STOP! Collaborate and Listen
After the gruelling 10 hour flight and the inevitable jet lag .. IBM Think has started.
Kicking off with Champion and Community day. This is the first time IBM have run a day like this tacked onto the main conference AND so far its amazing. A full run down will happen tomorrow but thank you IBM for this.
I am really looking forward to this week. Catching up with old friends .. making new friends and getting to know more IBM champions from different brands ..
Exciting times ahead 🙂
It is early February .. and cold in the UK, normally we would be just returning or just preparing to go on the annual ICS exodus to Orlando for the beloved Lotusphere / Connect conference ..but not this year. This year IBM have boldly gone – in the way of the Starship Enterprise – to another world for their annual conference this year. BUT not just for us ICS people!
Also new for this year is the event site. Much better layout than we have seen in previous years, lots of quality information about the event and watson is embedded now to help you find sessions of interest and to make recomendations. HUGE improvement on previous years so thank you IBM for that.
The IBM Champions will have a big part in Think too, as its a mega conference covering all the software brands the IBM Champions will be mega too. There are now almost 650 IBM Champions world wide across the IBM portfolio and many will be at THINK. I am very much looking forward to getting to know some of the Champions from the other brands and see it as a fantastic opportunity.
If attending Think isn’t exciting enough …. I will also be speaking with my fellow IBM Champion and good friend Roberto Boccadoro. Our session will be covering troubleshooting IBM Connections 6 (and previous versions) and its supporting software and lightly touching on the new Pink technology.
Monday, 12:30 PM – 1:10 PM | Surf B | Session ID: 1409A
If you want to learn more about Connections Pink troubleshooting you need to be at fellow champion Nico Meisenzahl‘s session – as Nico will be taking you through all the new Pink feature troubleshooting in his amazing session:
Monday, 10:30 AM – 11:10 AM | Surf B | Session ID: 1574A
Want to attend Think and would like a discount – talk to an IBM Champion
I am SO excited about this new big conference – I will be reporting from Think, Tim and I will be hopefully be grabbing some interviews and soundbites for ICONUK – more info coming soon.
If you would like information on BCC’s products and services, be sure to catch up with Tim and I at Think – or schedule a meeting with us. See you there.
Friday the 12th of January was a busy day for me ..
Off to London for the face to face #Domino2025 Jam. I was slightly dubious, not really knowing what to expect but what a worth while experience it was. Approx 35 – 40 of us slip up into teams discussing and prioritising what we would like to see for IBM Domino App dev, mail, apps support and sametime for version 10 and beyond. The teams were split into a good mix of developers, administrators, users and managers and lots of interesting discussion was had, and they were not all ‘the usual suspects’. We talked about what we loved, what drove us crazy and a bunch of small things that could be resolved quickly. There were lots of different opinions and lots of very similar discussions.
The openess of it all was very refreshing, some of the IBM guys who have moved to HCL were there, the UK IBMers were their usual awesome selves (we do have some good ones – you know who you are 😉 ) – the fact there was so much positivity, energy and enthusiasm of it all – from a user of this software I am really looking forward to the roadmap and plans for the future. As an administrator (at least for the Sametime piece of this – as everyone knows I am not a Domino Admin) again there were some very good ideas around admin and the infrastructer that is required – some were quite radical at that .. all in all I am pumped, enthused, insert other excitable words here about it all ..
I know that has been a lot of critism about IBM for being slow, behind the curve, too little to late etc .. but I think (and really hope) that all of that is in the past. Things are going to be good. Actually no, things are going to be great .. the momentum has started – we are running downhill, lets not stop or there may be a pile up 🙂
The word on the street is there is going to be lots of news at the IBM Think event in March – if you are thinking about heading to Think talk to me or another IBM Champion for a discount
Talking of IBM Champions, I also recieved an email Friday morning confirming that I was indeed an IBM Champion again this year.
For those of you who do not know what an IBM Champion is – IBM Champions demonstrate both expertise in and extraordinary support and advocacy for IBM technology, communities, and solutions. The IBM Champion program recognizes these innovative thought leaders in the technical community and rewards these contributions by amplifying their voice and increasing their sphere of influence. IBM Champions are enthusiasts and advocates: IT professionals, business leaders, developers, executives, educators, and influencers who support and mentor others to help them get the most out of IBM software, solutions, and services. – you can find out more information here.
This is such a big deal for me, I am so honoured to be a part of this amazing group of people .. so thank you IBM , and thanks Libby who heads up the IBM Champion program across all the brands world wide and Alan who has the task of wrangling the collaboration solutions champions inbetween his day job (you legend).
What a great start to 2018 – I work with the most fantastic group of people at BCC, have lots to look forward to this year work wise and I have been elected as an IBM Champion again. Lets do this 😀
I have the pleasure of giving another webinar on Wednesday at 4pm UK / 11 am EST – with my friend and IBMer Luis
We will be talking about migrating to the cloud and user management once you are there ….
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Are you interested in running some or all of your messaging platform in the Cloud? Interested in IBM Verse? Worried about how to manage the user-lifecycle in a hybrid or cloud environment? Not sure about how or where to start?
If you ever had any of these questions join IBM’s Luis Guirigay and BCC’s Sharon James for a quick but thorough review of how to deploy a SmartCloud Notes infrastructure, how to start your user migration project in no time and how to manage a hybrid or cloud environment with ease using BCC’s AdminTool for Connections Cloud.
AdminTool for Connections cloud offers centralized user management and administration, customizable user interface, security and logging features whether on-premises, hybrid or cloud only
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Being an IBM Champion is great and it does come with some benefits.
Today all IBM Champions are happy to announce that we can offer YOU a discount of $100 for IBM’s upcoming ICS event – IBM Connect in San Francisco
So what do you need to do – just reach out to an IBM Champion tell us why you want to go to Connect and what your expectations are and as if by magic we will give you the dscont code.
Now is a great time to register .. and I wish I was going to be there with you all (but I will be in Orlando – on a very long awaited family holiday) – so ping a champ and get the code 🙂
I recieved an email yesterday – just before I joined a live stream to watch the IBM Champions for ICS be announced.
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On behalf of IBM, it is my great pleasure to recognize you as a returning IBM Champion in 2017. Congratulations!
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I am so honoured to be amongst a great group of champions again. I have been an ICS IBM Champion since the program began in 2011.
Being an IBM Champion is all about being part of a great extended community, sharing knowledge, giving feed back and constructive critism and helping IBM with what ever they will let us help them with – from documentation to ideas about Connect.
In my 6 years of being an IBM Champion .. I have made some great friends and been introduced to some great IBMers (who I now class as great friends), helped influence some products, given a lot of honest feed back, and assited with my favourite thing – Documentation 🙂 It really has been a blast .. and I would still continue to do these things If I wasn’t a Champion 🙂
Being an IBM Champion doesn’t mean you have to be a *yes man/woman* – It just means you are passionate about what you do and have the right attitude – that doesn’t mean agreeing to everything, being constructive, giving feed back and ideas is part of being a champion which is why I love it.
So thank you once again IBM and especially to Amanda and Libby for everything they do for us Champions .. and I hope to be worthy of this title for the next year 🙂
As blogged over on the BCC page .. a round up of Sutol with some extra Shaz related bits 🙂
Last week we were in the beautiful city of Prague for the 8th annual SUTOL Czech user group. It was a small affair with approx. 100 attendees – making it more like an extended family gathering, which actually worked really well. The sessions were well attended and there seems to be a chunk of Czech business that already have hybrid and cloud environments and are uses of IBM Connections.
The Keynote:
Lots of news which was nice .. some of it revisited some of the information that was made public at ICONUK, but there were updated and NEW news!
So Drew Birnbaum kicked off the keynote with a look at ICS strategy through the ages – admitting that IBM had lost its way a little and how they are redeeming themselves going forward. It was very refreshing to know that the beast that is IBM have taken on board what Customers, Business Partners and IBM Champions have been saying – so positive news on that front.
Drew also covered the #newwaytowork message that IBM have been delivering to us over the past few months, and it seems to be becoming more and more relevant to how normal businesses work. One of the statistics that was shown was the average worker consumes approx.. 15.5 hours of media a day – 15.5 hours!! That is a lot of data, it’s no wonder we can get distracted.
One of the things that the Watson and cognitive engines can do is help us make sense of all that *stuff* and we are seeing it more and more as the API’s become available to hook in to. This message was reinforced on the integration into application and services that are cloud ready. Unfortunately there is no news on when on premises customers will be able to take advantage of this – here is hoping that one day we will be able to consume Watson or some of those features as a web service.
Barry Rosen had a lot to say. He is the new hero of our ICS community, and has become the go to man to pass on concerns, queries and praise to IBM. Always ready to listen and very honest, and had already made some changes since he announced the Road map at ICONUK back in September 2016.
The features and fixes to be released in the Notes/Domino feature packs are to be released via priority. Each cycle the highest priority fixes and features will be worked on for release, rather than promising something and not delivering, announcements will be made on what is coming over the next few weeks we hope and that will continue going forward. Again another improvement.
Sametime will also follow the continuous delivery method, which is fantastic news. There were a lot of speculation that IBM would be killing off Sametime now they had Watson Work (Project Toscana) and the alliance with Cisco, but Barry told us Sametime is not dead and it will have continued investment and fixes. Sametime IS the on-premises chat and meeting solution and will continue to be.
The same can be said of application development and x-pages. There will be an announcement in early 2017 on the future of application modernisation, development and the plans IBM have – Connect 2017 will be the place to hear this. Barry assured us that Martin Donnelly’s x-pages team have plenty to do and to release to us – looking forward to more new on that early next year.
If you are wanting to go down the Verse on Prem route for your email client there is also good news. The Connections entitlement to Files and Profiles has now been updated for Domino 9.0.1 customers to allow Connections 5.5, allowing the additional features for Verse on Prem at no extra cost – Shameless plug for the BCC Connect your Domino offering to help you get to that point to be Verse ready.
The ICS portfolio is becoming like a buffet, allowing us to pick and choose what applications and solutions suit our business and needs as users. Improved integration points should make this a lot easier and with the new framework and set of APIs for that framework will ensure that it’s easier to integrate applications and systems.
So exciting times and generally good and positive news all around. I sincerely hope that this is not too little too late and that IBM really have taken note of what Customers and BPs have been telling them. It’s a good message that Customers that can’t or won’t go to the cloud are still going to get support and updates for on-premises software and that if they do want to go hybrid that there will support for that too – Another shameless plug fpr the BCC Admin Tool for Connections Cloud at this point, as this helps with just that very scenario, manage your Hybrid and Cloud users just like your on-prem ones.
All in all ….
A very positive message was sent out by IBM and the attendees and those following the twitter stream seemed also to be enthused by the message, let’s just hope that message and the enthusiasm stays with us to Connect and Engage and well into 2017.
Personally
This was the first time I had been to SUTOL .. It really was like an extended small family gathering .. which was GREAT .. so good to catch up with friends and colleges in our space and with those IBMers that I only get to see at events like this. I finally got to chat to people that I have only spoken to in skype and on twitter. User groups are so important for networking and keeping in touch with what everyone is doing and sometimes you can’t beat a chat over a beer.
The speaker / sponsor dinner was so much fun – i haven’t laughed so hard and so long for a while .. Prague is also excellent for Pokemon hunting and I caught my first 2 Pikachu on the way, and about 15 other little blighters and many stops (so lots of balls).
The food was amazing, filling and tasty .. and there were many sausage jokes occuring on our two tables (we may have got a little rowdy, luckily we were in a private dining area). I haven’t been to many bars with such a crazy drinks menu .. we had GROG (unfortunately it wasn’t served by a pirate or a busty wench .. or in a wooden jug.. but it was GROG) .. so well worth the night out 🙂
I also won a prize in the closing session – thank you Panagenda for the kit .. I shall have hours of fun playing with that 🙂 The speaker gift was a lovely bottle of Czech wine – made for St Martin’s day (I know it was lovely as I have already finished it).
Thank you Prague .. thank you to the SUTOL team for making me feel so welcome and to Wannes and Roberto for being brave enough to speak with me for a second time. Shout out to Stephanie as well as it was girls on tour for BCC and we had a great giggle too .. bring on the next one 🙂
I was lucky enough to be selected to speak at the 8th SUTOL conference which was held in the beautiful city of Prague. A round up blog post is coming. In the meen time please find below the slides from the presentations given with Wannes Rams & Roberto Boccadoro
A brand new webcast hosted by ICONUK is starting this month on the 14th July at 3pm (BST)
This month we will introduce the webinars and also have speakers from the world of IBM Collaborative Services, The Champion Community and the wider user community.
These are going to be regular monthly webinars, so get in quick for the first one, as they are bound to be popular.
What’s New in the World of IBM Collaboration: Chris Moore & Leon Becket from IBM will talk about the latest enhancements and updates to IBM’s collaboration solutions. In this session, they will present what the updates have been to Verse, Connections Cloud and more. What these mean to you and demonstrate some of these key updates.
Also this month: The Internet of Things talking to IBM Connections Cloud – by our very own Steve McDonaugh
You can register for this event here: http://iconuk.org/iconuk.nsf/events.html
And find out more and register for ICONUK here: http://iconuk.org
I have been a little busy of late – working on some exciting projects (which I will be blogging about shortly).
The planning for ICONUK 2016 is in full swing too – don’t forget to register, submit your abstract or sponsorship over on the iconuk.org site
I have attended Social Connections 10 in Toronto which was an amazing time – was so good to catch up with so many friends, the sessions were fantastic, the venue was lovely, socialising is always good – and Toronto what an great city 🙂
I have been working with WebSphere for what seems forever and as a Connections consultant since version 2 – which I love doing. Learning new things and keeping busy is something that I crave .. so this brings me on to a new challenge ..
From the 1st of August I will be joining BCC
BCC have been
My first “outing” with the BCC team will be at MWLUG in mid August
So here is to new things – onwards and upwards 🙂