if there are community things out on the internet – they are not easy to find.

Please promote your community better – I have been a WebSphere person for almost 10 years and a Lotus person for only 2 – as the 2 communities are working more closely together and more and more of us are overlapping our skill set there must be a way to interact when we are away from User Groups – I am happy to help with this – contact me here.

All in all a good day .. but lets make WUG2012 a better one 🙂

A grand day out (x 2)

I have spent a couple of Grand Days Out  this week – being as I am just a little busy at the moment I wasn’t sure if I could spend the time out of the office, but I am pleased to report it was a worth while exercise.

Wednesday 23rd March was the WebSphere User Group (WUG) – at IBM Bedfont
Thursday 24th March was the Dachis Social Business Summit 2011 (SBS2011) – at the Imagination Gallery London

Both were very different days, I will elaborate more in separate posts but here is the condensed version 🙂

WUG

Good points:

  • Always good for any WebSphere related tech
  • I learnt something new – about classloading, will help me debug issues a lot better now
  • Lots of good tracks
  • I got to meet up with lots of WAS people I have been out of touch with for the past couple of years
  • There were 2 whole tracks dedicated around Portal  – from case studies, to development, to use cases.
  • There was a not bad lunch – although not quite enough of it, and at the end of the day beer and cake – although everyone disappeared pretty early.

Could Improve:

  • No Commerce Tracks AT ALL – come on WUG organisers, Commerce is a big thing, yes its a bit specialised but you could have squeezed in 1 or 2 commerce sessions. By having none you are excluding a big audience (until recently there were no Portal tracks either)
  • There were far too many IBM speakers –
  • Not enough social interaction – no #hashtag specified in the opening session. There were lots of people taking notes and tweeting, but no way to follow what they were doing.
  • Twitter ID’s on Name Badges – all conferences should have this now
  • Not a real community built up around WebSphere unlike Lotus – Although the WUG has been going for 10 years and most people do know each other there isn’t the same sense of community – if there are community things out on the internet – they are not easy to find.Please promote your community better – I have been a WebSphere person for almost 10 years and a Lotus person for only 2 – as the 2 communities are working more closely together and more and more of us are overlapping our skill set there must be a way to interact when we are away from User Groups – I am happy to help with this – contact me here.

SBS2011 – Wow – I was so totally blown away at what a great day this was

Good points:

  • Tech agnostic – this was all about social and not what you use to do it
  • Very diverse set of speakers – different speakers, talking about lots of different ways that people do social, in and out of business.
  • Fantastic social interaction – Jazz Impact was a great way of  using  audience participation and social interaction to demonstrate what the speakers of the day had been talking about.
  • Fabulous venue – with real food.
  • Great social networking opportunity – it was like a who’s who in the social software community

Could Improve:

  • Not a lot to be honest – having one track keeps everyone focused. There were plenty of breaks, good food and much chance to talk to the speakers and always an opportunity for Q and A
  • The only real improvement would have been a screen of the twitter stream for the hash tag (#sbs2011) being visible
  • Twitter ID’s on Name Badges – all conferences should have this now (same as the WUG)

 

I will post in more detail about each event in detailed posts – but all in all both days are well worth taking the time out of your schedule for.

Lotus Community Champions

On today’s LITE call Joyce Davis has announced that IBM have started a Champions Program and are going to include the Lotus Community

Details are still being sorted out and will be promoted shortly – but it’s IBM’s way of recognising the contribution that some of us make – Joyce was very specific to make sure that some of the unsung hero’s that fly under the radar that do a lot for the Lotus Community are recognised.

What a great way to recognise all the work that some of the Community do – I am sure that Joyce will promote is and the boys will announce it on This Week In Lotus once the details are available