Category Archives: Presentations

09.16.14
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Adding External Users To Connections 5

Last week I did a presentation at Icon UK on the new Connections 5 feature that allows you to add external users into your Connections environment.  To write the presentation I built my own environment multiple times using different techniques for adding external users and discovered some interesting stuff along the way.  Since the presentation doesn’t have my commentary on it i’ll try and summarise that here

1. On page 6 are a list of things an external user can do according to IBM documentation.  Some of the items on that page (in italics) actually didn’t, in any of my testing, work.  This is because there are conflicting security limitations on what a user can’t do (see items in bold on page 7)

So for example although the documentation states that an external user can share files with people or communities, it also states that they can’t use type ahead or directory lookups.  Preventing type ahead and directory lookups actually disables the ability to share files with a user since there’s no way to lookup a user.  Sharing files with a Community works fine.

2. The external users can be added via an LDAP attribute from your LDAP server or by a separate LDAP server or branch.  Although an entirely separate LDAP server is more secure and in my opinion preferable, it must use a search base which means flat names in Domino can’t be part of the external LDAP source.

To counteract this in one instance I faked a hierarchy as the users were created (using a simple Xpages app to allow people to self register and manage their own passwords and setting a fake hierarchical name for them in the background).  In the other instance I used the same LDAP source as for internal users but with a specific attribute set to the word “external”

In general the external users feature has been locked down securely enough that i’d highly recommend it for inviting people to work with your Connections communities .

09.11.14
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Icon UK Presentation – External Users in Connections 5

Today I am finishing my presentation for ICON UK on external users in Connections 5.  There’s a lot to cover and I’m trying to run neither over or under time and pull off the goldilocks of presentations covering…

  • How external access works
  • What can external users do (and not do)
  • How your internal users interact with external users
  • Configuring external user access
  • Securing the perimeter
  • Implications and things to think about…

I’ll post the presentation here once I’m done but of course it won’t come with me talking over each page (is that good or bad?)  – so if you can make it to Icon tomorrow at IBM South Bank in London, I hope to see you there.  My session is at 11am.

 

05.26.14
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Norway & ISBG

Last week I was in Norway at the ISBG conference in Larvik.  You would know this if I hadn’t messed up publishing my blog entry talking about how much I was looking forward to going and what I was presenting on but I tried to set it to publish “in the future” and got the year wrong – so yeah.. I”m back!

At the bottom of this blog you’ll find links to my three presentations. Two of them are updates from ones I gave at Connect and the third is entirely new on how to configure Single Sign On / SAML / SPNEGO for your company.  I had 45 minutes for that presentation and even abbreviated I ended up with 55 slides but I think it went well – except for the bit where I kept stepping forward to hear questions better and nearly fell off the front of the stage.  You know the moment where one foot hangs in mid air and you desperately throw yourself backwards to stop falling forwards.  That.

Any-who , this was only my 2nd trip to Norway and since last year it poured with rain the entire time I didn’t see much. This year we spent some of the weekend in Oslo by the harbour and walked, walked walked.  A beautiful city and if you get a chance I highly recommend the Viking Ship Museum (get there early before the crowds as we did) and the Norwegian Folk Museum (thank you to Wencke Lorentzen for her guiding and the lefse ). The Folk Museum is huge and impossible to completely cover even if we had a whole day which we didn’t because we spent too long with the viking ships.  A very interesting takeaway for me is that without any form of written communication there is very little understanding of how the vikings managed to survive, sail huge distances, find their way home and live each day – all we can is make a best guess.   We also spent a long day walking, walking around Oslo which has some of the best public art I’ve seen (it was a gorgeous day so that helped the 9+ miles journey).

Oh and we ate some of the best food ever – if, like me, you love fish and especially raw fish and also cheese, and are happy for the waiter to bring out “whatever” until you say stop.. well Norway rocks 🙂

Thank you to the ISBG team for inviting me once more and everyone who attended.

 

 

 

02.04.14
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BP304: What We Wish We Had Known: Becoming an IBM Connections Administrator

This is my presentation with Paul Mooney on Connections administration.  In it we attempted to cover all the key things about Connections administration we think you need to get started.  I realise it’s a very heavily graphics based presentation and I will be uploading some speaker notes to go with it next week hopefully.

01.08.14
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Connect 2014 Sessions, Plans For The Month & Thank Yous

Let’s start with the thank you’s – I was delighted to be named an IBM Champion again for 2014 and for that I have to thank the (anonymous) people who nominated me.  I find the whole nomination / tell us why you’re good process very difficult to work with as I think I lot of English people do.  Being self effacing is more our style but this year I made a promise to myself that if I were nominated I would take a deep breath and fill in as much information as I could on why I thought I should be a champion. I think that exercise was good for me and appreciate both the reward and the journey 🙂

Moving On !  It’s January so this month is jam packed.  I actually leave for Florida on the 19th  so only 10 days to go for me and much to organise.  The presentations are written but there’s the Great Geek Challenge to organise, gifts to ship, banners to print, Spark Ideas to blog  and a surprise put together by Chris, Julian, Kathy and myself which may be as fun as we think or fall flat as a stone.  We’ll see.  Meanwhile the week is filling up and I’m very excited about my presentations now they’re complete..

Monday BP304 What We Wish We Had Known: Becoming an IBM Connections Administrator with Paul Mooney

Dolphin S.Hem 1 at 3.45pm

This is where Paul and I attempt to share all the stupid mistakes, bad decisions and dumb moves we made when first starting out with  IBM Connections and how much easier it is if you just know.. stuff.  We’re trying something very new in the format of  this presentation and I’m nervous about that but pleased with the work and what we have to tell you.

Tuesday NERD101 Spark Ideas ! (brought to you by Nerd Girls)

Swan Mockingbird 1 & 2 at 11.15am

This is our 4th year for Spark Ideas and we have a packed lineup that doesn’t include me.  I’m just logistics girl and I’ll be acting as MC with my friend Susan Bulloch acting as roper to drag people off stage if they run over their 6 minutes. If you’ve never seen a Sparks session check out our Vimeo channel.  6 minutes to share an inspirational idea. More details on that soon but thanks in advance to  Bill Buchan, Colleen Burns, Deborah Cole, Julian Robichaux, Norman Cox, Stuart McIntyre, Tim Davis, Gaby Spaszewski and Jamie Magee.  Watch out on this blog and the Nerd Girls blog for details of their talks.

Tuesday BP101 Adminblast 2014! with Paul Mooney

Dolphin N.Hem E 3pm

Another year another new Adminblast – Paul asked me to join him putting this together last year and we’re joining forces again this year.. some new tips, a few favourites and more slides than are sensible.  This year I hope not to be ill , nearly pass out on stage and remember almost nothing.  Last year I was saved by an ice cold bottle of beer handed to me by Mat Newman as we were about to start (just to keep from overheating)….

Wednesday BP104 : Simplifying The S’s: Single Sign-On, SPNEGO and SAML with Chris Miller

Dolphin S.Hem III 10am

This session will be an overview of all your options with regards to single sign on and single password and will be performed entirely as a series of mimes.

Wednesday SHOW401 : Taking IBM Sametime Mobile with Paul Mooney

Swan Osprey 1&2 4.30pm

This is a Show and Tell , 270+ pages on how to take a standard Domino server and turn that into Sametime on a mobile device , every step explained and detailed including our tips along the way about firewall rules, SSL certificates and performance.

Wednesday Great Geek Challenge

Fountain Restaurant 8pm – 10.30pm

Thanks to  generous sponsors the best night out at Connect is back for our 4th year.  Come and queue early, when we hit capacity we have to close the doors (well there are no doors but we’ll stand a bouncer at the gate to stop you coming in!)

So that’s my week.. in between I hope to find time to do everything else include visit the labs, meet with customers and hang out with friends.  Oh and attend a few sessions!  Mostly right now I’m looking forward to some sunshine.

See you there

Gab

09.24.13
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Some Punny Title With The Word “Abstract” In It..

IBM Call for Abstracts is open as I’m sure you’ve heard from 100 other sources but I wanted to talk a bit about some of the tracks and especially the Show and Tell track that Paul and I have been working on with the track manager Christian Holsing at IBM since its inception.  You’ll notice if you go look (oh go on, here’s a URL if you can’t wait) that the Lotusphere Technical Program at IBM Connect remains a big  component of the overall Kenexa World / IBM Connect event.

As part of the Lotusphere component the content breaks down into tracks some of which are designed for IBM, some for customers and some for BPs.  Getting your abstract accepted is about two things

1. Writing a decent abstract.  I can’t emphasise this enough.  Don’t submit something half thought through or constructed because you think it’s so important you”ll “get to that later”.  First pass, if the abstract isn’t good , you’re out.  Plenty of people in the Community including myself are happy to talk to you about your abstract pre submission, I know I run mine by friends before submitting.  Don’t make the mistake of a bad abstract on a good subject

2. Submit to the right track. Not all of them. The right one.  Last year I was very sorry to see sessions I would have loved to have had in Show and Tell miss us because they were submitted to the wrong track. That’s true of all tracks.  The content team try to share / move abstracts to better tracks but it’s a manual process and 90% will simply get lost in the shuffle.

Do not pass up the opportunity to present at Connect.  I can’t emphasise this enough.  Every year the content team wants new ideas and new speakers and there is no better exposure for yourself or your company than sharing your knowledge with the variety of attendees at Connect.  Plus if you’re weird like me you just like standing on stage to shout “look how cool this is!”.

The Show and Tell has, over the years, gained the reputation for being hard-a** , we take only the most technical sessions. However we recognise that although we want in depth technical detail on a niche aspect of an ICS product, the products and technology themselves have become more complex and the depth of step by step instruction we wanted can become a death march for both presenter and attendee. So this year we’re changing things around, we still want highly technical , we still want demos, but here is the abstract for this year which I hope gives you an idea of the changes in style.

The Show ‘n Tell track brings you the best in live technical education. SNT sessions explain in comprehensive detail a specific technology with detailed instructions, picture screenshots and live demonstrations that show how it can be used and applied for your environment. With 90 minutes per session you can share your expertise with an audience who has come to learn something new.

This year we are interested in technical content on any of the IBM Collaboration Solutions products demonstrating how people can get the best out of them, as well as how combining IBM technology can deliver an integrated Social Experience. Whether you’re an administrator or a developer consider only that our attendees are working with complex technologies and demanding new ideas, at IBM Connect we want to give them content they can’t get anywhere else.

As far as the other tracks are concerned.  If you are a Business Partner or a technical consultant or an individual your best tracks to submit to are Best Practices, Jump Start and Show and Tell.  Not Infrastructure or Application Development which historically are 99% IBM presenters.  In addition if you’re a Customer or Business Partner you have new, what i’d call technical marketing,    tracks to submit to talking about cool things you’ve done. For Customers (“Track Seven: Customer Case Studies (from an IT perspective”) and for Business Partners (“Track Eight: NEW! Spotlight on IBM Business Partners “).

If you have an idea for a session don’t twist yourself in knots trying to decide whether to submit, just write the abstract and submit, you won’t regret it.  I’ll be sending in some submissions myself and keeping my fingers crossed but whatever happens I hope to see you in Orlando in 2014.

09.11.13
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Icon UK Presentations

Doesn’t time fly? Icon UK is already nearly two weeks’ behind us but here, finally , are my presentation slides.  I did two presentations this year both with great presenters.   My first one was with Mark Myers (who, despite having a genius brain, has not grasped that I understand very little of what he says regarding development).  Our presentation was on how Administrators and Developers have to work together when doing Connections customisations and developments and was based on our experience working together on the SocialBizUG site.  Our presentation is here and was a new idea we’re hoping people liked.

Chimera

I also did a presentation with Paul which was an update on planning and preparing for Connections 4.5 installs, it’s aimed at anyone wanting to know what’s involved in deploying Connections or who is about to being an install themselves.

PreparingForFirstConnectionsInstall