Category Archives: Presentations

06.06.16
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Sametime For Mobile Users – #NWTL

My final New Way To Learn session today was looking at the Sametime mobile clients, Connections Chat and Sametime Meetings.  I hope you find it useful and as always the full recorded session is available in the #NWTL Community.

The slides by themselves are below

In this session we looked at the architecture behind the Sametime mobile applications for chat and meetings. What do you need to deploy to support mobile users and what features are available to them on the different mobile platforms. We also looked at potential bottlenecks, security and troubleshooting for the mobile clients.

06.03.16
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Sametime Audio and Video For External Users – NWTL

Today I did the second in my series of Sametime presentations for IBM’s New Way To Learn (NWTL) initiative.    The session was recorded with audio and is available by joining the Community here http://bit.ly/1t7e0LE . The session slides by themselves are on slideshare and shown below.

If your Sametime environment is going to include Audio and Video you will probably want to be able to talk to people outside your own company, or at least to your own users on their mobile devices who aren’t connected via VPN. In this recorded online session as part of IBM’s New Way To Work initiative we reviewed the infrastructure behind the Audio and Video elements of Sametime and how best to extend those features beyond your firewall.

 

06.03.16
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Upgrading Sametime 9.0.1 – NWTL

I have been participating in IBM’s New Way To Learn (NWTL) initiative with presentations around Sametime 9.0.1.  The presentations are done online and recorded so they can be viewed later and are available with the audio recordings to anyone who joins the NWTL IBM Community.  If you want to watch the presentation and see other great NWTL presentations you can join the community here http://bit.ly/1XXakab

My  first presentation which was last week was on how to upgrade your Sametime 8.5.2 or 9.0 environment to Sametime 9.0.1.  The slides without the audio are on Slideshare and shown below.

In this recorded online session we looked at all the options to upgrade your existing Sametime environment to Sametime 9.0.1. Whether you have only a single Community server on an early Sametime version or an entire infrastructure including audio and video on 9.0 we outlined how to plan for an upgrade and the pros and cons of doing the work side by side vs in place.

03.30.16
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Last week in Eindhoven…

We were in Eindhoven last week at the Engage conference.. over 400 attendees, speakers and IBM’ers gathered for two days of learning, talking and cleaning out the hotel bar of tonic water.. I’ve been to several of the past Engage conferences and Theo always puts on a great event but this was bigger and better than ever.  So why?

IBM sent a lot of executives to Engage with the Opening General Session being given by the new ICS general manager (appointed at Connect in January) Inhi Cho Suh and with product strategy presented by Suzanne Livingston , Sara Gibbons and Chris Crummey.  The first thing Inhi announced was that things are going to change – starting with the Orlando conference which moves to February 22nd at Moscone West in San Francisco.  That’s a big decision and commitment – serious tech companies have conferences in SF and that’s where ICS (IBM Collaboration Services) need to be if they are going to innovate, lead and grow as opposed to maintain.   Inhi also let us know that she has asked the product team to work on a 2020 strategy and that it will include IBM Verse on premise.

Then we got the demo of Verse , Toscana and the thinking behind ICS design.  It’s a shame the OGS wasn’t recorded as Suzanne’s background to their design thinking and Sara & Chris’ demo were both much more detailed (and further advanced) than at Connect in January.  However if you want some idea of what we saw take a look at the OGS video from January (from about 90 seconds in to 20 mins in) here

Aside from the OGS the entire IBM team (of which there were more than 30 in attendance) were everywhere wanting to hear about problems, wanting to listen, wanting to change their relationship with partners, with customers with development for the better.   It’s hard not to be taken up with the positivity and enthusiasm.  I’m an optimistic person but I don’t consider myself naive – I feel that I recognise honesty and intent when people talk to me and I what I heard that ICS was important, investable and part of the core IBM development strategy.

In short I choose to believe until I’m proved wrong.

There were of course plenty of great sessions to attend and, as usual, I missed many of the ones I wanted.  Partly because there were also lots of round table discussions too which I found very interesting.  Apparently I’m still the 8 year old in class first to put her hand up with a question.

My session on SHA2 and SSL vulnerabilities was against Mat Newman’s User Blast and Sara Gibbons’ with Toscana.   We were all along the same corridor and I watched person after person go past my room on their way to Mat or Sara’s , so thank you to everyone who chose to hear about security instead and filled out my room.  I hope you found it useful  (and the hand puppets helpful).  For anyone who wasn’t there I have added it to slideshare 

On the final evening of the event Theo invited speakers to a dinner preceded by a surprise.  The surprise was that 32 of us were sent into the Escape Rooms.. you are locked in a themed room for an hour and have to decode lots of puzzles to find the code to get out.  I’ve always wanted to try an Escape Room and I chose the “Tomb” which was an Egyptian tomb and went in with a team including Tim and Mike, Sue Smith, Bill Malchisky, Mat Newman, Rene Winkelmeyer and Carl Tyler.  We didn’t make it out in time – we were soooooo close.. but a few things to bear in mind

  • The tomb was entirely dark except for a small flashlight Tim found hidden in a basket in a corner and some candles.  My night vision varies from “bad” to “crappy”
  • Having multiple alpha males in a small space all shouting instructions at each other may not be the best way to get out quickly
  • There was sand everywhere.  Everywhere.  My shoes may never recover
  • Tim is great at puzzles but apparently in the dark, without his glasses (which he forgot to bring in) and with 7 people shouting at him to hurry up – not so much
  • There was a really cool effect where we completed a puzzle and lasers appeared out of the eyes of a skull on the wall and we had to position 7 different mirrors around the room to bounce the lasers around to hit a small hole on the wall.  We got so excited doing that we didn’t notice we had completed the puzzle and a new “door” had opened for about 10 mins.
  • I was given a cryptex to decode and open.  I broke it by pulling the end off.
  • With only 1 light source we could only do one thing at a time so some of us spent a lot of time kneeling in the sand feeling around fake skeletons for clues

In the end it was great fun and I’d definitely want to do it again.

All of that plus a chance to talk to lots of customers and see lots of friends – some of which came along just to meet up.

I hope you’re recovered Theo – because we’re all up to do it again next year.

 

 

 

 

 

03.16.16
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Spark Ideas – Connect 2016

This year at Connect in Orlando the Nerd Girls and IBM once more hosted the Spark Ideas session where we ask people to talk for around 6 mins on any topic they like.

This year we had some great from changing career to changing country, to dealing with large life changes to growing your own vegetables. We managed to get the sessions recorded* and we have now uploaded them into a youtube playlist for you to enjoy.

I hope you find them as entertaining, enlightening and moving as the audience in Florida did.  A huge thank you to Amanda Bauman, Jamie Magee, Ginni Saini, Chris Miller, Lauren Maxwell, Theo Heselmans, Mat Newman and Carolyn Pampino for so generously sharing

*apologies to Mitch Cohen who took the raw video as I then edited them and uploaded them. Any issues with the video are entirely down to me.  Thanks Mitch!

03.14.16
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Whilst You’ve Not Been Looking Something Amazing…

Next week in Eindhoven there is an IBM conference running for two days but if you haven’t been paying attention you may not have noticed what Engage has become and if you don’t act very quickly  – like today quickly, you’ll miss a fantastic and free opportunity.

Started and run by Theo Heselmans , Engage has grown far beyond the original Belgian community and this year – with almost 400 attendees and 85 speakers he’s providing an event for attendees from around the world and another great location – the Evoluon in Eindhoven.   Even if you made it to Florida in January (and especially if you didn’t) what’s awaiting you in Eindhoven is something very new including strategy sessions, round table discussions and content that hasn’t been seen anywhere else.  That includes my session – this year with puppetry (because how better to explain SSL vulnerabilities than by using hand puppets) .

The keynote is being given by an IBM team led by Inhi Cho Suh the new General Manager for IBM Collaboration Solutions, Suzanne Livingston (Group Product Manager, IBM Mail, Chat, Meetings & Social Cognitive Solutions), Chris Crummey (World Wide Executive Director of Evangelism and Customer Experience) and Sara Gibbons (Senior User Experience Designer).  

The round table discussions  are definitely something I’ll be attending too, scheduled 4x each day and each individually hosted by either someone from IBM or an event sponsor. Want to talk to Inhi Cho Suh about ICS strategy? Ed Brill about Verse Deployment or Matt White about extending your skillset to Cloud technologies?  You won’t easily get that opportunity again.

All that is just the beginning, take a look at the full agenda here then RUN don’t walk to try and grab the last 20 or so places before registration closes.

As for me, I’ll be driving over next Tuesday and presenting Thursday morning so I have plenty of time to go to sessions myself and just generally see and talk to people.  If you want to meet up or have any questions to ask me, just email or DM me and we’ll get something organised.

My session is at 11.30 on Thursday morning  is Building & Deploying SHA2 Certificates
If you saw my session with Mark Myers at Connect in January you may wonder if this is the same thing.  It’s not.  For a start I have hand puppets and no Mark.  I hope to explain where to expect your highest risk, how to stay secure by having a strategy and how to generate and actually deploy SHA2 certificates in Domino, WebSphere and IBM HTTP Server.

I hope to see you in Eindhoven !

 

11.30.15
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Orlando Here We Come…

Surprise and delight (yes honestly, I had no idea if I’d get on the agenda this year) but I’ll be speaking at IBM Connect in Orlando in January.  When I heard about my session acceptances no-one else seemed to be posting about theirs so I wasn’t sure if there was some NDA I had missed.. apparently not and now the session preview tool is available with all the sessions and timings, I guess I’m good to share 🙂

On Monday at 11.30 am in Lake Eola A I will be presenting on security with Mark Myers from LDC Via.

Our session will focus on the recent SSL vulnerabilities and how to create and deploy a SHA2 certificate (#1086)

Two years ago enabling your site with SSL was a simple affair, buy a certificate or create your own, install it, then just remember to renew it every couple of years. Then, suddenly security holes are being found in SSL virtually every month , popular browsers stop connecting to your site to protect themselves, and you’re continually being told your users data is at risk. In this session we will discuss how it all went wrong and can go wrong again, then go through each step of requesting, generating and deploying a 4096 SHA-2 certificate to use in a keyfile by Domino, IBM Connections, IBM Sametime and other WebSphere products. If you work with these IBM products and need to secure them with confidence this session will show you how!

On Tuesday at 5.15pm (eek!) in Lake Mizell AB

I’ll be presenting on how to Plan & Complete a Connections Upgrade, hopefully talking about Connections 5.5 if it’s shipped and out of NDA by then.

This is the last session of the day on Tuesday just before everyone leaves to go to Harry Potter @ Universal so I’m going to take a chance that some of you will be there and put together a great presentation for you (#1084)

So we have IBM Connections installed, but now it’s time to consider what and when to update. It could be a WebSphere fix or a DB2 fixpack, a new application, or database scheme. Some updates are for security, some for performance and some for new features. In this session we’ll discuss how you can decide when and what to upgrade, how to plan for and perform a safe upgrade, test when it’s complete and what things can trip you up along the way. All of this is based on lessons learned over hundreds of deployments.

Finally I’m really excited to say that IBM have invited us to do Spark Ideas again this year

– it’s always a fun and inspiring time when 8 or so brave volunteers get up on stage to tell us in 6 minutes about something that inspires them or changed them.  I’ll do another blog following on from this explaining more but if you know Sparks, enjoy Sparks and will be at Connect drop either Amanda Bauman (@amandabauman) or I a line – as always we are looking for volunteer speakers (and if you know you would like to talk but don’t know on what, I can even help you work that out)

Sparks will be 2.30pm on Tuesday in Florida 4 – give your week a lift and come and see us or even join in.  We’ve got ideas for a few surprises this year too (#1120)

I am writing my sessions now so if there’s anything you would like to ask me to cover (within my topics) please let me know and I’ll try and do that.

So Orlando here I come (well “we” as my colleagues Mike Smith & Tim Davis will be there too).. we really look forward to seeing you there.

 

11.17.15
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Conference Review 2015

Well it’s nearly the end of the year and my planning has started already for 2016 but I thought it would be nice to say thanks and give some feedback on the conferences I spoke at and attended in 2015. I apologise in advance if I miss out some organisers names – I don’t know all of them but my thanks always go to the entire organising teams.

My last conference this year was Social Connections in Stuttgart , I also spoke at their event in Boston in April. Due to my own prior commitments I literally had to fly in to Stuttgart, present and fly out again which was a great pity.   It’s an interesting conference in which every session focuses on Connections and collaboration and not least because, at least in Stuttgart, the audience was much more executive and so less hard core technical than many of the user group events I go to.  That’s no bad thing and it opens up scope for me to present on less technical and more strategic topics.  It’s also very interesting to hear from those working on different ends of the deployment spectrum such as user adoption or cultural change. Thanks for everyone involved including Christoph, Doug, Femke, Jan, Lars, Maria, Martin, Simon, Stuart & Wannes.

Social Connections would definitely be on my agenda for 2016.

In March 2015 I was at Engage in Ghent.  Once more Theo puts on what I consider to be the best technical and networking event in Europe, possibly worldwide.  The content is only a part of the Engage experience as there are multiple out of session events and opportunities and it puts the European audience in the centre.  There are few IBM presented sessions other than the keynotes and I would say it’s a true community event. Thanks to Theo & Hilde for all their hard work every year.

Engage is March 23-24 in Eindhoven in 2016. I already have my travel booked.

ISBG is the Norwegian IBM User Group event that takes place in Larvik, Norway at the end of May each year.  This was my 3rd year attending and I did three technical sessions all with the theme of integration and single sign on.  The audience tolerate me speaking in English and (at least for my sessions) are primarily technical. ISBG have a great afternoon event on the first day in which we break into teams and have competing challenges including answering questions after visiting sponsors.  The challenge has a theme and a story each year and the ISBG team puts a huge amount of effort into the story and the accompanying video (CSI 6 this year)  – see here for what an amazing job they do.  In addition we are entertained at dinner by Rune Carlson one of the conference organisers and a professional, award winning , magician.  It’s a beautiful location with an enthusiastic audience and lots of pure fun thanks to everyone involved including Roger, Vanessa, Wensche and Rolf.

If I get asked back I hope to be at ISBG 2016 in May

In August I attended MWLUG for the first time.  This is partly because it was held in Atlanta and I have several customers in the surrounding area but also because it draws an audience from around the US with a few hundred people attending.  This turned out to be a great decision, there was a very wide range of attendees and sessions, lots of friends and people I used to only see at Lotusphere were there, the hotel / location were great and the organisers put a lot of effort into providing activities outside of regular sessions and into the evenings. I came away feeling happy, excited to be doing what I do and invigorated – in other words the feeling I am used to come away with in January.  Thanks Richard, Lisa and everyone on the MWLUG team

In 2016 MWLUG will be held in July (I think) in Austin, Texas which hopefully means we’ll be able to visit the IBM Design Labs as part of or before the event.  I’ll definitely be submitting a session as it’s a great conference so I hope to be there.

Finally I spoke at Icon UK in London in September.  It’s great to have a UK based event and IBM supporting it by hosting it at their offices on South Bank. It’s a great location and everyone seemed to have a good time.  I believe, but don’t know, that based on its success this year there are plans to repeat it in 2016 in September. If so I definitely plan to be there.  Thanks to the Icon team including Tim, Steve and Victor.

Then there was IBM Connected in Orlando last January.  I don’t think any of us knew what to expect with the reconfigured conference that was held entirely at the Swan hotel.  Definitely it was going to be smaller and more than a few regular faces were missing and missed.  I think everyone agreed it was a successful event – sometimes all you need is the people and the place, the rest is just bonus and Orlando in January definitely had all of that.  As a swan-song (no pun intended) to 20 years of Lotus Orlando it was bittersweet but turns out.. not such a swan-song after all.  IBM Connect is once more in Orlando this January at the Hilton Convention Center (you can register for it here) and I’ll be both attending and speaking.  Starting the year in Orlando in January as it was meant to be….

This year I was unable to attend AUSLUG/Inform in Australia. I hope to fix that next year if I can just price up flights I can afford when the location and dates are available. Ideally I’d be interested in tying that into work or another event in that part of the world so we’ll see if anything comes up..:-)

That’s it so far .. hopefully I’ll see you somewhere along the way. Now for a few weeks of no travel before the New Year starts.  We’ve nearly made it through another year everyone.. high fives all around !