Speaking at Connect 2014 what an honor

It is an honor and a privilege to have been chosen with my friend and community peer Christoph Stoettner to speak at this years Connect / Lotusphere conference.

This will be the 4th Connect / Lotusphere I have attended but the first I have spoken a full session at – in previous years I have helped run a BOF and have spoken at speedgeeking.

We will be speaking in the Best Practices track, sharing our admin and scripting tips and tricks to help make a Connections Admin’s day a little easier 🙂

Screen Shot 2013-11-26 at 12.58.57The full article can be found here on the IBM social insights blog

See you in Orlando 🙂

ConnCtrl bash script for IBM Connections

I have also blogged this over on the Cube Soft company blog – with my good friend <a href=”http://twitter.com/TimsterC” title=”TimsterC” target=”_blank”>Mr Tim Clark</a> we have created a script for starting and stopping IBM Connections on Red Hat (RHEL)

 

The script has a bunch of variables to allow you to input the path to the WebSphere deployment manager and nodes, and a place to enter the names of your Connections servers.

Please visit Tim’s blog for all the information and to download the script.

I’m back .. it’s been a while

Many of you may have noticed that I have been AWOL for a while.

I had much going on in my personal life and I would publicly like to thank my close friends for assisting me through that difficult time.

I am now back .. with a vengeance.

Since mid June 2012 :

  • I have lost over 36lb in weight – and I feel like a new person
  • Presented at UKLUG with a trapped nerve in my back – thanks to Bill Mal, Steve Mc D, Wild Bill especially for being so fantastic.
  • Changed jobs – I am now very pleased to be working with good friend and former college Stuart McIntyre as I am now a member of the fast growing Collaboration Matters Team.
  • I have dislocated my elbow – not recommended. It’s on the mend but has stopped me exercising 🙁

The next Social Connections user group is in 10 weeks, I have lots of exciting project work lined up, I will be going to not Lotusphere (Connect 2013) and I have additional trips planned to Disney World in Orlando next year.

Onwards and upwards and its good to be back

Social Connections III – 3 weeks to go

Only a few weeks until the 3rd Social Connections user group, held in the IBM Labs Dublin.

We have a few places left if you are interested in attending this unique user group. We have some fantastic sessions such as:

and many more … the full agenda can be found on the Social Connecitons site here

 

As well as a full agenda planned for the day with two tracks – one for business and one for technical and admin – we have some other plans for the day in store.

If you can join us after the event we have an evening dinner and reception planned for at the Guinness Store House

There will be a tour of the storehouse, information on the history of Guinness and the chance to pull your own pint – followed by dinner and drinks in the fantastic surroundings of Arthur’s Bar.

Arthur's Bar 1 Arthur's Bar 2

Arthur’s Bar: A new edition to GUINNESS STOREHOUSE but as old as Ireland itself. It’s a traditional Irish pub, a place of hospitality. This communal gathering space is somewhere to relax and experience the heart of the Irish community whilst enjoying the breathtaking views of St. James’s Gate Brewery and Dublin city

 

The spaces for this event are limited and will be on a first come first served basis. Please sign up and let us know as soon as you can if you would like to attend.

Looking forward to seeing you on the 22nd of June in Dublin.

Customizing Connections Demo Files

The demo files that acompany my Customizating Connections Presentation can now be downloaded here

Inside the zip file you will find :

The templates and css files from \customization\common\nav
The custom community thumbnail image from \customization\communities\images
The custom strings required for the twitter profile extention  from \customization\strings
The JustNudge profile twitter ear file – LCC_Twitter_EAR-latest.ear
Instructions on how to deploy this and how to extend the profile – add twitter widget.txt
Examples of the following config files :
communities-config.xml
profiles-config.xml
widgets-config.xml

Enjoy 🙂

 

 

 

Social Connections III

Social Connections III will be upon us soon – I am very pleased to be part of the group that organises these events for IBM Connections users, administrators etc.

One thing I would personally like to see is more people that are thinking about using connections and existing domino admins (who are likely to get asked to look after a potential connections environment) to these events – we cater for potential users and admins as well as existing.

So my question to those potentials is what would you like to gain from comming to a social connections event?

Admins would you like some technical overview, training, etc?
Users would you like to hear more user stories and current customer case studies?
Community Managers – what would you like to see?

These events are all about our audience and what sessions they would like. For Social Connections 3 we are having two tracks the afternoon one business related one technical, it is also possible in the future to have a half day tecnical or development workshop – if this is the kind of information you would be interested we would love to hear from you.

As an installer, implementer and administrator I know what its like to get new technology thrust at you – we have a good network of community people who will be more than happy to share experiences, and assist where they can – we just need to know what you would like us to talk about.

Either leave me a comment or contact me via skype or twitter – I would love to hear from you

Registration for the Social Connections III event can be found here

Connections 101 – what a fantastic idea

I think a community high five is in order for Mr Paul Mooney and Ms Gabriella Davis.

They have taken on the mamoth task of creating a Connections 101 site that will assit those new to Connections and WebSphere to get you up and running with advice, information and assistance.

Something like this can not come soon enough.

I am lucky, I have been what I would describe as “mucking about with” WebSphere for the past 11 odd years. I had a very good teacher (thank you Bleddyn), and the best hardware to play with it on (the iSeries – or As400 for oldschool people or IBMi for new school people).

I was in at the deep end with Websphere 4 and 5 and IBM Commerce (which runs on WebSphere) and it went from there.

11 years later .. I am still at it. Athough I have swapped WebSphere Commerce for IBM Connections now.

This new site along with blogs (like mine I hope), useful presentations at lugs (like WebSphere for Domino people, or WebSphere what you really need to know), and the help of the community will get people up and running and working confidently with Connections. It’s a fantastic piece of software and once you know what bits you need you can get up and running fairly quickly.

I would love to help or contribute in anyway .. so if you feel I have something to add – let me know

Issue with custom themes and communities

I have had a PMR open for some time relating to a bit of a known issue with Custom themes and Connections communties

There was an issue where you would create a custom theme


In my case I also customised the coloured community themes also

When clicking on forums, blogs etc the theme was stripped out displaying

It appears there was a step missing from the wiki!!

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/Defining_a_community_theme_ic301

Step 1.dd. Remove the file theme.css from the corporateTheme directory

In my case I had based my custom theme on the default theme and had used it as the default Community theme (which has no theme.css), so all communities with the default theme appeared correctly.

BUT, I had also lightly customised the coloured community themes – removing (or renaming) the theme.css from each coloured theme has resolved the issue.

Thank you mr Kieran Reid for investigating and confirming this was the issue.

Lotusphere Saturday 14 Jan

After a not bad nights sleep, I was up at 7 and off to breakfast at 8 with Mick Moignard.
Disney do lay on a good breakfast and I  enjoyed my eggs and bacon followed by mickey mouse head pancakes 🙂
After breakfast I met up with Darren & Stuart and wandered outside to see part of the annual hog ride.
Our community has a few bikers so Paul Mooney, Bill Buchen etc. organise a hig ride on saturday & sunday. Hire a bike and see Orlando.
Stu headed off to do his outlet shopping so I grabbed myself a Dazza, we bought a day park ticket each and headed off to Disney Hollywood studios. We caught up with Sam & Mike and the others  and hung out inthe park for a few hours.
Muppets were seen ( darren does a fantastic swedish chef), scary rides were ridden (but not buy me) & star tours ride 3 times was awseome. You will notice in this pic of us outside the Tower of Terror below that I am loaded with coats and bags and jumpers – this is becuase the metal people went on ToT to drop in an elevator and sensible me went to ride star tours (again)
After 4 and a bit hours of fun, Darren and I said good bye to the other guys about 3 and headed back tothe boardwalk via a mickey mouse ice cream.
Once back at the boadwalk we headed for Big River Grill where B.A.L.D ( bloggers annual get together) takes place.
We said hello to loads of people, caught up with the yellow legend that is Mat Newman – which of course involved a Tim Tam Slam  and finally ate a real meal.
I caught up with some old friends and made some new ones – we have a great community. The usual plan after BALD is to head to the espn bar where the Turtle has a get together – due to much sport occuring they were not admitting anyone else, so we  headed over to a favourite haunt Kimonos.
Kevin had only just arrived and missed dinner & we finally caught up with Femke, so they had sushi – much more chat was had, catching up isn’t a huge thing as we talk almost everyday on skype so the conversation turns to Lotusphere, Karaoke and software ( an ocasional reference to an iseries or power system may have occured too) 🙂
After Kimonos we wandered out to the dolphin lobby bar – chilled out on the sofas and chatted some more, all in all a good start to setting up a busy week