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.
BP104: Simplifying The S’s: Single Sign-On, SPNEGO and SAML
This is my presentation with Chris Miller on Single Sign On technologies. We struggled with how to convey such complex ideas and varying technical implementations in such a short time and opted to step away from much of the low level technical detail and talk about the concepts and use cases instead.
IBM Connect Wrap Up
Hello again.. well i’m still in the US but now fully recovered from Connect and the nasty bug that took me out and apparently used me as a carrier to take out 40% of the community. Last year I spent most of Connect down with flu so this year I thought ahead, got a flu jab and lasted until Weds night, right after the geek challenge before being wiped out by a stomach bug. Curse you random travel bugs preying on my lack of sleep and reduced immunity!!!
So how was my Connect? Truthfully I had braced myself for this year , I was concerned there would be a small pocket of techies roaming amongst HR bods and it would feel like we were visiting our own conference. There was definitely a touch of that, but mostly I was really pleased to see so many first time attendees in sessions and certainly the ones I was at and did were well attended. It was a very different Connect for me as well. Usually I am tied up doing presentations but manage to get to sessions too and meet with friends – this year it was wall to wall presentations , customer meetings and IBM meetings. I barely managed to get to the labs and to the showcase not at all. I didn’t even make the Social Cafe at the back of the showcase – one minute it was Sunday and everyone was setting up and next it was Thurs morning and it was all over. From a business sense it was great and I made a lot of contacts within IBM that may regret giving me their business cards, but I didn’t get to learn as much as I do usually and I have a long list of sessions to track down.
What about the news from IBM? I actually enjoyed the Opening General Session which was well paced and i’m used to there being little technical “how we did this” content. That’s not what the OGS is anymore and no I don’t expect to hear new features about Notes or Domino during it. Those are both mature established products, I want to know IBM is continuing to support and develop them yes but I don’t expect exciting news to come just from those products. Mail Next is interesting and reinforces support for Domino which is clearly the back end architecture. It’s good to see IBM attempting to innovate in the mail , calendaring, personal productivity space and using their best server to do that – overlaying what appears to be a slick web interface with some , I assume, J2EE application analytics. All I need to know about Mail Next is that it was in the Design , not Development, lab for us to see. It’s an evolving concept and I don’t need to know answers to the technical questions beyond “yes it’s Domino underneath” right now. We’ll see what happens and I hope there’s a design program to support its development throughout 2014.
Other than that there were some great technical sessions. There’s no doubt the combination of technologies available to us is getting more complex, not just within IBM, and so the technical skill required to select, design, install and support them is too. That led to some difficulty in writing sessions – mine with Chris Miller entitled “Simplifying The S’s: Single Sign-On, SPNEGO and SAML” took some creative thinking as well as some real concentration when attending them. In short if you come to Connect to learn, the lotusphere track presentations this year were at a higher technical level than ever before.
Other than that I saw a few friends this week, not as many as I’d like. The Dolphindor cards put together by Julian Robichaux, Kathy Brown, Chris Miller and myself were, I think, a big success. Check out our Facebook page for some hilarious photos – thanks to everyone to joined in, hope you had a good time. The Spark Ideas sessions were wonderful even if they did make me cry and hopefully Chris will be able to upload the videos to the Nerd Girls’ Vimeo channel so you can all see them. The Great Geek Challenge, possibly our last one, was a lot of fun and thanks to Carl for bringing the electrocution machine to make awarding the final big prize fair and to Kathy and Katie for running the room.
My final thank yous to the guys at LDC Mark Myers, Matt White, Julian Woodward to the goddess herself, Susan Bulloch, to Chris and Kathy and Carl and Paul and everyone who laughed with me and made me feel part of the community.
It was a good year. Possibly one of my best despite all the things, and people, I missed. I’m cautiously optimistic about 2015.
Announcing A New Kind Of Event For The UK
I’m very happy to announce that, together with our friends at LDC we are putting together a technical networking event in London this March. This is something new and different and we hope people will come to exchange ideas across a broad range of topics, share what they are working on and learn from others.
Collaboration Stack Community Event
Do you work with collaboration platforms? Meet your peers at an informal, technical get-together. Whilst making valuable new contacts, you can share ideas, debate best practice and explore emerging technologies.
We hope to have interactive talks on broad topics such as security, development languages, and single identity including round table discussions where we can brainstorm ideas.
The date of March 21st is set and it will be in central London. It will also be free.
This is a community event, we will not be having a sponsor area , but if you or your company want to get involved please contact anyone from Turtle or LDC. We will be looking for topic ideas and round table moderators as well as session leaders.
Watch our site http://cscevent.com for more news and registration details.
One Of Our Sparks Is Missing…
Stupidly amongst all my cutting / pasting last week to get the Sparks in place on the Nerd Girls blog I completely lost one of them. Apologies to Stuart McIntyre who spotted he’d been lost in the shuffle, I think you’ll agree his is one not to be missed. I’ve updated the Nerd Girl Blog as well
Is love enough? The passion to help children find a home for good (Stuart McIntyre)
Parents to two boys and two girls (currently 9-16 years old), home educators and business owners, surely life is chaotic enough already? Why would we want to throw open our doors to other children (and their birth parents), let alone those with possible addiction, behaviour or other issues? Hear why Stuart and his family entered the exhausting approval process, why way more than just love is required, how fostering is working so far and why it might just be something for your family to consider!
Sparks Ideas Is Back – Don’t Miss It
Over on the Nerd Girls Blog we have posted the speakers and topics for our Spark Ideas session at IBM Connect 2014 on Tuesday at 11.15 am in Swan Mockingbird 1&2. Susan Bulloch and I will be watching the clock and keeping things moving..
There are more great speakers and topics this year , see them all here and we will all see you in Orlando Nerd Girl Blog Spark Ideas Full Details
My Search For The Perfect Doorbell Is Over (Yes Seriously)
Last March the build of our home office was completed. It sits at the end of our , not very long garden and is s our primary place to work now. We love it.
About 20m from the back of the house
The only downside to the office is that it’s the full length of the house and the length of the garden away from the doorbell. We order plenty of things for home delivery and our poor neighbours were having to take things in because we never heard the bell ring. So we tried a few things
1. Buying the most expensive doorbell in Homebase that claimed the furthest range (25m). Didn’t work at all
2. Importing a doorbell from the US that cost 140 USD plus import charges that claimed a 100m range. Worked intermittently but not well enough
Finally Carl sent me a link for a new product that hadn’t yet launched called the Doorbot. The Doorbot connects to your wireless internet and has a mobile app that works on iOS and Android , when someone rings the bell the app launches. You register the app with the serial number of your doorbot(s)) and you can “answer” the bell which triggers the video camera and a microphone. For me it means I’m able to trigger the mic and talk to the person at the door as well as see who’s there and if I even want to answer it (hello 6pm Jehovah’s Witnesses)
Since it uses push notifications there’s a small delay but at home it’s not even a couple of seconds. Maybe when I’m away from home and on 3G it might be longer but my use case for talking to someone at my door when i’m away from home is small. We received it Monday (14 quid import duty) and set it up and had 3 deliveries Tuesday and 3 visitors Wednesday all worked beautifully. For some reason other people aren’t as excited as I am when I open the door and explain how thrilling our new doorbell is, I guess if you don’t know about it, it’s just a doorbell.
I had no solution for what we’d do if the Doorbot didn’t work so very glad it does and highly recommended for anyone who has trouble getting to the door on time or wants to keep an eye on people who ring their doorbell.
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
Dukes of Hazzard Analogy
I was talking about development and customers today, and remembered an email I once sent to a customer a long time ago.
The customer was complaining that the system that we had developed and that he had been using for a few years did not do a certain thing. We should add it for free because it should have been included from the beginning as it was an obvious requirement.
I used this analogy in my reply:
Imagine you are the Dukes of Hazzard. You have been getting in and out of your car by the windows for years. The doors were welded shut and you did not spend the extra money to strengthen the car while still allowing them to open. However, you always get in and out by the windows so you have never minded this. Now you would like to open the doors and want the mechanic to make this happen for free because obviously doors should open.
He accepted this argument, and gave us the money to fix the doors.
The Worst Product Apple Have Ever Released
It hurts me to say this and goodness knows I’m not a fan of the “if Steve Jobs” were alive mantra but Apple have finally managed to release a product so bad, so beta, so limited and so shonky that I had to spend time working out how to remove it and that takes me back to my windows days.
So what is it? Well most of you won’t even notice but in Mavericks Apple kindly introduced iBooks for OSX. I read a lot on my iPad on my iPhone and – you know – actual books. I have over 2000 books in iTunes syncing across devices. I never had any real urge to read books on my computer but Apple obviously thought I did (or they were up to something nefarious) so they brought out iBooks. Why is iBooks so terrible? Well let’s start with the fact that it removes your books from iTunes completely and imports them into “iBooks” where they can no longer be found via spotlight. If you’re looking , and looking , and looking you’ll find them hidden away in
~/Library>Containers>com.apple.BKAgentService>Data>Documents>iBooks>Books – intuitive eh?
Of course not ALL books are there, no, no, . I went from 2058 books in iTunes to just over 1600 books in iBooks with 400 odd left behind in my old iTunes folder (I spotted that, iBooks certainly didn’t tell me). I believe those are ones I dropped in from other sources and not from the iBookstore. So that’s annoying but I’ll just carry on using iTunes and ignore iBooks…..
Unfortunately no. As soon as you launch iBooks it starts the ibookstoreagent and that takes over from iTunes, you no longer have a books folder in iTunes and none of your books are visible there. Your iPad or phone syncs with the new iBooks app (the one with 400 books missing). The iBooks app itself is horrific, you can’t edit any metadata on books (like correcting author names or titles or book covers) or sort the books the way you want – basic stuff that we could do in iTunes. So now I have 400 books missing, a useless app oh and all my books moved to that container folder have been given a numeric code instead of the useful filename so I can’t search for them by title or author in spotlight.
I check my iPad and iPhone and neither have all books on them, even all books bought from Apple. If I look at “purchased” I have tons to download manually because they won’t sync. At this point I’m ready to roll back to Mountain Lion .. but some kind person on the Apple support community (well several kind people) offered a way to remove iBooks and go back to my happy place with iTunes and books management in there. Here’s what I did
1. Used Activity Monitor to stop the iBookstoreagent
2. Found the ibookstoreagent and moved it to trash (otherwise it will keep restarting
3. Used AppCleaner (free to install but not from AppStore) to remove iBooks and all its related files completely
4. Launched iTunes and my books folder was back with the 400 missing books in it
5. Dragged / dropped all the books in that container folder into iTunes
6. Choose File – Library – Organize Library to get all those books back into the iTunes folder structure
7. Deleted the container and everything in it including the copies of books I now had back in iTunes
That’s it. It took about 5 mins (10 if you need to download AppCleaner) and now I am back to the way I worked before, all collections etc intact and 2058 books in place.
I’m now very nervous about any iTunes or OSX updates going forwards, for the first time since I moved to Mac 6 years ago, i’ll be holding off to let others go through that pain barrier first. If you haven’t launched iBooks yet, I’d recommend you don’t.
Bad Apple. Bad.
The Turtle Partnership Blog 