Category: Technical

Tech stuff

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No Email Day

Friday 11th of November 2011. In the spirit of trying to be social and stay current with what is going on in my technical world, I attempted a day without email.

 

Inspired by No Email Day, a number of my techy friends that were also attempting this and Mr Luis Suarez himself, who has been free for almost 4 years now – I wondered,  just how difficult it would be?

 

I set my out of office message – explaing no email day and how I could be contacted instead, my email footer has the company website, my contact number and twitter id on it anyway and an internal out of office told my colleges I would be available on the company Sametime server.

After announcing on twitter I was attempting a day with no mail I started the day. I was suprised as just how receptive people were to contacting me by other meens. I am normally on skype through the working day monitoring the community chats and I spoke to a few people via a chat, plenty of sametime messages to different members of the Applicable team and full backing from my boss. Who after emailing me a message instantly sent me a twitter DM instead 🙂

All was going fantastically, until we noticed an issue with the internal connections server (which actually turned out to be a db2 process that had got stuck), we managed a priority one incident with only 3 email (none sent by me) – but the communication between the support teams and incident manager were all handled over sametime.

I am so impressed I managed a day without mail.

I don’t expect to be getting rid of email anytime soon as its a tool which I do find I need, but I am already cutting back – I try not to send attachments anymore. If I have something to share with-in the company it goes in Connections in someway, file, video, link etc. I blog interested things or put them in a wiki and point people to that these days.

I try to share with the community on my blog, in the Lotusgreen house etc. Skype and Sametime are my weapons of choice for real time communication or I even make a phone call everynow and then 🙂

Maybe every Friday should be a no email day – I can cope with that – could you ?

 

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Back to word press – blogger migration and merging sites

I have decided to move back to using a word press blog again as you can see 🙂

The first task has been moving my old blogger blog over here – easy I thought .. hmmm actually although it should be, it did prove to be a slight pain in the bum.

Firstly the import tool doesn’t work too good, but after a little trial and error I managed to get to it work thanks to some awesome googleness for finding me the info I needed.

Step one:
Export the blogger blog to and XML file – super easy, log on to the blogger dashboard and export it

Step two:
Convert that xml to a format that word press 3.x.x can read – I found this page on the wordpressites.net site which will convert the XML file to the correct format for you.

Step three:
Import the newly created WXR file and tidy up the content – I added some new categories etc. This tool worked brilliantly – imported comments, attachments etc 🙂

Step four:
Set your blogger site to redirect to the new wordpress site. This page was fantastic – has some very simple instructions to generate a blogger template to redirect the blogger site to wordpress.

My second task has been merging my Disney related blog over, seemed a bit daft having multiple blogs. I have merged my Disney realted wordpress one to this site too. Created some Disney pages, categories and tags, allowing me to have one site for multiple topics. I was thinking at least that way people can filter the Disney out if they want to.

The third task will be moving the domino blog over here – not sure how long that will take, I am hoping that the mighty Stuart McIntyre will come up with something snazzy or I may need to chat up my friends in the Lotus community. At some point 3 blogs become one – hopefully very soon.

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JustNudge Twitter widget is just fantastic

Michael Ransley from JustNudge has released a fantastic twitter widget to extend the connections profile.

The IBM® Connections Twitter widget allows a user to share their twitter feed from within their profile.
The widget uses a profile extension to capture the twitter username and then calls the twitter API when a user clicks on the widget.

It is very straight forward to deploy

Here are the steps:

Check out the profiles-config.xml file

Add a new profile extention attribute

Create a new profile extension field under the “contactInformation” section of the definition:

Check the file back in

Create resource bundle

Create a properties file in < connections shared data > /customization/strings and is called com.justnudge.resources.properties.

The contents of this file are as follows:

label.contactInformation.extattr.twitterName = Twitter Name

Register the resource bundle in the LotusConnections-config.xml file:

Check LotusConnections-config.xml file out

Add the following line of code into theelement block to register the resource bundle:

Install the Widget application

The widget is delivered as a J2EE ear file and takes approx 5 minsutes to deploy. It must be deployed into the same cluster / server that rund the Connections profile application.

Once complete synch all nodes and regenerate and propagate the plugin file for the web server.

The final step is to place the widget onto the profile so that it is displayed

Once the widget-config.xml file is checked out the following modifications need to be performed:

The widget definition needs to be defined:

add it to the end of the widget definition section just before the closing tag

i.e.

Finally the widget instance needs to be defined – ensure that this is in the “profilesView” page:

i.e


…
Check the widget file back in

Synch all nodes

restart the profile server / cluster

Here is how it looks :

An additional twitter tab is added to the user profile

A new profile extention is added to hold the Twitter name

The new tab is populated with the tweets

Full details can be found here on the Just Nudge site:

twitter widget for IBM Connections

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lotusphere tips site

All the talk of Lotusphere got me thinking (dangerous I know)

Last year I was a Lotusphere virgin – 2011 was my very first Lotusphere and I had no idea what to expect – other than what my good friend Mr Stuart McIntyre had told me and some of the lovely people I follow on twitter.

I,  of course, thought they were exaggerating the long days, the walking, the late nights, the social aspect of it – after all it’s just a tech conference – right ?

O my how I was wrong … It was like no other conference I have ever been to – and it was amazing.

So last year I did a bit of research into Lotusphere before I went. I found a few guides and some tips on the interwebs, but it was all over the place – so this year I have decided to attempt to pull some of that information into one place.

I have made a very simple (so simple it is just flat html) site of  Lotusphere Tips  – which I have put up for the time being on my web space. It may not stay here, but I am all for creating a lotusphere tips and guides place for people to go when they want information about non-technical conference stuff like :

I need to share a cab (Use the @lotuscab twitter account)
Come on why does everyone say get comfortable shoes?
how do I get to Disney from the airport?
what is this Kimono’s place anyway?

I am sure that most of this will end up on the Lotusphere podcast page and maybe in the Community site when we get one – a wiki would be good, then the whole community can add information.

But this is my first stab at it – as I am still a Lotusphere newbie it can be tough not knowing where to go for info and what to expect, just trying to help some fellow newbies out 🙂

If anyone has any tips, guides or info that I can add – give me a shout and I will add it on

Thanks for being an awesome community

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well the lotusphere abstracts are open then

Later than we were expecting the call for the Lotusphere 2012 abstracts are now open :

Lotusphere 2012 – Call for Abstracts

You only have until the application deadline: Sunday, November 6th 2011 so not long at all ..

This years tracks  :

Jump Starts & Master Class Sessions:
Audience: Developers, system administrators and technologists, IT managers of all levels

Track 2: Technology for Collaboration Solutions : Infrastructure & Deployment:
Audience: System administrators, IT managers and integrators of all levels

Track 3: Technology for Collaboration Solutions : Application Development
Audience: Developers, system architects of all levels

Track 4: Best Practices:
Audience: Business leaders and IT managers, application developers, system administrators and integrator

Track 5: Customer case studies
Audience: Business leaders and IT managers

Show ‘n Tell:
Audience: Developers and administrators of all levels

SpeedGeeking!:
Audience: Any and all Lotusphere attendees

Lotusphere IDOL:
Audience: Any and all Lotusphere attendees

Birds of a Feather Sessions:
Audience: Any and all Lotusphere attendees

The Lotus Evangelist Customer Panel:
Audience: Any and all Lotusphere attendees

Business Development Day:
Audience: Business partners
Business Development Day is a one day track all its own exclusively for IBM Business Partners.

IBM Connect 2012:
Audience: Business leaders & Busines-savvy technical leaders
This event is a separate conference that runs in parallel to Lotusphere for two days.

So thinking caps on people and I hope we get some great sessions this time around

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social connections 2 registration open

SOCIAL CONNECTIONS II NOW SCHEDULED!!

 

The second Social Connections event will take place on 9th December 2011 at Cardiff University in central Cardiff, Wales.

 

We are delighted that our next event is now in the diary and organising the details of the event continues apace.  Registration is open and we are seeking speakers from around the world.

 

For more details of the Social Connections II event, check out the details and then register.  We also have a number of FAQs already answered.  If you have more questions though, please don’t hesitate to ask!

 

If you want to check out how the Social Connections I event went, head over to our Lanyrd page – there’s some great content available!

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Technology is not the problem

Ripping out a software or technology stack is not going to fix the issues of bad project management, lack of collaboration and user engagement.

The technology is not the problem – in a workshop run by world renown Collaboration expert Michael Sampson he explained to the audience that the technology – regardless of the vendor – is only 10% of any kind of user adoption hurdle.

10 % Tech Vs 90% People

Strangely enough 90% of the audience got it – the normal users, the power users the knowledge workers – the real people, the people who count.

The remaining 10% who made all the right noises and then promptly went back to “it’s my way or the highway” approach were what can be best described as “the management”. These are the same people who write articles and tweet about collaborating and being a “social business”.

Sorry Mr 10% but if you don’t listen to your 90% it doesn’t matter if you have a Lotus/IBM solution, Microsoft, Oracle, Jive, Social Text – the list goes on – put in whatever technology you like – if you do not communicate what your goals, strategy and success targets you will go round and around in a vicious circle of vendor bashing.

In turn this will alienate the 90%

Your users don’t resist change – they resist being told they HAVE to change. If the 90% aren’t involved or consulted they will resist. Engage your users, empower them to input ideas and suggestions.

Sell your solution – the magic 90% need to know how their working lives will be improved, how they can collaborate and work more efficiently – keep them in the loop.

Offer Help – training, workshops and sessions where the magic 90% can feedback – have a dynamic plan – things will change when you engage your users.

Discuss and Communicate – two way discussions, frequent (but relevant) communication, ensure you are receiving feedback and process it accordingly (do not ignore the negative feedback), collaborating is the key.

This is not rocket science it is common sense!

So why do so many organisations still blame the technology?

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Social Connections 1 – the sessions

The majority of the presentations from Monday are in the Social Connections 1 event on Slideshare, including the following:

Stuart McIntyre’s opening session:

Social Connections 1 – Welcome

Daniel Siddle from Headshift/Dachis Group:

The Why, What, How of Social Business

Jon Mell from IBM:

Things I wish I&#39;d known 5 years ago

Joseph D’Armi from Portal:

I’m too busy to collaborate

Michael Ahern from IBM:

Beyond the Basics: An Overview of User LifeCycle and Managing Users with TDI

Simon Vaughan and Chris Graves from Cardiff University:

Great expectations – students today, employees tomorrow

Claudio Procida from IBM:

IBM Connections – Customizing and Extending

Andy Piper from IBM:

Beyond the Portal: What is WebSphere?

Closing Thoughts:

Social Connections 1 – Closing Thoughts

The remaining sessions will be added ASAP

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Social Connections 1 – the session videos

Here are the recordings of the sessions from Social Connections 1.

Session 1
First morning session, featuring Stuart McIntyre of Collaboration Matters, Daniel Siddle of Headshift and Jon Mell of IBM.


Session 2
Second morning session, featuring Stuart McIntyre, Mike Roche of IBM, Joseph D’Armi of Portal and Michael Ahern of IBM.
(Apologies, this is a lower quality recording than that originally streamed – the higher quality version was corrupted.)


Session 3
First afternoon session, featuring Stuart McIntyre, Mark Calleran of The Salvation Army, Simon Vaughan and Chris Graves of Cardiff University.
(Apologies, Youtube seems incapable of displaying the last hour of this recording (featuring Rebecca Okoroji of Portal and Andy Piper of IBM) – we’re working on it!)


Session 4
Last session of the day, featuring Stuart McIntyre, Claudio Procida of IBM, Daniel Siddle, Jon Mell, Michael Roche, and Sharon Bellamy of City University.